What is Preventative Law?
And Why is it Important to Consider?
Preventative law is a legal practice that aims to help clients avoid legal troubles, lawsuits, and protracted litigation. It involves creating plans, documents, and strategies to help clients understand their legal rights and responsibilities and to minimize the risk of litigation. It emphasizes the importance of pre-facto planning to avoid legal problems and their consequences.
When most people think of a law, it is usually associated with litigation which connotates controversy, stress, drama, and legal fees, but through preventive law, which entails pre-thought, planning, bookwork, and research, law can, and in our firm’s opinion, be centered around trying to keep expensive, time-consuming messes from occurring.
How Can I Prepare My Business?
There are several practice areas that are essentially preventative in nature and require you to comply with current laws and regulations while also preparing you for any difficulties or changes that may come.
For example, some legal services that our firm offers include: asset protection, estate planning, tax planning (in conjunction with your CPA), strategic business planning, corporate governance, regulatory law as it pertains to your business, intellectual property (acquisition and protection), and the list goes on.
Again, the idea is to make sure that you run into as few legal complications as possible in the course of running your business. To assist you with this, our firm offers experience in many facets and areas of law.
Is Preventative Law the Same for Every Business?
We’ve explained the global perspective, but more specifically, preventative law takes into account various elements of your day-to-day business, such as current employee rules and policies, management and operational practices, contracts, mergers, acquisitions, regulations compliance, bills and collection of debts, matters of risk and liability, etc.
In our years of representing small to mid-sized businesses, we try to assist with any and all legal needs to avoid a problem by being proactive rather than reactive.
Sales Contract Example
The best example of this is getting a call from a client concerning a contract dispute that is headed to litigation. Many times, the issues in dispute could have been handled with our firm’s involvement in the review of the contract before signing.
So, being preventative would be to involve us on the front end to avoid issues after the entering of the contract. A little time spent before the contract execution can, possibly save much more time and expense after a dispute and litigation arises.
No firm can create a contract that has zero potential for dispute; however, knowing what the terms, duties, obligations, and responsibilities are as stated in the contract and the ramifications of such can prevent many issues as you progress through the contract term. While the rebuttable to this may be that lawyers will muddy, or even kill, the deal. We firmly believe that being proactive with representation far outweighs the latter.
A Different Way of Thinking About Preventative Law
We like to think of preventative law philosophy as being a deal maker rather than a deal breaker, and of course, if some legal terms cause us to advise not doing the deal, the client has the option to disregard. But, in that instance, at least they understand the risk involved.
Bottom line, the essence of preventative law can be summed up as follows: a little time and money spent before the contract execution can, possibly, save much more time and expense after a dispute and litigation arises as it is always much less expensive to spend legal fees on entering a contract than litigating one.
How to Get Help Protecting Your Business?
We represent over 75 small to midsized companies and would gladly speak to you about your company and how we may be able to assist you.
Tim Mendolia
Managing Partner
M&P Law Offices
A general practice based in Parker County, Texas, offering legal services estate planning, criminal defense, family law, and business law since 1994.
