Posted: September 9th, 2015
Joe Campolo, Managing Partner at Campolo, Middleton & McCormick, LLP talks with LI News Radio 103.9 FM host Jay Oliver about his latest Op-Ed piece published in the Long Island Business News, “When it comes to your employees, stop complaining and start training.”
Posted: September 9th, 2015
Published In: Long Island Business News
Tags: labor & employment, management
Much of the griping I hear from other business owners is about how the work effort of their employees is lacking. When I hear these complaints I’ll ask, “What are you doing to train your employees?” The usual response is something like, “Well I pay them and I don’t have time to train them. They either get it or they don’t.” In this scenario, it’s the business owner who doesn’t get it.
Continual training of your team is one of my greatest takeaways from serving as a U.S. Marine. Their mission is simple: Marines are at war or training for war. It is the quality of these training programs that have made the Marine Corps so successful. Young Marines who complete basic training at Paris Island are filled with esprit de corps, motivation and confidence that serves them on and off the battlefield. As business owners you can learn to motivate your team as well – by training them.
I’ve taken this lesson into my law firm today. The members of our professional team, attorneys and support staff, are constantly training in new technology, emerging areas of the law, team building, client relations and other skills they can put to work for both their own and the firm’s benefit. I view this training as a non-negotiable part of the employee experience at our firm. The benefits clearly outweigh any of the perceived negatives:
Training increases employee engagement. Training your employees helps convey that they are valued members of your company. A recent Dale Carnegie study showed that engaged employees are enthusiastic, inspired, empowered and confident—are yours?
Increased productivity. While it may temporarily sting to sacrifice an hour or two for a training session, your employees will learn skills and tactics during that session that will increase their productivity and boost production in the future.
Increased customer satisfaction. Management must be aware of customers concerns and should conduct regular training with the staff as to how to address and correct any problems. If they aren’t, then those managers should also get training on that issue. These sessions always result in an immediate bump in client satisfaction.
With these types of benefits, I recommend that every organization – no matter how large or small – implement a formal training program. Training increases employee engagement and job satisfaction, which means lower turnover and higher profits for the business.
Who’s with me?
Posted: September 4th, 2015
Posted: August 31st, 2015
Posted: August 26th, 2015
Tags: negotiation
Effective negotiators must strike a delicate balance between being aware of emotions, yet not becoming too emotional. It’s critical to perceive and understand the emotions driving everyone at the table—yourself and your adversary. This awareness will help you understand your adversary’s thought process and, in turn, use that understanding to push the negotiation in your desired direction. The ability to identify and use emotions to your advantage during a negotiation is called Emotional Intelligence.
The Business.com editorial staff recently posted an article on Emotional Intelligence, called, “Emotional Intelligence & Negotiating: Lessons from Harvard Business School.”
To be a good negotiator, you need a high Emotional Intelligence (EI).
This is the ability to not only recognize the state of your emotions, but those of others, and allows you to respond properly to the emotional situation without getting, well, overly emotional.
High EI is essential to effective negotiations that get the best results for all parties concerned, maintains Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler.
Wheeler recounts the story of a contentious meeting between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the height of the competition between their two companies (even though Microsoft and Apple actually did business with one another). Jobs accused Gates of stealing what was then the new graphics interface of Windows from Apple.
If you know anything at all about Steve Jobs, you know he was not a quiet man. Gates remained calm and, rather than yelling back, replied, “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out you had already stolen it.”
Besides being a funny retort (who knew Bill could be funny?), Wheeler notes that by keeping calm and making a valid point that neither Apple nor Microsoft has invented the GUI that Xerox pioneered, it reset the tone. Instead of escalating confrontation, the meeting calmed down and both men were able to discuss their different points of view more productively.
As Wheeler puts it, “The heart of EI is self awareness, the capacity to sense the first stirrings of anger or anxiety. That awareness, in turn, must be coupled with an understanding of what kindled that particular response…if we dig deep enough, we sometimes see that our own attitudes are the real source of visceral response.”
Keeping Your Cool in a Negotiation
Negotiations can involve heated discussions, and the difference between a deal and a deadlock is whether you can keep your cool even when emotions threaten to break the thermometer. According to Wheeler, emotionally intelligent people are effective negotiators because they:
Identify the emotions they and others are experiencing
Understand how these emotions affect their thinking
Manage emotions, either by diffusing them or intensifying them
Leverage emotional states to work towards mutually satisfying outcomes.
Wheeler’s research shows that people who are not good at negotiating tend to experience high anxiety, caused by a sense of lack of control and unpredictability about how the course of negotiations will unfold. People in this emotional state tend to respond more quickly to counteroffers, and consequently settle for less than optimum outcomes, just to get the negotiations (and associated anxiety) over with.
Okay, sometimes we can’t help how we feel. If we’re anxious about being in negotiations, we can’t just “decide” to not feel anxious. Wheeler suggested strategies to cope include:
How do you want to feel and why?
Well, ideally you want to feel confident, and one way to feel confident is to be fully prepared. Know what you want to achieve, and to what degree you are willing to compromise.
To what extent do you have to modify your own emotional state to get in tune with other attendees? Maybe you don’t want to come on too strong, or maybe you don’t want to seem too accommodating.
What can you do to put yourself in the desired emotional state?
It’s going to be different strokes for different folks. Some people listen to music (relaxing music to get relaxed, heavy metal to get pumped), others meditate, others go to the gym. Try to visualize the situation and you performing your best in that situation. Whatever you do, the goal here is to achieve a state of confident relaxation.
Take a break during the negotiations.
If things aren’t going your way or someone is irritating you, just take a break. That way you don’t respond in an emotionally inappropriate way to what’s bugging you. Use the break time to re-evaluate and consider how you can get back on the track you want
It’s not enough to identify your emotions, you must manage them.
There’s always someone who can push your buttons. Merely knowing this is the case doesn’t prevent those buttons from getting pushed. Managing how you react when those buttons are pushed determines whether you or that someone else dictates the course of negotiations and the final outcome.
For further education on emotional intelligence and the art of negotiation, you can download Wheeler’s Negotiation 360 app. While you won’t be able to negotiate the $2.99 price, the reviews are all outstanding and you should get some emotional satisfaction out of your investment.
Posted: August 26th, 2015
Beginning October 1, 2015, a shift in credit card security and in-store fraud liability could place unwary merchants and business owners at risk.
EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a relatively new form of credit card (in the United States) that utilizes computer chip technology intended to help prevent transactional data breaches and credit card fraud. In the U.S., most EMV credit cards contain the computer chips as well as the traditional magnetic stripe. If a merchant does not have a payment processing system that accepts the computer chip, payments may be processed via the magnetic stripe as usual. However, after October 1, 2015, those businesses that have not upgraded their in-store technology and processing systems to accept the computer chip portion of the card will be at risk.
Prior to the October deadline, depending on the card’s terms and conditions, the payment processor or issuer would typically be liable for consumer losses related to fraudulent transactions. After the deadline, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express have announced that the liability for chargeback related costs of fraudulent transactions will shift to party who has not adopted the chip technology.
Generally, the EMV liability shift will have the following impact:
EMV use is already widespread in Europe. Following suit, millions of EMV cards have already been issued to consumers in the United States, with millions more on the way. It appears that the U.S. will eventually phase out the old magnetic stripes and smart card technology will be the wave of the foreseeable future. Business owners may be hesitant to shoulder the costs of upgrading their current payment processing systems, but they should be aware that an upgrade now could mitigate exposure connected to EMV non-compliance in the future.
In an era of increasing consumer fraud and data theft, will your business be prepared for the EMV liability shift?
Posted: August 26th, 2015
Tags: real estate
Clients often ask when purchasing a home, “Do I really need a new survey?” My reply ninety-nine percent of the time is, “Yes!” Clients are purchasing what is most likely to be their largest asset and the survey is the blueprint of what they are purchasing. It is the way in which the title company confirms and ultimately insures the property’s boundary lines. The title company will defend the purchaser’s clear title and ownership of the property as of the date of closing.
Title companies will accept an old survey as long as it is guaranteed to a title company, even a different company than the one being used. In that instance, the title company will conduct a survey inspection before closing and compare what is physically noted at the property as against the old survey. If there is something new – for example, a fence – the title company’s survey reading will note the fence, but state that it “is not located.” That means the location of the fence is an exception to the property description on the title policy. If it turns out that the fence is not on the correct property line and creates what is know as an “out-of-possession,” there is the potential for an adverse possession claim by a neighbor.
Last year, a gentleman came to me after his real estate sale fell apart because of a neighbor whose fence encroached by six feet all along his entire backyard. The encroachment was discovered because the gentleman’s purchaser in 2014 obtained a new survey. When the gentleman purchased back in 2008, he did not obtain a new survey and used one that his seller provided from 2000. Sometime in 2002, the neighbor erected the fence, which gave that neighbor six additional feet of property all along their common boundary line. Because the gentleman didn’t get a new survey when he purchased, he never discovered that the fence encroached because he never knew exactly where the fence was located in relation to the boundary line separating the two pieces of land.
In 2014, when the gentleman wanted to sell, the neighbor’s fence had been in place for more than a decade, making it a ripe adverse possession claim. In addition, the gentleman’s title company would not have to defend his ownership of that six-foot parcel, because the location of the fence was excepted in the title policy.
Had the gentleman done a new survey in 2008 when he purchased, the location of the fence would have been known. It could have easily been addressed by removal, relocation, or getting a boundary line agreement from the neighbor. The neighbor would have no choice but to cooperate if he wanted it to keep the fence in its existing location. There would be no adverse possession claim because the fence had only been in place for six years, not the requisite ten years.
Posted: August 26th, 2015
Tags: intellectual property, technology
These days, it is quite easy to provide links to other website’s content from your own. Generally, linking to another website does not infringe the copyrights of the site. However, different kinds of linking can give raise to different issues and may expose you to liability for copyright infringement.
Deep Link: A deep link is any link that directs a user beyond the home page of another website. This type of linking generally does not constitute copyright infringement. However, there could be liability if you know or had reason to know that the work you are linking to was infringing and encouraged it.
Inline Linking: A line link is the actual display of another site’s content on your own. This involves embedding a line of HTML on your site. An example would be embedding a YouTube video on your site. Although there is not clear consensus on this issue, the majority view in the courts is that inline linking does not give rise to copyright infringement. The exception is if you know or had reason to know the work clearly infringes somebody’s copyright.
Framing: Framing is feature that allows a user to view contents of your website while it is framed by information from another site. This involves using HTML code to pull content form different sources. Instead of taking the user to the linked website, the information from that website is imported into the original page and displayed in a frame. The case law on framing is not clearly developed, but a framer is more likely to be found liable of copyright infringement if the users are confused about the association between the two sites and if the framed material was modified without authorization.
The best way to avoid any risk of liability for copyright infringement is obtain permission or use disclaimers. A simple linking agreement with the linked site is the simplest method to avoid any issues. However, if you are unable to obtain permission, a prominently displayed disclaimer may reduce the likelihood of legal issues. Although not a guarantee, such disclaimer may be taken into consideration by the courts.
Posted: August 26th, 2015
Tags: healthcare
Governor Cuomo announced that New York recovered a record-breaking $851 for the Medicaid program in 2013, which led the nation.[1] Lately, Medicaid providers have been receiving audit letters suggesting that collections will pick up again. New York’s chief Medicaid collection agent is the Office of the Medicaid Inspector General (“OMIG”), and this agency brandishes its auditing power like the Holy Lance of Longinus. I had the privilege and good fortune to win a reversal of a $2.1 million OMIG audit finding against a client following a hearing in recent years,[2] but such results are not common. New York has amassed considerable resources to combat fraud, waste, and abuse in the Medicaid program, and as a result a provider facing audit may feel like the Spartans at Thermopylae.
Medicaid providers who want to keep their money need to understand the OMIG audit process, and they need to work with counsel familiar with that process. Three mistakes most Providers make when faced with an OMIG audit include:
OMIG audits are governed by 18 NYCRR §§ 517.1 et. seq., and they often begin with a letter notification. Providers should retain counsel as soon as they receive this initial notification. Auditors introduce themselves in an entrance interview and outline the scope of the audit.
An audit usually focuses on 100 to 200 identified records. These records are called the “sampling frame,” and the auditors will later extrapolate the error rate found in the sampling frame to calculate the total overpayment they will demand back from the provider. Following a Draft Audit Report detailing any overpayment findings,[3] the provider may submit written objections. The audit concludes with a Final Audit Report,[4] detailing final overpayment findings.
OMIG calculates overpayments utilizing a statistical method called a mean per unit point estimate. This method produces stratified findings expressed in confidence levels. A typical report could express its finding that the mean per unit point estimate of the amount overpaid is $2,200,000. The lower strata in the findings is called the lower confidence limit, which in this example could be $1,975,000. OMIG’s report will say it is 95% certain that the actual amount of the overpayment is greater than the lower confidence limit.
Armed with this hi-low range, OMIG offers to settle for the lower confidence limit. However, if the provider chooses to exercise its right to a hearing challenging OMIG’s findings,[5] then OMIG will seek to prove at the hearing that the mean per unit point estimate, the higher number, is the actual overpayment amount.
In audits with smaller overpayment findings, the incentive to settle is much stronger. For example, I once had a client whose mean per unit point estimate was approximately $400,000, and the lower confidence limit was approximately $200,000. This provider settled because if it challenged findings at a hearing and lost, it risked doubling its liability.
18 NYCRR § 519.1 et seq. govern the hearings challenging OMIG audits. Hearsay is admissible, and OMIG’s own records are essentially self-authenticating.[6] The provider bears the burden of proof to show that OMIG’s audit findings are wrong.[7] This framework makes an OMIG hearing resemble a star chamber, and hearing success for the provider often relies upon avoiding the mistakes outlined above during the audit. Counsel can help providers avoid making the three big mistakes outlined above, and those who go it alone in an audit often do so at their peril.
