If the IRS disagrees with your classification, your company may be required to pay substantial penalties, including back FICA taxes, interest on wages and past taxes, as well as the employees' own taxes. In addition, you may be responsible for many benefits for the incorrectly classified employees. Legal advice before you decide whether someone is an independent contractor or an employee can help your company avoid expenses like these penalties, taxes, and benefits. Even simple tasks like drafting the summary of the discussion on a matter in the minutes of a corporation authorizing the transaction should be done by a lawyer. In addition, a business executive cannot possibly know all of the potential legal problems which can arise from ordinary, day to day business operations.
Legal counsel can be invaluable in both identifying and resolving such problems.
A good lawyer is part of the solution, not part of the problem. Particularly these days, lawyers are trained to appreciate business problems and to supply cost-effective answers to those problems. Such an audit can be performed by any experienced business lawyer. A legal audit would seek to catalogue all of the significant legal problems your company might encounter in a specified period of time and also to evaluate whether access to legal counsel on a regular basis would help your company prevent or minimize legal problems and save money. Then you should analyze the costs of legal counsel.