The Professional Employer

  To run a business, you need a grasp of current employment practices, a detailed employee handbook, and to comply with all federal and state labor regulations. A Professional Employment Organization (PEO) can manage these administrative responsibilities and free up your in-house resources to concentrate on growing the business.

Hiring PEO services involves more than simply passing your HR responsibilities over to them: the PEO actually become a co-employer of your personnel. As the legal “employer of record” for your entire staff, the PEO hires your employees and leases them back to you. They then use their own tax ID to submit payroll records and file taxes, offer benefits, and secure workers’ compensation insurance.

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  When navigating the court system, a small business owner encounters certain risk factors inherent in litigation.

The combination of three components of our civil litigation system presents a real threat to small business owners who one day may find themselves at the receiving end of a lawsuit:

1. Attorneys for plaintiffs (the person or entity suing) handle many damage-type cases on a contingency basis. In other words, the plaintiff doesn’t have to lay out any money to sue and the attorney only gets paid if his client prevails.

2. While the person suing may not have to put any money down, the defendant (the person being sued) is paying an attorney an hourly rate to defend himself against the lawsuit. As you can imagine, these hourly rates are substantial and can really add up.

3. In our civil litigation system, if someone sues you and they lose, as a general rule, they do not have to reimburse you for your cost of defending yourself against their suit. The United States does not have, for lack of a better phrase, a “loser pays” system.

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Many attorneys advise small buisness owners to settle immediately regardless of guilt.  Small Business owners just can’t afford the combination of billiable hours, time lost, emotional stress, nor the potential for bad publicity.  For any small business owner the best defense against employment litigation is a good offense.    Be proactive.  Outsource to a Professional Employer.

Always remember the Golden Rule of employment allegations:  “It’s not who wins or loses the fight.  It’s the cost of the fight.”