Top Tweets for #LeadEthically

One of the most powerful things you can do as a business to mitigate your litigation risk: Treat your employees well and listen when they point out operational and ethical issues. It vastly reduces your litigation risk. But not for the reason you think. When I'm suing a business of any kind for any sort of bad act, who do you think my best witnesses are? Yep. Former employees who can't wait to spill the beans on everything the company did wrong. Someone worked for you for 5+ years and left after their new manager proved to be unbearable? Or the person toiling away in the back office for 10 years watching all the paperwork go by? Pure gold for an opposing party. The longer term employees in particular tend to have a long list of things wrong at the company that they could never get anyone to listen to. The right former employee with the right information can give me what I need to get punitive damages that I otherwise could not get. Your probability of losing just went from 50% to 99% and your total exposure from a lawsuit just increased somewhere in the neighborhood of 3x–9x. On the other hand, if I talk to your former employees, and they all stand up for you and say things like "They make mistakes, but they always try to fix them and do the right thing," my probability of winning and the amount of damages I can recover if I do win drop with each former employee who tells me that. Listen to them when they point out problems and treat them well, and they will have nothing useful to tell me. Side note for other litigators: most states have begun to follow comment 7 to ABA Model Rule 4.2, which places no restrictions on contacting former employees of an adverse party that's a company. In some states, it's still a bit unclear and the rules depend on whether they were a managerial employee or whether the subjects you want to discuss with them would directly implicate the company in the current litigation.