Hi everybody. My name is Nancy Giles with Giles Law and we represent businesses and business owners in litigation and all different kinds of business disputes.

I’ve been thinking lately about some of the common mistakes that I see among business owners across many different types of disputes. And I wanted to share those with you in a series of videos about the six most common mistakes that I see people make in litigation. And the first one for today’s video is letting your emotions run the show.

So the first thing that probably comes to mind are things like anger and revenge and your ego. And those are, those can be really dangerous in a business setting. And sometimes they show up as you saying, Well this is about the principle — it’s about the principle of the thing. And that’s okay. That’s okay to fight on principle. But you need to understand what you’re doing. And do you want to use your business as a vehicle to fight for principle or do you want to make a decision from logic and from a place of cost benefit analysis and dollars and cents? Most of the time you want to treat it as a business decision and listen to your lawyer to help you get those emotions out of the way.

Another example that maybe people aren’t as aware of– the ways that I see emotions get in the way– are when you have your own fear or guilt or insecurities running the show a little bit. And one good example of this, let’s say you decided this is worth it. We’re committing the resources. We’re going to spend a year, two years building up our case. We’re going to go to trial, we’re gonna win this thing and right before trial you got cold feet, you get scared and you think forget it. Let’s just settle.

There’s nothing wrong with settling before trial. I usually recommend it. However, if you’re settling from a place of fear, then you’re usually not going to get as good of a settlement as you could. So you’ve gotta not do a knee jerk reaction, not freak out. Listen to your lawyer, take a deep breath, and again make your decisions from a place of the data, the logic, cost benefit analysis.

Your business is always going to be best served If you treat litigation as a series of business decisions that you make rationally and not emotionally. When you do that, you litigate from a place of strength instead of a place of weakness and that gives you that maximizes your possibilities for having the outcome that you want.

So next week we’ll talk about mistake number two. Until then I’m Nancy Giles with Giles Law in Phoenix Arizona and you can find out more at Giles legal .com. Thank you