If your career or business is untouched by significant legal matters, then you probably don’t have much of a career or business. We are a nation of laws, and any senior executive or business leader who’s been around will tell you: turn a blind eye to the legal system and you risk everything. Like it or not, that’s the way it is.
Moreover, our great nation was designed in such a way that each of you actually has a say in how the legal system operates. I mean, you know who makes the laws, don’t you? Federal and state governments do. More specifically, the folks who make the laws are variously called legislators, lawmakers, or, that’s right, politicians. Yikes.
Now, I’m no lawyer, and yet here are 12 classes of law that I have been involved in at one time or another during my career:
- Intellectual property: Patents, trademarks, copyrights
- General corporate: Corporation (C-type, S-type), LLC, LLP, bylaws
- Shareholder litigation: What happens when your stock falls off a cliff
- Employment: Wrongful termination, sexual harassment, discrimination
- Workplace safety: Self explanatory
- Antitrust: Anticompetitive practices, The Sherman Act
- Environmental: Dumping chemicals in the ocean, for example
- Product liability: When products have unintended consequences
- Corporate governance: Sarbanes Oxley, accounting fraud
- Securities litigation: Insider trading, stock option backdating
- Libel and defamation: When you harm a reputation and it isn’t true
- Investment banking / capital: IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, venture funding
Granted, I have had a relatively extensive and interesting career. And speaking from experience, the proverb, “May you live in interesting times,” is indeed a curse when it comes to legal matters. Still, in this life - and that includes business life - you have to accept reality, and that means taking the good with the bad. And that includes legal and political stuff.
Why am I telling you this? Because. Among other things, I write this blog to help officers and directors, managers, small business owners, shareholders, and employees. And since the banner at the top of the page reads, “The Corner Office: Taking on the big questions facing CEOs, boards, and shareholders,” I will sometimes provide commentary on important legal and political matters that intersect with business, management, and leadership.
For example, I have at times written posts about the federal government’s governance of banks, Big-3 automaker bailouts, who’s responsible for the financial meltdown, the stimulus bill, limits on executive pay, the cap and trade bill, proposed health care legislation, proposals to overhaul our banking system and prevent future “too big to fail” scenarios, and even how bloggers can avoid committing libel.
Why do I do it? Because, like it or not, these topics can have a significant effect on many, if not most of you. And the last thing I want is for you - my faithful readers - to work your tails off to make something of your career or business, only to get blindsided or taken down because you weren’t savvy to perhaps the biggest risks you take - the legal ones.
Had a business-related run-in with the legal system or “interesting” experience with our political system?
