If you haven’t read Liz Ryan’s 5 Ways to Ensure Mediocrity in Your Organization, click here.   The insightful article describes five of the most insulting leadership practices and the lifeless, disengaged team members it creates.  From a legal literacy perspective, these leadership practices also serve to turn your organization into a litigation lightning rod.

How?

Well, let’s take Liz’s #1 insulting leadership practice: letting your employees know you don’t trust them.  She says that it causes employees to create the appearance of working without actually getting anything done.  They’re “present” but disengaged.

Being checked-out also means that those employees will have no interest in pointing out that iceberg on the horizon.  Why bother? The lack of trust has created a barrier.  It stifles communications and means problems escalate before they’re visible to senior management. 

More trust yields a better flow of information and allows legal issues to surface and be addressed while they are still small and less expensive to fix.  It’s a win-win situation.  It allows employees to contribute and make a difference and can save your organization time, money, and a ton of aggravation.

When I opened the newspaper this morning I was saddened to learn about the tragic death of a jogger in Hilton Head Island, SC who was killed yesterday by a single engine airplane making an emergency landing on the beach.  The jogger was listening to his iPod.  He didn’t hear the plane coming.  He never knew what hit him.  He was distracted.

In my experience, businesses distracted by the business of doing business often don’t “hear” lawsuits coming at them either.  They ignore problems that escalate into complaints and then get blindsided by a process server handing them a formal legal complaint (i.e. the lawsuit).  They don’t mean to do that, they’re just distracted.  They learn the hard way that the legal aspects of business are an intregal part of BUSINESS.  The more they can build legal literacy into the DNA of their day-to-day business decisions, the less they’ll have to turn over to the lawyers later on.

Building legal literacy into the business DNA helps keep your business alert without distracting from your business. You’ll be able to pick and choose your legal risk and side step legal landmines.  It sharpens your ability to recognize problems before they flatten you.  It eliminates blind spots.  That’s one of the reasons I wrote The Business Guide to Legal Literacy: What Every Manager Should Know About the Law.  It’s a roadmap to managing your legal risk with more confidence.  It puts you in charge.  It gives you freedom.

Last night’s well attended Ask the No Nonsense Lawyer interview with attorney and mediator David DeLugas provided some awesome insights about how mediation is a quick and easy way for resolving problems and improving business relationships.  He compared it to an invitation to negotiate, the knock on the door that says “Hey, have you got a few minutes?  There’s something I’d like to talk about.  It’s a process that let’s you contribute to the resolution, instead of a lawsuit where someone else (judge and/or jury) decides for you and the remedy is limited by the constraints of the law.  Often the remedies provided by law are not enough. 

I hold these Ask the No Nonsense Lawyer programs approximately once a month because hearing about processes such as mediation from a skilled practitioner and including them in your leadership toolkit is an easy way of taking control of a situation before it takes control of you.  Ask the No Nonsense Lawyer is a complimentary teleseminar program that allows you to call in from anywhere.  All you need is a telephone. 

Future editions of the program will include discussions about how employee-friendly codes of conduct can boost productivity and profitability, as well as how to budget legal costs and keep them from turning into a run away freight train.  

If there’s a topic you’d like to hear about on Ask the No Nonsense Lawyer, please send me a note or leave a comment below.  Oh,  and please stay tuned.  I’ve got some new developments in the works you’re going to love.

Having more legal literacy in your business tool kit helps you squeeze out avoidable costs.  In today’s uncertain environment controling avoidable costs is more important than ever.

The law touches every aspect of business.  Identifying those touches and prioritizing them lets you make minor course corrections early in your decision making.  It can make the difference between hitting a bull’s eye or missing the mark altogether, between protecting business profits and preventing business meltdowns.  Sometimes it can be a simple as identifying what your confidential business informations is and taking the proper steps to protect it. 

To learn more about the small steps you can take to make the law a valuable and practical business partner listen to the replay of my interview with Alex Mandossian here.

This time the New York garment company who had previously engaged in publicity stunts went too far — they broadcast their poor grasp of legal literacy when they used a photo of a sitting president of the United States in a Times Square billboard ad to hawk their men’s outerwear.   

Sure, they contacted the AP photographer who took the photo of President Obama during his visit to the Great Wall of China inBadaling.  But according to the Associated Press, licensing the photo still requires obtaining the necessary clearances – in this case getting a model release from the President.  (To read the NY Times version of the story click here, the Washington Post version includes a picture of the billboard from a different angle.)

Pleading ignorance of the law, the garmet maker president said:

Is it a calculated risk?  Not being an attorney — I’m being, really, a designer, merchandiser guy in the apparel business — I would leave that to attorneys or whatever. 

Hmmm, a calculated risk.  Sure. 

Maybe they should take a hint from  Seinfeld’s George Costanza who discovered the hard way why not knowing right from wrong is more than a calculated risk.   

Ignorance of the law is a losing defense, so is saying the ad was placed in “good faith.”  You’d think that since Women’s Wear Daily, The New York Times, and the New York Post all refused to run a similar ad the company might want to know why.  But apparantly they’d rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

Using someone’s photo in a commerical context implicates their right of publicity.  It requires some kind of basic a model release. 

A little bit of Legal Literacy can go a long way.