DISPUTE PREVENTION AND RESOLUTION
Disagreements can be among the most costly interruptions to the normal flow of business, whether they be between and among staff, between your organization and those either upstream or downstream from the kind of services you provide (suppliers, customers/clients, constituents). When simple disagreements or lack of clarity or cohesion regarding some set of circumstances escalate into a full-scale dispute, there is the real potential for disaster: work stoppages, litigation, bad publicity: all sorts of nasty stuff.
The best way to resolve such problems is to do whatever you can to ensure that they never materialize in the first place. You know all about the ounce of prevention maxim, of course, but you may not be inclined to buy an ounce for your own enterprise. It’s actually relatively easy to avoid most disputes – and even to bring a quick, comprehensive and inclusive resolution to those that somehow slip through the filter, and the keyword is clarity. The more precisely and accurately you use real English – not jargon or legalize – to describe exactly what you mean and what you expect, the likelier you are to achieve what you want.
Oddly enough, while the legal profession is predicated on the possibility of dispute, preventing conflict is rarely best achieved by lawyers.
A careful examination of potential for misinterpretation, along with honest discussion about how to ensure individual interests are being protected while the organization pursues its own transcendent objectives, will help avoid all but the most sinister disputes. And articulating in advance of any need written procedures for reconciling any differences that do ensue will go a long way to helping restore the right balance between aggrieved parties. But such written policies are better developed by the people who will be impacted by them and those who must implement them than by lawyers. This is a matter of building and sustaining trust, and the interjection of legal counsel into this process is often self-defeating. Save the big guns for when all else fails, but careful planning should minimize – if not entirely eliminate – any eventual need for heavy artillery.