Module 05 Course Project - Selling Your Business: USE ATTACHMENT TO COMPLETE THIS ASSIGNMENT!!!

Name: Rodney Wheeler

Institution: Rasmussen College

Course: B412/ENT4177 Section 01 Law, Ethics, and Entrepreneurship

Date: 09/13/17

Tort Liabilities

In the rule of law, the word tort describes a sort of violation or crime where one party causes bodily harm, damage or even injury to another party. Any violation results from intentional actions of the entity, breach of contract or can occur due to negligence. The tortfeasor is the entity or individual that commits or is responsible for the tort, and the tortfeasor is required by law to incur the tort liability. In layman’s terms, the tortfeasor is held accountable for their actions against a victim. For most laws, the harm suffered by the victim doesn’t always have to be physical for the tortfeasor to pay damages. Understanding tort liabilities has a significant impact on the direction that a business takes. By understanding all tort liabilities associated with a business, an entrepreneur can come up with ways to avoid torts in the firm. This way, the entrepreneur won’t have to lose money due to law suited failed against him (Becker et al., 2013). Also, in unavoidable circumstances, the entrepreneur will have the ability to handle the torts before they become a major problem. By laws can be established in the company’s policies indicating how situations involving violations will be treated.

Since Directional Educational Solution LLC is a limited liability company, it will have various torts coming its way from time to time. Some of the torts include invasion of privacy, battery, negligent torts, fraud, trespassing among others.

Intentional torts (invasion of privacy)

An act performed to cause bodily harm to one entity to another, or to interfere with the personal rights of a person is considered an intentional tort. Some of the typical examples of intentional torts are the battery, false imprisonment, invasion of privacy, fraud, and damage to property. In my business, the business can occur when an employee invades the private life of another employee (Hammer, 2015). For instance, an employee can use the work space of a fellow workmate to spy on their personal affairs. An occurrence of this violation will make employees lose respect and trust in each other thus affecting their work output. To manage the incidence of this tort, the policies of the HR department need to discourage personal relations between employees. However, if two consenting employees feel the need to engage in intimate relationships, they should be required by the HR department to sign a contract secluding the business from any form of liability if anything goes sideways.

Negligent Torts

A negligent tort results in injury to the plaintiff and aren’t considered intentional. This tort has in it three aspects. For instance, if the company fails to pay an employee their dues as agreed an employee can sue the company for negligent torts. If word gets out that the firm has a culture or habit of not paying its employees as agreed upon, it could ruin the reputation of the company. To avoid this, management and the department responsible for paying the employees their monthly salaries should pay the employees on or before the 10th of any month.

Fraud

Fraud refers to the wrongful acquisition of funds from an entity without their consent (Hammer, 2015). An employee in the company can decide to defraud the business by stealing critical information that leads to the success of the firm or even taking materials and selling them without the knowledge of the company. By defrauding the business, an employee can cause the underproduction of the company, and thus the company is unable to deliver on its promises to its customers. Management should conduct a thorough background check on a person before hiring them to avoid and minimize cases of fraud.

Trespassing

Intrusion refers to unauthorized access to an area. People trespass for various reason, but mostly they do so to steal or cause harm to an entity. On the grounds where the company is based a people from the outside might try to access the company servers to take information critical to the daily operations such as test scores, test, and test answers. If such information is to reach the hands of the wrong people, the company will crumble. The company should provide a key card to every employee to help them access the company’s buildings and departments to minimize this tort. Also, there should be tight security stationed at all entrances and exits and also at the server rooms.

Battery

The battery is the physical assault of a person with the intent to cause bodily harm (Frumer et al., 2016). Battery task many forms such as using one’s fist or using a blunt object to hit a person. Two employees can get into a heated confrontation and after that engage in physical confrontation leading to the battery. If the employees fight on the company’s ground, it will affect the normal operation of the business. Some services will be affected since the employees will be busy fighting each other and distracting their fellow workers from their work. There should, therefore, exist policies in the HR department that bar any form of physical confrontation on the company’s grounds. Also, the policy should stipulate that if employees choose to engage in a physical confrontation, they face instant dismissal or suspension from the company without pay.

References

Becker, J., Kugeler, M., & Rosemann, M. (Eds.). (2013). Process management: a guide for the design of business processes. Springer Science & Business Media.

Frumer, L. R., Friedman, M. I., & Sklaren, C. S. (2016). Is the Action Time-Barred? Raising or Avoiding the Defense of the Statute of Limitation or Statute of Repose (Vol. 4). Products Liability.

Hammer, M. (2015). What is business process management? In Handbook on Business Process Management 1 (pp. 3-16). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.