Franchise Lawyer Offers Tips on How to Reduce Legal Fees and Litigation Exposure

Recently Charles Internicola blogged about how franchisor's can reduce litigation exposure and legal fees in a blog entry titled "Franchisors: How do you Reduce your Litigation Exposure and Legal Fees?".  Charles Internicola goes on in his article to explain that the answer to this question is to simply avoid lawsuits.  While this answer may seem obvious and may even seem like a simple task to complete but many franchisors struggle with losing time away from their franchise system, which means less time to devote to the structure, improvements and other issues and tasks that may need to be completed, losing money to litigation costs that must be paid out to the plaintiff if a lawsuit is started and the cost of litigation fees that are paid to a commercial or franchise litigation attorney for the cost of the lawsuit.  The key reason many franchisors stuggle with this - to be simply put - waiste of time and money? Many times it is because they have not put into practice one of the major ways to avoid the litigation in the first place which is speak with your franchise attorney on a regular basis so that your litigation exposure can be reduced greatly.

Charles Internicola explains that while keeping open communications with your franchise attorney may cost more legal fees than "doing nothing" costs it will the franchisor less in the long run for the following reasons:

• The legal fees you will incur from speaking to your franchise attorney to help cut down on litigation exposure will cost far less than the legal fees for a franchise litigation defense matter.
• Loss of productivity by you while you are involved in a lawsuit will take away from building your franchise system and is ultimately costing you money
• The uncertainty in a litigation matter as to how much you will have to pay out for a matter that could have been avoided if the proper steps to reduce litigation exposure had been taken.

In short - make sure you stay in constant contact with your franchise lawyer if you are a franchisor.  It will help avoid unnecessary costs and will help you be able to stay focus on what's most important to your franchise.