Asset protection can be described as a 3-legged stool for want of a better phrase. At the top of that stool, the absolute best layer of protection, and often you will hear specialists in the asset protection space talk about building firewalls.
The very best one is actually best practice. The easiest way to ensure that a person is not going to be exposed from an asset protection perspective is to make sure they don’t ever do anything wrong. Now I know that’s a really easy thing to say and really easy to write up on the whiteboard.
A lot more difficult to deal with in today’s environment particularly where if you look at the per capita numbers, the three most litigious areas in the world are California in the US, which is probably not too surprising, New South Wales and Queensland in that order. But it means that even if we are trying our level best to deliver on that best practice principle, there is every chance that something will go wrong at some point in time.
What are the other two components of this three-legged stool? The next one obviously is making sure you’ve got appropriate insurance in place.
If you’ve got a situation where you haven’t delivered on best practice for whatever reason, it might be a team member or employee, it could be in a moment of time where you weren’t quite across the issues you need to be across. The insurance doesn’t deliver.
The insurance I put an asterisk against, because the reality is that the insurance companies that are around still today aren't there because they pay out. They are around because they specialise in not paying out.
The third leg of the stool then is this: it all comes down to your structure.
As always thanks to the Television Education Network for the video content here.
** for the trainspotters, the title here is riffed from a Paul McCartney tune ‘House of Wax’.
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