Choosing the employment policies that are right for your company is a big deal. Things like dress code requirements, remote working options, and time off allowances can have an enormous impact on your company’s culture and the happiness of your employees. There are some policies, though, you simply must have in place – the kind that can protect you and your company in the event of an employee-related issue.

So where do you start? How do you know what types of policies and documents you need to create? Well, we created this blog post to answer these very questions. At a high level, there are three items we suggest all companies have in place:

Trust is at the core of what we do.

Our clients often come to us seeking advice during some of the most critical times in their lives. How should they set up their company? Who will care for their kids when they’re gone? How will they protect an idea they’ve spent their whole life perfecting? These are important decisions that we, as advisors, must help them make.

So, we asked ourselves: what traits do we look for in someone when we’re seeking advice? Below is a wordcloud with our answers.

We sat down with Luke Pfeiffer, current Legal Assistant Intern, to get his take on what it's like to work at Gutwein Law. Spoiler: you'll learn a ton (and we think it's pretty fun here, too). If you're interested in becoming a Legal Assistant Intern with Gutwein Law in the future, please send a cover letter and your resume to careers@gutweinlaw.com. 

Who are you? What are you studying?

My name is Luke Pfeiffer and I’m from West Lafayette, Indiana. I’m a freshman student at Purdue University studying accounting with a pre-law concentration.

What were you looking for in an internship?

Above all else, I was looking to gain exposure to the legal field, and Gutwein Law couldn’t have been a better place.

Firing or terminating an employee is a natural part of business. It can be uncomfortable, awkward, and certainly not fun. But it can also get a whole lot worse, especially if a former employee brings a lawsuit against you. It can not only be costly, but it can cause unrest among your other employees and customers.

So how do you best protect yourself from lawsuits from terminated employees? Employment separation and release of claims agreements.  We’ll call them separation agreements.

We had a client contact us recently who was reasonably upset after discovering a party they'd been working with “breached” their Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The said party was a prospective buyer who told one of our client’s customers they were buying our client’s business (I think you can see the problem here). Unfortunately, our team at Gutwein Law wasn't given a chance to review the document prior to our client signing the NDA, and that "breach" of contract wasn't really a breach after all.