Most founders worry about runway, product, hiring. Legal exposure tends to sit somewhere near the bottom of the list. Which, fair enough, until it isn’t.
A lot of what trips small businesses up isn’t malice. It’s just stuff that didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, and then one day it really, really is.
1. Accommodation requests that quietly escalate
An employee mentions a back condition. Someone asks about flexible hours after a diagnosis. These conversations feel manageable, until they aren’t documented, until a manager makes an offhand comment in a meeting, until the request gets sort of ignored. That’s the path most disability discrimination litigation actually starts on. Not dramatic refusals. Slow, casual mishandling, often by people who genuinely thought they were being reasonable.
The EEOC’s small business guide is genuinely useful here, and it’s free, which is maybe the more surprising part.
2. Contractors who aren’t really contractors
Look, classifying someone as a 1099 because it’s cheaper has become a tradition at this point. It’s also one of the fastest ways to end up explaining yourself to a state labor board. The tests vary by state, but most of them care less about what the contract says than what the working relationship actually looks like. Daily check-ins, fixed hours, a company laptop. Those things matter more than the title on the invoice.
3. The exit that turns into something else
Someone gets fired. Maybe they were underperforming, maybe there was a personality thing nobody wanted to name out loud. Two months later, a letter arrives. And almost always, the claim isn’t really about the firing itself. It’s about something that happened in the weeks before. A complaint that was filed. An accommodation request. A safety report nobody followed up on.
Side note: it doesn’t seem to matter all that much whether the termination was actually retaliatory. What matters is how the timing looks on paper, and how the documentation reads.
4. Policies nobody reads
Handbooks tend to get written once and then ignored. By everyone. Including leadership. But when something goes wrong, the handbook is often the first document a lawyer asks for, and if it contradicts what managers actually did in practice, that’s its own problem. Worth a periodic review, even when nothing is on fire.
There’s solid practical guidance from SHRM on building a real accommodation process, which most founders haven’t read and probably should. The broader point about empowering staff in the workplace connects here too. Engaged employees raise issues early, in conversation. Disengaged ones lawyer up.
None of this is meant to be alarming. Most small businesses go years without anything resembling a real legal incident. It’s just that the cost of one, when it does happen, tends to be wildly out of proportion to the cost of avoiding it.
