Many HR professionals view their responsibility toward legal risks as being to identify and then avoid them. In my experience, this is a mistake.
Rather, HR’s job should be to identify, assess and manage legal risks.
Many years ago, I defended an age-discrimination claim. My client had for a long time employed an underperforming and misbehaving salesman. The company tolerated his employment out of fear of an age-discrimination claim. Eventually, it could no longer put up with the situation and fired him.
