Legal Guide

Acquiring Litigation Services in The Event of a Lawsuit

Running a business often involves balancing the needs of your customer with the limitations of investing in such an enterprise in the modern day. For the most part any hiccups that you face during your path to maximum customer satisfaction would most certainly be well handled by offering a discount to an aggrieved patron, but in certain situations this just won’t get it. You need to be ready for customers that might want to sue you at some point or another, and there is a wide range of responses that you can formulate if such a situation where ever to arise.

The influx of lawyers that are willing to sue on behalf of irked customers has increased quite significantly over the past few decades, and this has resulted in a large number of lawsuits impacting businesses. The manner in which you develop any kind of response to various lawsuits will determine whether or not you are forced to pay some kind of arbitrary settlement in the long run, so the first thing that you should do is acquire litigation services that can help you countersue. Even if a countersuit is not filed, you would at the very least get the chance to defend yourself in open court and avoid some of the bad press that can come with being sued in the first place.

While hiring a lawyer to fight this litigation is all well and good, you need to play your part to try and ensure that your lawyer gets the chance to help you as much as they can as well. Part of this would involve figuring out what the customer’s story is. Ask them about what went wrong and pay close attention to the pain points that they are referring to. This is crucial since if the customer diverges from these pain points this could be grounds for having the case thrown out entirely.

Also, while the case is definitely going to play out in court at some point or another, there’s no reason why you can’t do damage control on the side as well. If you feel like the customer’s complaint was valid and that you or your employees were at fault during the response process, don’t be afraid to sincerely and publicly apologize to the complainant. You can also try to offer some other kind of compensation such as a discount or a freebie, this might go a long way towards cooling everyone’s tempers and avoiding something that could be even more detrimental to your public image.

Oftentimes when a customer resorts to filing a lawsuit and the like, they are just upset that they did not get the kind of customer service that they might have gotten used to. These days a far higher value is placed on preserving the customer experience than ever before, and it has created expectations among average consumers. If a customer feels like they are now being taken seriously, they might be willing to drop the lawsuit thereby making all of your problems go away for good.

Even if this attempt fails and your customer is still bent on continuing with the lawsuit, an acknowledgment from your end might just compel them to settle out of court. Out of court settlements are always preferable. One reason for this is that you would likely have to pay far less than would have been the case if the settlement was decided on by a judge, as in such situations the complainant’s legal fees would be your responsibility to handle as well.

Another advantage of trying to handle things behind the scenes while letting things play out in court as well is that you might be able to win things in the court of public opinion which is a great backup plan in case the court case doesn’t move in the direction that you might have expected. The kind of settlement that you would need to pay is undoubtedly going to be a financial blow in the event that you lose the case, but the true damage would be done to the image of your company. You would find that your customers would start to dry up since they would be wary of suffering a similar kind of experience when they come to your place of business as well.

There is also a pretty decent chance that the customer is just suing frivolously, in which case you should gather evidence that can prove this in court. Try to find camera feeds that can provide video evidence of what actually transpired. You don’t have to prove that you offer the best possible customer service, rather you just need to show to the court that the customer is not being honest about what they truly ended up experiencing in any respect.

Proving dishonesty to a certain degree will cast a shadow on anything that a customer said about your service. Frivolous lawsuits can actually boost people’s opinions of you since it would show them that even when you are being sued for no reason, your superior customer service is going to shine through and the truth will eventually reveal itself.

The most essential thing that a business owner can do when they start to face litigation is that they should avoid panicking as much as possible. Panicking in such situations can lead to rash decision making which can often cause further problems for you. Keeping a cool head and contacting a lawyer can help you to formulate a strategy, one that can be implemented to secure yourself in the face of further litigation down the line. Keeping in mind that litigation can happen at any time is generally a good approach since it will prevent you from being caught off guard.


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