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July 30, 2020 pathwd 0 Comments

Protecting Your W&D Dealership From Lawsuits

Owning a W&D Dealership means lots of things, but one of the risks is having a situation that elevates and starts to involve attorneys.  Given the high billing rate of competent attorneys, simply defending your company from a spurious attack could easily cost thousands of dollars just to get started.

When you get into that situation, it is vital that your dealership have verification of the actions, communication, documents, and procedures used for that job, because these are the items that matter.  Indeed, if your team has followed proper procedures and have access to all the correctly executed and signed documents as well as any related communication, then it is likely the situation will not elevate to attorneys.

If you were threatened by an attorney on any given job, would you be able to easily defend your company?  Could you, in the matter of ½ hour, review the workflow, actions, dates, documents, emails, orders, and signed contracts related to that job?  Could you easily share all of this with an attorney and shorten the billing time to stave off a legal attack?

Frivolous Lawsuits: How to Stop Them In Their Tracks

If not, you have a legitimate reason to lose some sleep, because there are some folks willing and able to fund an attack on your company, with or without legitimate cause.

I remember one instance where a Commercial GC “adjusted” the size of 12 windows due to a site condition.  The Project Manager was young and didn’t document the request properly on his end.  Months later, he emailed and said, “There are 12 windows that are the wrong height.”  My salesperson was able to, in about 10 minutes, provide the email thread that verified the GC’s requested change.  After that experience, we instituted further workflow changes that didn’t allow order changes until the proper change order was executed and received from the GC.  Since our system is “living” and easily changed, we can continue to grow-change-improve as we see areas of new risk.

I sleep better at night, and my attorney is busy billing other people $350 per hour!

 

 

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