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Should I Hire Legal Counsel When Working In A Regulated Industry?

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by , 02-14-2012 at 01:58 PM (176 Views)
There may be times in your life when you do not have a choice but to retain legal counsel. Incidents such as bankruptcy, car accidents, wrongful termination, and a host of other unfortunate incidents typically require you to retain some form of legal counsel. However, there are plenty of other times throughout life when you may be confronted with the option of retaining legal counsel. Starting a business in a heavily regulated arena is a perfect example.

There are certain industries within the American economy that are heavily regulated—financial services, pharmaceuticals, food and service, etc. If you are considering starting a business in a heavily regulated industry, you will most likely be applying for membership with some governmental agency, or seeking to obtain approval from them in order to carry on with business.

If this is your case—get a lawyer!! Our firm recently registered with a governmental agency related in the financial services sector. From the time of registration to the time of approval, the process took 6 months. Now, we retained legal counsel to aid us in the registration process. And they were not cheap. You may have to look into how to get a business cash advance. We purposefully chose one of the best legal firms in our industry in order to ensure that our compliance with the government would be perfect. If you are currently running a business, or considering starting a business, in a heavily regulated industry, you want to make sure that your company is always in direct compliance with all regulatory requirements. This is not an area to play around with. With this thought in mind, it is best to always retain legal counsel when starting a company in these types of industries.

Peace of Mind

You may be able to register and become compliant on your own, but the time, energy, and stress is not worth it. For example, in the financial services industry, if you wanted to start up a hedge fund in the commodities world, you would register as a Commodity Pool Operator with the National Futures Association and the Commodity and Futures Trade Commission. You are not required to retain legal counsel. But writing the entire Disclosure Document exactly as the NFA wants it, and providing all of the other Policy and Procedure Docs is not easy. Your time will most likely be much better spent building your company and letting lawyers do what they do best—protect you and shuffle papers! How to get a business cash advance can help alleviate financial strain.

Time

In any business, time is money. The longer it takes you to go back and forth with a governmental agency, the more money you are losing by not being able to market your products and services. As long as you do your homework and find highly qualified legal counsel, your lawyer is going to a trained and experienced expert at communicating with the particular governmental agency you are dealing with. This has the potential to greatly cut down on mistakes, wasted time, and miss-communication. Who do you think can better get your company compliant and registered—someone who has never done it before (you), or a lawyer who has processed hundreds of cases?

These two reasons are more than enough concerning why you should seriously consider retaining legal counsel when starting or running a business in a highly regulated industry. As a business owner, you should be seeking to exploit every competitive advantage possible, and retaining a high caliber legal team to represent your firm can give you a great competitive edge as it will help keep your company fully compliant and in business over the long-term.
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