Carl Kanowsky, Esq. I was sitting in my downtown Los Angeles office, located above the Chinese restaurant. The smells of fried food and MSG wafted up to me, and I was thinking about the waitress with the great set of wheels I saw at lunch when I heard it: RAT-A-TAT-A-TAT. I jumped and reached for my...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. Craig Murphy, CEO of Propel Inc., a Minnesota company, came in to see me recently. He was thinking of expanding the company’s territory to include California. He had gotten favorable reviews of many of Propel’s products, including Whirl-A-Hurl. You see, Propel makes this great...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. A few weeks ago, I wrote about some missteps that employers seem to repeat. I’ve got a few more to share. Contrary to what you might expect, these mistakes are made by employers of all sizes, even ones with sophisticated personnel departments. It seems that often, the motivating...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. First, a disclaimer. I am proud to say I am a founding director of the Bank of Santa Clarita and am fiercely loyal to it. You won’t hear any derogatory comments from me about the bank. Don’t get me started on the megabanks, though. I, like many of you, feel overwhelmed...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. Some real estate brokers I know like to form new limited liability companies or corporations for each development they represent. The common wisdom is that isolating the assets and liabilities of each discrete project keeps all of their assets in other developments free from creditors. That...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. Udders ‘R’ Us (“URS”) delivers milk to supermarkets in Southern California. It’s owned and controlled by a Georgia corporation. URS is run by that most dangerous of all professionals — someone who attended law school but never passed the bar. Fred, this manager, had a...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. Over the past few years, there has been a big push by employers to have employees sign agreements stating that any dispute between them would go to an arbitrator rather than a judge and a jury. Presumably, the logic behind the strategy is to avoid runaway jury verdicts. Some employers...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. Sometimes it seems like the different branches of government are about as skilled in communicating as those twin baby boys in the YouTube video titled “Talking Twin Babies.” (You should check it out. It’s hilarious.) Everybody’s doing a lot of talking and finger-pointing,...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. You’ve probably heard the proverb, “Never criticize someone until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.” Well, for Jose Robles, this old saying has come to haunt him. Jose worked for Liquid Environmental Solutions for four years. He’d been a fine employee, apparently. That...

Carl Kanowsky, Esq. I’ve written previously of some of the hijinks perpetuated by attorneys, but I couldn’t resist the following stories. Fortunately, the first brain freeze was committed by someone not represented by counsel. The moral of this column – which I generally save to the end so...