Posted on October 24th, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of this video.
What’s going on fellow entrepreneurs? Today I wanted to talk about a personal decision versus a business decision and I know that that’s not strictly law-related, but I’ll bring it back so you understand why I’m even talking about this.
When it comes to employment claims, it’s so easy to make an employment claim in California, that people just do it even when they don’t have a claim.
So there are a lot of times when someone files a claim, a Superior Court claim, Labor Board claim, whatever it is, and we certainly can go through the motions and spend all the money in legal fees to defend ourselves or to defend our clients.
But sometimes it’s just not worth it. If you can get rid of it with nuisance value, then it makes sense. So for example, if someone files a Superior Court claim, just the retainer alone is going to be $10,000.
Well, if I could get rid of it for less than that, because it’s not a real claim, then it makes it worth it.
So lots of times there are clients that say, “I didn’t do anything wrong and I’m not paying a cent. I don’t care what this costs me.” And they’re true to their word until they get $50,000, $60,000 in and they’re like, wait a minute, this is too expensive.
Then I say, “Yes, that’s what I was trying to tell you.” In law it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right and right and I tell this to all my clients.
So what I mean by that is you have to be right in your position, which is we didn’t do anything wrong, we paid all the overtime that that was owed.
But then you also have to be right in the outcome. If you could get rid of this claim for $20,000, or you can litigate all the way through and pay $200,000, it doesn’t make sense.
It makes sense to pay to settle this even though you didn’t do anything wrong. And I know that that’s a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow. But that’s the difference between a business decision and a personal decision.
So at the end of the day, it’s the client’s decision to make. If they would rather fight this all the way, no problem. We’ll fight it tooth and nail and if there isn’t anything that was done wrong, we’ll likely prevail.
However, at what cost? All right, so that’s it for today.
Until next time, be productive.