Switch on your dispute antenna
When should your dispute antenna come up? Last week I had a call from someone who had a dispute but failed to seek legal help early enough causing them enormous stress and money. In this video, I share the common signs when it's time to seek legal advice.
Some believe going to your lawyer will cost more money. It's like trying to fix your car yourself. If you want to be safe, you go to a mechanic. If you want to make safe, commercially smart decisions and continue sleeping at night, get a legal opinion.
If you have a situation that may turn into a dispute, whether this is business or personal reach out for a quick chat.
Know a colleague, friend or family member who could benefit from this video please share.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Ross Millen:
Hi. If like me, you're of a certain vintage, you might remember a television program, My Favorite Martian, or maybe you don't. But anyway, at certain times, the Martian, the antennas started to come up. And what I want to talk to you about today is when your antenna should be coming up.
Now, had a person ring me the other day and anyway, I think they needed a very small antenna for this, but they said, "Oh, well, we've got a letter from a lawyer saying that we'd done something wrong in our business and we disagreed. So we rang the lawyer and we told them why they should just drop it. We wrote letters and we went through all our files. We got out every piece of paper, every email, every document. We sent it all across to the other side's lawyer saying, 'Look at all this. No problems at all.' then they suggested a mediation. Oh, we went to the mediation on our own. We just assumed the mediator would be helping us, would sort everything out. Well, it didn't. Guess what? Now, we're going to be sued in court. We can't sleep. What do you recommend we do?"
Well, we're helping them. But what I recommended they do was have their antenna working about three months earlier. As soon as they got a letter from a lawyer saying, "Hey, we're going to sue you," or, "We're asking for all this money," I think that's the time to ring up a lawyer because you need advice to think, "I don't try and fix my own car. I don't try and fix my refrigerator." I mean, you need someone who knows what they're doing.
So in this case, the antenna should have gone up. "Hey, we've got a legal demand. Maybe it's something that even if we want to handle it ourselves, we at least need to know what our strengths and weaknesses are, what we're supposed to do, what we don't need to do, and negotiate from a position of knowledge." So what I'm saying to you is, you need your antenna up.
We had another client who were negotiating with family members over an estate, and we said, "Why is the other side always saying that we want a minimum of a hundred thousand when that's miles more than they're entitled to?" And then it came out, "Oh, well, we had a lot of discussions with the disgruntled brother and we are saying, 'Oh, we'll give you a hundred. We'll give you a hundred. But that wasn't enough for him.'" When they finally came to get advice, we said, "A hundred is miles too much. He won't get that in the court. So you should have started your negotiations much lower." So then we had to spend a lot of time backtracking, backfilling, getting back to a reasonable number before we could settle.
So what I'm saying to you is, in many situations in business and in your private life, there'll be situations where you need to have your antenna working to know, hey, this could be a dispute or could lead to a dispute, I'd better get some legal advice sooner rather than later.
So I hope that's been helpful to you. Remember, I'm Ross Millen at Millens. Any questions, any queries, don't hesitate to contact us. Thank you.
