Meet Coach John, the employment lawyer: an interview with John Yow, Principal at Yow PC

John, you have had an unusual path to employment law expertise. Many employment law practitioners received their training at a firm but yours was initially on the frontlines during your time at the Oakland Raiders and at your startup. How do you see that experience as a differentiator in what you offer to small and mid-size private companies for employment advice??

I think the differentiator is that it gives me a practical view of things, because when you are an external counsel you advise on risk based on what your clients are telling you. When you are on the front-lines,? in-house, you see the “in the moment” effects of the advice you are implementing.? I think I have a good marriage of the legal and practical due in part to me studying up on the application of the law to employment issues.?

Many early stage startups legal teams may not have the resources to get all things employment law right immediately, how do you advise smaller teams on prioritizing getting their employment law house in order??

The first thing is to focus on the big risk issue items. You can solve 90% of your employee issues by treating folks fairly. A discrimination claim, at its heart, is that someone is being treated unfairly for some reason. The next thing is the tech out there, whether it is Rippling, Central and Stripe Atlas, those companies will check a lot of boxes. You have to be careful on fully and unconditionally relying on what they provide,? but these solutions will get you further along than what you could have 10 years ago without having to pay for an expensive attorney. And then at some point, form a relationship with an employment lawyer you can bounce ideas off of. If your company keeps these high-level principles in mind, that will go a long way to stopping employment law issues before they start.?

The other key piece of advice I have is everyone has to sign a CIIA (Confidentiality and Invention Assignment Agreement). If you relax on this for 6 months and then your funding round is coming up, you will be in a mad dash to get them signed by everyone.? This is a representation companies are required to make in every funding round, so it is best to develop a bright line rule on this from the get-go: everyone signs.?

With so many companies going remote during the pandemic and continuing to be remote-first companies, what are the top pieces of advice you give to remote workforces??

With remote workforces, the company has to understand what their relationship is to remote–is the company fully remote or wishy-washy on it. If there are inconsistent expectations on the applicability of remote work, that is going to cause issues. ? The next thing I would do is start with your more restrictive states and understand what those requirements are, such as California and New York and then figure out what your state by state strategy is going to be. You will necessarily need to have a different strategy for a 40 person workforce versus hundreds of employees.

Thank you John for your time! You can reach John at [email protected]