As highlighted in a recent YouGov survey, small businesses that fail to take care of legal issues are said collectively to be losing over £13.6 billion a year. The survey showed that the average SME in the UK is likely to encounter more than eight commercial legal issues a year, with more than 43% of these issues resulting in costs of £5,000 or more.

More than half of all issues were found to be in five key areas:

• Disputes (13.2%)
• Employees and Key Contractors (12.5%)
• Customers and Suppliers (11.4%)
• Terms and Conditions (9.2%)
• Software (9.1%)

Free online legal health check

If you’re concerned about legal issues facing your business, help is at hand. Our friends over at Lawbite have great value legal services including free initial consultations for businesses. It only takes a few minutes to get in touch, and get support.

It’s not just legal matters that businesses need to think about though, your business finances may need regular care and attention. That’s why we created our Accountancy Healthcheck service, it’s free with our Limited company Premium and Small Business packages and can be added onto our Pro package. For more information, see our article “Accountancy Healthchecks – why it’s a good idea to get checked out“.

Further reading

Whether you’re looking for advice on Written Statements, contracts, and how to change terms in your contract, or if you’ve been overpaid and don’t know what the next step is, we’ve got it covered in our Legal matters blog section.