Imagine that you have been suddenly
transported to the North Pole….

You are standing on an ice floe in blustery sixty
degree below weather – NAKED!

You look around you and find that you are surrounded by huge, hungry polar bears. This is not a good situation!

All of a sudden, you realize that you are not without resources. You have your trusty survival backpack with you – the backpack that contains all of your emergency supplies. Quickly and gratefully you open your backpack to look for warm arctic clothing and a rifle to protect you from weather and beasts. Unfortunately, your survival backpack contains only a tee shirt, a pair of shorts, one sneaker and a sling shot. You are not prepared for this kind of extreme situation!

You are in the same position as hundreds of clients I have dealt with.

They have taken what they thought were proper steps to protect themselves and their organizations but simply did not adequately appreciate the nature and extent of law suits, regulatory charges and other traumatic incidents requiring them to deal with accountability in “The Blame Game”. They were not Trial Ready!

As a trial lawyer who has stood on such ice floes with freezing, naked and traumatized clients and fought off the polar bears, I can tell you that many of them did not escape the dire consequences of unpreparedness. As founder and CEO of a risk control consulting firm, I can also tell you that most of them should have.

Their backpacks of risk management efforts just didn’t cut it and nothing could be done to help them.

As a result of our experience and research, my team and I have set out to save others from unexpected ice floes and Polar Bears. We want to make sure that every emergency backpack contains protection from the unexpected threats that can disrupt or destroy an organization.  The protection we have come up with is The Fourteen Point Formula which is the central feature of The Due Diligence Solution.

Strategic Risk Control 866.411.0122 www.strategicriskcontrol.com

If you have the Due Diligence Solution in your survival backpack, you will have a better chance of avoiding ice floes and getting rid of Polar Bears!

Gearing Up For Ice Floes

Any time that you or your organization get involved in the Blame Game of Accountability for something gone wrong, you are going to find yourself out on that ice floe – alone and with unwanted Polar Bears trying to show that you are at fault.

Whether the Blame Game involves law suits, regulatory charges, financial hardship or failure to take steps to protect your organization and others from harm, you can always win if you can prove that you exercised Due Diligence.

Due Diligence is a legal term meaning that you took “reasonable and appropriate steps” to recognize the risk you are being held accountable for and took “reasonable and appropriate” steps to protect against the risk causing harm to your organization or the outside world.

As you can well imagine the words “reasonable” and “appropriate” have been endlessly discussed, dissected and defined in the courts and while there is a certain amount of subjectivity and variability as to what they mean, research and experience have disclosed that there are certain common denominators and requirements to force a court to agree that the conduct being examined amounts to Due Diligence.

Bearing in mind that scrutiny by the courts involves intense examination under “The World’s Most Powerful Microscope”, whatever constitutes Due Diligence in the courts is what you need for your survival backpack. If you have ever been there, you are well aware that the court room is the coldest and most miserable ice floe and the Polar Bears are the biggest, toughest and hungriest.

That’s where The Fourteen Point Formula comes in.

To beat the Polar Bears on the ice floe of the court room, there are 14 critical components needed to satisfy the definition of Due Diligence. If you have them well in hand, you can defeat the Polar Bears and get off the ice floe safely. If you don’t, well….

Even if you have all or most of the Fourteen Points, they won’t work for you unless they are specifically organized in your survival backpack to be available and effective when the ice floe looms.

If they are not readily available in a format that discourages or defeats the Polar Bears, they will not be effective.

Standing on the ice floes with clients, I have seen them fumble in their back packs for policies, procedures and proofs that may be effective to their internal organizations but are totally useless in court because there has been no foresight as to what is required to prove Due Diligence in front of a Judge and Jury.

The same applies to your survival backpack.

You may think you have what you need but if your survival gear doesn’t work on the ice floe, it isn’t of much use.

What we at SRC want to do is to make sure that your survival gear works on our Courtroom Ice Floe. To do so, it has to be specifically formatted and understandable for the court room.  That’s where the Due Diligence Solution becomes critical.

Impressing the Polar Bears

If you are trying to deal with a hungry Polar Bear, there are only two approaches – either destroy them or convince them that you will not make a good meal.

Since destruction and mayhem are not a popular component of our society, impressing them of the wisdom of leaving you alone is the best approach.

Now, if you try to impress a polar bear with something he or she does not understand, you lose and will become a good meal.

If, on the other hand, you can deliver a message to the Polar Bear that you will win in the game of “Meal or No Meal”, the Polar Bear will gladly back off and leave you alone.

It’s exactly the same in the court room.

If your survival backpack contains protocols that are not understood by the court and do not contain the proper “legalese”, you lose.  The purpose of the Due Diligence Solution is to package your good practices into a Due Diligence Manual featuring the Fourteen Points and formulated to be effective and easily understood in the ice floe of the court room.

In the result, you can win on the toughest of ice floes, defeat the Polar Bears in any accountability game and even impress your insurance carriers.

Are you ready for the North Pole? And do you have the right survival gear?