Setting up and running a business requires a broad range of ongoing actions. A vital component of this consists of ensuring regulatory compliance in a broad range of areas, from tax law to more industry-specific regulations. While you can do some research on your own (such as reading articles like this) ultimately you’ll need to speak with a lawyer. Here’s how that legal relationship can help.
Understanding the regulations
First, lawyers are the best people to help business owners to understand any important regulatory requirements relevant to their professional niche. Often, the way that these regulations are written and recorded can be difficult to understand – simply speaking with a lawyer with experience communicating the information found in these regulations can be a perfect source for seeking guidance and further understanding.
Developing business policies
In order to ensure ongoing regulatory compliance, it’s essential that you have a series of policies that dictate how your business is run. Not only do these serve a practical purpose when it comes to organising how employees work, but they can also be essential for proving good faith in the case that your business needs to undergo a regulatory investigation.
Solicitors with experience in regulatory areas such as the team at Weightmans can be integral in this process, ensuring that the policies are drafted correctly to cover all eventualities from both practical and legal perspectives.
Ongoing guidance
The nature of doing business dictates that you can’t just sort out your compliance issues and then forget about them. Regulations change over time, along with the way in which your business operates.
It’s generally essential to remain in communication with your solicitor in the long term, to ensure that you remain up to date with compliance related issues. Ideally, you’ll have an excellent ongoing professional relationship, allowing you to reach out for quick advice as and when you need it.
Legal representation
While you should obviously aim to avoid any events which may lead to investigations, in the case that you do face legal issues, it’s vital that you have a legal team that can help you develop an effective defence. The more your solicitor knows about your business’s history from a legal perspective, the better they’ll be positioned to help you build a watertight legal defence.
Training
In order to effectively ensure compliance in the long run, you need to make sure that everyone in your organisation is fully trained on compliance issues. Employees can’t be expected to simply know all the rules – they need to be provided with access to training material, and lawyers can be a great way of ensuring that this training material is legally accurate, and that it covers all the necessary bases.
Clearly, there are a wide variety of different ways in which business owners can leverage the expertise of lawyers to ensure regulatory compliance. While it can seem like a costly investment, the alternative – facing punitive legal action as a result of breaking important regulations – is far, far worse. Make sure that you identify a lawyer with extensive experience in your field, and use their services to fulfil the important functions outlined in this article.
