As an SME that is scaling up and expanding internationally, legal protection is highly important. When scaling up, you will want to both ensure that you have the capacity and human resources to include the legal department. Legal protection may come in many forms for SMEs. It can be commercial arbitration, contract reviews, where it involves keeping in house counsel or a legal team for larger SMEs, or where you need assistance with mitigating risks, managing HR, or many other situations in order to protect your SME. Up4Scale readers would have certainly considered these issues and implemented best business practices to avoid disputes and legal issues. However, we will discuss dealing with negligence and how to prepare for lawsuits and mediation. This article will be covering a solution to what you might consider malpractice or negligence in the corporate world. SMEs may seem small and not have a high volume of sales, but as they scale, having the practical support systems in place to deal with issues such as past incidents can be highly critical to their long-term success. The negligence we will be discussing, as explained in the promoted article is negligent behaviors and variety of ways in which they can have negative impacts on SMEs. The legal way to address these issues is through civil legal means, whereby the victimized company can bring a lawsuit for damages against the company who caused them harm to their essential functions, operations, and reputation. Having the practical tools and knowledge to manage and deal with these legal issues is important for SMEs to be able to deal with incidents of negligence and intentional malice.

Negligence in this context is defined as when a victim’s rights have been violated by a company that acted either in a careless manner or intentionally did not follow local laws or regulations and caused harm to people or community members. Although the word negligence has a negative connotation to it, according to the Law Journal Newsletters in “Negligent Givings, Hyperethics, and the Problem of Regulating Professional Conduct in the Age of Moral Indeterminacy” Wong et al. (2019), business ethics makes sense of morally questionable actions within the workplace when employees are asked to act against their moral principles. The company would be found liable for damages caused either intentionally or through intentional negligence. An example of negligence is when an organization fails to supervise its employees. The organization will be found liable for the negligence of its employees. If a company that is scaling up and expanding internationally within the restaurant industry has a worker that is serving excess alcohol to customers and the company fails to implement policies to prevent the acts of negligence, then the restaurant may be found liable for the actions of their employee. Another example is when a restaurant fails to serve customers a product or service, which has not been inspected by health and safety, such as mold and contaminated products.

It is understood that SME’s often are underfunded and cannot afford legal assistance. A practical solution is to establish a compliance strategy with local regulations from the beginning to help mitigate your risk in the long-run. The difficulty is that when you expand internationally, legal protection and compliance can be harder because you are subject to foreign laws and may not have a legal and business model that aligns with foreign regulations and laws. Nevertheless, these are the best individuals or teams of lawyers that can help you to understand your country’s legal protection, compliance and deeper issues to protect your business. For more information about how to protect yourself in the long-run, please review our UP4Scale article on risk management as it relates to scaling internationally.

SMEs have a clear interest in treating paperwork competently when it goes through international markets. In today’s globalized environment where companies operate cross-borders, the functioning of companies no longer is limited by domestic boundaries. This doesn’t mean that scaling up is easy. From an operations perspective, and from an international business law (IBL) perspective, there are many things that can go wrong but the potential for international trade to generate revenues is also very high. Understanding how you can take charge of your documentation is critical.

This is where legal envelopes come in. The use of legal envelopes may not seem like such an important tool in making sure that your trade documents are in tip-top shape. After all, it’s just paper, right? Well, actually no. A legal envelope is the one that can keep your documents safe from thieves, damages, and boring old red tape.

If you’re involved in making an SME expand into global markets, make sure to keep this read handy. It will go from being one of many “just-in-case” articles to any business owner’s favorite international business law resource.

In scaling, businesses may take many different routes to get to a desired outcome. Trading internationally could be the way companies decide to go. What does that look like? Essentially, any good or service is shipped abroad from a parent country to a foreign country, where they are marketed and sold to consumers or businesses. Naturally, this scenario will put in the hands of SMEs many pieces of paperwork that need to be safeguarded.

Let’s examine an example more closely. You have a special type of fish that’s been in high demand in your community. The particular method by which this fish is extracted from sea water has become a sought-after practice. In order to keep the particulars of your method a secret, you refuse to sell your method directly. Instead, you prefer to have buyers of your fish handle the extraction themselves.

After some marketing, a call comes from a restaurant based in Asia. This restaurant is interested in acquiring bulk numbers of your fish. It wants you to simply supply them fish. You agree. The restaurant makes you send them several documents to sign, including a few photos of your fish.

You enter into a contract with this buyer, but before you send the fish, you need to figure out how to prevent documentation leaks or theft, while securely sending them over.

On the whole, there are several possible consequences to botching the management of these crucial documents in a cross-border situation. If a company doesn’t make the proper efforts to secure the proper legal envelopes, you could:

Fortunately, the benefits of using legal envelopes far outweigh the cost of getting them. Legal envelopes serve as a means for protecting the valuable papers that are associated with your international business dealings. They go beyond the role of storage. They are developed to ensure that you don’t have to worry about fraud, theft or anything else in between once your information is out of your hands.

Think of legal envelopes as the thing that can save you a lot of money, time, and resources as long as you make the right choice to collaborate with a quality envelope producer.

When it comes to doing business internationally, having legal envelopes ensures that you protect both, your property and the property of the people you work with. By having safe legal envelopes in your possession, you can rest assured that you’re operating securely.

Legal envelopes have become indispensable within the international business trade due to the following 5 key reasons:

One of the ways that legal envelopes can save you money is in the event of a potential business dispute. Any type of correspondence sent as a business, even from the general public, will be protected by the law. Anything that goes in a legal envelope cannot be used as evidence. If a commercial dispute arises, only the documents that are not protected by these types of envelopes are going to be part of the package for resolution.

However, it doesn’t mean that these envelopes will allow you to skirt the law. If there’s enough evidence available to demonstrate malfeasance on your part, then it’s possible that legal envelopes won’t be able to keep the documents safe irrespective of what is in them.

In any case, if you can avoid the costs associated with a business dispute why should you bother? A few quality legal envelopes can save you thousands of dollars in the end.

Now that you know the top 5 benefits of legal envelopes, it’s time to move forward in choosing the ones that can work for you. Here are some questions you may want to ask yourself before making a selection:

Using legal envelopes in an enterprise scaling process can make your business ship and receive items safely, without running into potential international trade hazards.

For more information on international business practices, you can visit Wikipedia.