Overview

Often, law for business students is taught as a sort of compressed version of law school. This sort of training can be very useful, but it ignores a crucial difference between how lawyers and managers relate to the law: lawyers are trained to argue for specific legal conclusions on behalf of a client, while managers make decisions to manage legal risk (threats to the business resulting from not knowing or following legal requirements). Accordingly, it is useful to provide managers with a broad overview of legal risks associated with running a business, how their decisions alter those risks, and how to minimize risks.

For these reasons, this chapter offers a broad discussion concerning general evaluations of business legal risks. Risk management is a topic for an entire course by itself, so in this chapter we will only touch on several major points and then apply them to the law.