Security Litigation

by Mark Rowe

Author: Eddie Sorrells

ISBN No: 97801-28019245

Review date: 28/03/2024

No of pages: 202

Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann

Publisher URL:
http://store.elsevier.com/product.jsp?isbn=9780128019245

Year of publication: 18/12/2015

Brief:

Security Litigation: Best Practices for Managing and Preventing Security-Related Lawsuits, by Eddie Sorrells. Published 2015 by Butterworth-Heinemann

price

£27.74

So many books on security management are about the security half; not as many are about the management part; fewer still consider the legalities of it all.

And yet so much security work is done under contract, between a security company and its customers. What if something goes wrong, on either side? What if one side wants to end the contract, or goes ahead and breaks it? What if you are sued after a security or other sort of incident, or if you are accused of discrimination? Can you leave it to your insurance? These are the sort of issues that are tackled in a welcome book, Security Litigation.

If something is major enough, can even the largest companies be brought down or at least hurt by litigation? Is it worth the worry? At the risk of paraphrasing – not something you lightly do for a book about legals – the author, an American security practitioner, takes the view that yes, it can happen, so let’s do something practical.

What readers will find welcome about this book – even if they aren’t facing lawsuits – is that it speaks so plainly about legal matters. “To state the obvious, litigation is expensive.” Hence so much legal work is about negotiation, and preparing, so that you don’t go through litigation proper at a trial. Gathering your evidence counts; as in all things, knowledge pays off. But that demands that you have evidence to call on, which may show up weaknesses in the way you run your business. “Nothing can hinder the discovery process more than not properly preserving documents and other forms of information.” That said, if you don’t ask, you don’t necessarily receive, even from your own side. Never assume a thing, which surely is wise advice in any field, let alone the law.

As the book points out in the final chapter, this subject can cover, besides the contracts themselves, your marketing material, instructions to staff, how you assess a site, how you select and train your officers if you’re a guarding company, and screen those guards, and what you train them in. Even little things can come to matter, such as whether you have your customer’s name on the contract guards’ shirts. The author puts across how a lawsuit can be draining (’emotionally and financially’), which can serve as a prompt to make sure it – maybe negligence – doesn’t happen again (or as seldom as you can possibly make it). But as Sorrells advises, fixing the consequences of a problem is not the same as eliminating the root cause. In other words, there’s more to a lawsuit than simply winning or losing it.

As the author points out very early on, the security service, the interest of the customer, and the law might collide; and those dilemmas have to be (but can be) managed. As with so many works on private security, this one is written by an American with American cases and the US generally taken for granted as the background. So long as you appreciate that, even UK and other regions’ readers have much to learn from this 25-year practitioner, so that they can navigate the law, and indeed business and life.

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