Summary

Martin Segal sees the workplace as an unending sequence of commercial transactions, and life in the workplace as a series of contractual agreements. We play in a field strewn with land mines - legal actions, large and small, waiting to explode. What may have started as a simple buyer-seller, borrower-lender transaction can escalate into differences of opinion, then blow up into a full-fury lawsuit. But, says Segal, this needn't happen. Most of these legal differences can be traced back to faulty, misunderstood contract and sales transactions, how they were conceived, created, implemented. Agreements that can't be enforced, business plans gone awry, unforeseen problems that suddenly pop up to wreck what once seemed to be golden business opportunities - these are some of the legal issues that Segal addresses in Preventive Law for Business Professionals. What Segal offers in response is his "anticipatory thinking approach," a "preventive law" method to lay bare and defang these legal perils before they evolve to such magnitude that expensive, time-consuming court action becomes inevitable. Dr. Segal offers a carefully culled list of the most salient and likely commercial transactions, issues that can be prevented, and what you can do to forestall them. Based on numerous examples and actual court cases, as well as from classic legal disputes, Segal lays out the legal reasoning of the presiding judges, often with direct quotations that provide an especially realistic, useful understanding of how these cases were actually decided - and why.