Making It Legal:

Is Mercury in retrograde? Because it seems that I’m encountering a lot of people who are rushing into selling stuff, with nary a thought for how to run it like a business.

Q.: “I have a website I’d like to start. It’s currently online and I would like to sell a product that is 100 percent natural, that could be perceived as medicine. Yes, I used it for this but it could be used for a lot of different things. My questions are: Is the website OK? If not, what’s involved to have this rewriten to be OK?”

A.: This is my beef: Whatever this website maven chooses to sell through the site, he needs to be very careful that he’s not perceived as practicing medicine without a license. He’ll want to make sure he has set up a business as either a corporation or LLC (and is not doing this as a sole proprietor); he may need special permissions/licensing from his state to sell his kind of products. In addition, he’ll want to be sure he has the right liability insurance in place to guard against any customer claims or complaints. That needs to be in place as he’s developing the website content. Otherwise, he’s spending a lot of time and money creating content and setting up the website, which might have to be dismantled if he’s doing business illegally in his state.

Because “one size does not fit all.” And because “you get what you pay for.”
In “a whopper of a sexual harrassment claim” (thanks to blog author Jon Hyman for the turn of phrase I couldn’t resist), the case of EEOC v. V & J Foods, Inc., a Burger King franchise had an employee manual that outlined the procedures to be followed in a sexual harassment grievance. However, the policy was written in a convoluted and confusing manner and–significantly–provided no way to bypass a harassing supervisor. When a part-time teenage employee ran into a problem with her supervisor, she didn’t follow the grievance procedure in the manual.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t care that she didn’t follow the proper procedure. The employment manual wasn’t clear to the average employee (in this case the average employee would be a teenager or high school graduate). In fact, the court found that the complaint procedure was confusing even for adults and, as a result, the grievance process was unreasonable.

The issue for your employment manuals is that they need to be clear and easily understood. If you do download them from the internet, make sure you show them to your attorney in order to demystify the boilerplate and insert the right provisions for your business. Otherwise, you could end up with a document full of policies and procedures that no one is required to follow.

Between paper and pixels, the amount of information that one company has to retain can become staggering. Plus, like Arthur Anderson, if you shred (or delete) information that you should have retained (or you’re destroying because you were just named in a lawsuit), that fact can be held against you in court.

There’s a way around that. You can implement a routine document retention (and destruction policy) that governs how and when you can destroy documents. If you set the policy and implement it routinely before there’s litigation on the horizon, you can protect your company.

For a free white paper that looks at what to retain and for how long, go to theHRSpecialist.com/