Table of Contents

Preface

Part One: How to Create a Winning Legal Attitude

1. The Need for a Paradigm Shift

Early intervention and understanding the relationship between law and business can help anticipate and avoid costly legal mistakes. Unfortunately many managers discount the legal aspects of their business and brush them off as a cost of doing business. But, if we want better results we need commitment and solutions, not casual trade offs.  We need to reframe business risk management to include legal risk management. 

2. How Behavioral Economics Influences Decision Making

Recognizing a mistake is not the same as understanding how it was made and being able to avoid it in the future.  Before old paradigms can be changed it is necessary to understand why we do what we do to stay stuck in our old ways of thinking.

3. How Latent Legal Liabilities Escalate the Cost of Doing Business

More regulation, more personal liability, more criminalization of civil wrongs and spectacular jury verdicts inflated by punitive damages create headlines that depress stock prices and significantly raise the cost of doing business.  Even small legal mistakes have a big negative impact.  Together they provide incentive to protect assets and change the way we think about legal risk. 

4. How Legal Leverage Creates Value and Competitive Advantage

Besides avoiding lawsuits, improving your company’s legal risk management builds stronger business relationships and enhances reputations that create opportunities for competitive advantage that would otherwise not exist. The convergence of compliance and performance management thereby transforms the nexus between law and business into a business sweet spot.  It creates legal leverage.

Part Two: How to Achieve Legal Leverage: Developing Tools to Minimize Risk and Maximize Opportunity

5. How to Integrate Legal Literacy into the Value Chain: Who Needs to Know What

Integrating legal literacy into the value chain transfers responsibility for legal risk management to the primary decision maker and puts the employees, not the company lawyers, in the driver’s seat of legal risk management.  How sweet is that?

6. How Miscommunications Create Liabilities: Avoiding Smoking Guns

Smoking guns come in all shapes, sizes, and languages. But regardless of whether they are confessions or merely well intentioned, yet double-edged, words stored in hard files and hard drives, they are all evidentiary landmines waiting to explode when you least expect it.  Smoking guns fuel litigation.  The twelve legal leverage rules show you how to take control of your business documents and keep them from turning into a minefield.

7. How to Keep the Wheels On: Managing and Mediating Expectations

Business is about relationships: creating them, maintaining them, and if necessary, fixing them.  Lawsuits are triggered by the breach of duty, supporting evidence, and the incentive or motive to take action and sue. Eliminate or reduce any one of these aggravating factors and the likelihood of successful litigation goes down.

8. How to Transform Legal Obstacles into Strategic Opportunities: The Role of Good Decision Making

Bad decision making processes combined with the mathematical principle of regression tempt the hand of fate. It’s not a question of whether latent legal liability will materialize, it’s only a question of when.  Good decision making and critical thinking skills are a smart investment. 

Part Three: How to Maintain Legal Leverage: Developing a Supportive Corporate Culture

9. How to Stay On Course: The Role of Continuous Learning and Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is how the business enterprise makes information available to the organization and how it develops employee judgment that consistently converts the information into results the organization wants. Without the ability to convert information into action, learning is nothing more than the acquisition of information and data.

10. How to Stay In Synch: The Role of Lawyers

Having access to a trusted legal professional either in-house or through a law firm can help embed legal literacy in your value chain. Advice from a licensed professional has the benefit of attorney-client privilege, a special form of confidentiality that allows communications to remain within the confines of the relationship, and can help keep the law and your business objectives in synch – but lawyers can be so annoying.  Utilize the legal leverage ten-step program to build a better relationship and unleash the tremendous power of the attorney-client relationship.

11. How to Stay On Message: The Role of Communications

Exactly what kind of compliance message does your organization send? How often is it sent? Compare that answer to how often the sales and cost-saving message is sent. Which message is louder?

12. How to Stay Centered: The Role of Ethical Leadership

The leadership challenge in architecting moral authority within the business enterprise is in creating enough freedom to allow employees to apply sound risk management tools.  Leadership that is spelled with a capital “L” as well as a lowercase “l” must be mindful of their role in creating incentives and how those incentives shape expectations, drive behavior, and impact their company’s legal risk profile.

Epilogue: Winning from the Beginning

Appendix A: Legal Literacy Toolkit Chart
Appendix B: The ABCs of Legal Literacy
                        1. International Law
                        2. Contracts
                        3. Product Liability
                        4. Employment
                        5. Unfair Competition
                        6. Intellectual Property
Appendix C: The Lessons of Sarbanes-Oxley
Appendix D: Excerpts from Federal Organizational Sentencing Guidelines, 2004
Appendix E: Excerpts from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002: Table of Contents
Appendix F: United States Attorneys’ Manual: The Thompson Memo
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
The Author
Index