How to destroy your legal nurse consulting business

How do you destroy your legal nurse consulting business? You can destroy your legal nurse consulting business in an instant, something you took years to build. The controversy over killing Cecil the Lion and the disappearance of Walter James Palmer makes me think about the impact of a business owner’s actions on his business.

Let me be clear. I would never take a bow and arrow or gun and hunt animals. Of any kind. I find it to be disturbing to look at the severed heads of animals mounted to walls. In the 1970s, my husband and I went to the office of a general practitioner. We were horrified by what we found in the waiting room. Every available wall surface was covered by severed heads. If that was not bad enough, we recoiled when we saw the coffee and end tables. They were made from amputated feet of elephants. My husband grew up in India, where elephants are respected work animals and decorated for religious parades. No way should magazines be spread out over their limbs. We never went back to that office.

Unlike the general practitioner, Walter James Palmer kept his passion private. He apologized to his clients for the inconvenience of closing his dental practice and promised to reopen it soon. As a small business owner, what this dentist did affected more than him. His employees would also be impacted by his activities and unwanted publicity. What happened to their jobs and paychecks?

What could you destroy your legal nurse consulting business?

Clearly most LNCs are not going to Africa for a big game safari. But there are more common ways to destroy your legal nurse consulting business:

• An expert witness lies under oath or is found to be disqualified
• A legal nurse consultant has an affair with a client – and then cannot collect on invoices (yes, it happened to someone I know)
• An employee embezzles money from an LNC business (I have heard horror stories of small business owners who did not have safeguards in place and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars)
• A legal nurse consultant hires subcontractors and then does not pay them for the work they did (she committed suicide)

All of these problems have long lasting effects and can destroy a legal nurse consulting business. Walker James Palmer’s life will never be the same. His patients, neighbors and community both in Minnesota and in Florida have reacted. By hunting and killing Cecil, Dr. Palmer set in motion events that will follow him forever.

Pat Iyer is president of the Pat Iyer Group, and former president of the American Association of Legal Nurse Consultants.

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