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Author: Associate Runa Jasia

There comes a time in a company when the founders need to deal with some serious legal situations. They need to handle these legal actions very calmly and patiently. Legal matters are precarious in nature and need to be handled with the adept legal advisors.  Obviously, such cases exist in the history of top companies. But the way the founders handle these situations are not only noteworthy but also can be a precedent for other founders. 

Here are some situations where legal matters are handled by founders in an efficient manner:

Chief Executive Officer of Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook has been confronted with several controversies in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg-He is the Co-founder and had led Facebook as its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal was a major political scandal in early 2018 when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of people's Facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political purposes." This news spread like wildfire and caused an uproar among users.  The main issue was regarding the use of by Facebook, without the user's knowledge. But both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica claim they were duped by the researcher who originally harvested the data, who used an innocuous-seeming personality quiz in 2013 to access info on friends of people who used the app. It also came in the picture that during vote-targeting strategies for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Mark Zuckerberg owned up to the dire mistake and apologized for such a privacy breach of the users. He finally spoke up regarding this situation. The CEO acknowledged: "It was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that." It was also in the news that Facebook is now investigating the third party apps in a very detailed manner. Facebook will shut down such programs that are using the personal data of its users. Brian Acton, a co-founder of messaging app WhatsApp also tweeted: #deletefacebook. There are many people who deleted their facebook account due to this breach. 

Sometimes owning up and accepting the fault is a better method of handling a situation than any other. This is a classic case of that. 

Chief Executive Officer of Google LLC

Sundar Pichai is an Indian-American business executive. Eventually he took over the management of other Google products like Gmail and Google Docs, and rose through the ranks rapidly. He gave the idea that Google should have its own browser. So going ahead, there was a time when he needed to make a tough decision regarding an employee of Google named James Damore who was working as an engineer at Google.  "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber: How Bias Clouds Our Thinking About Diversity and Inclusion" is the title of a memo written in July 2017 by the software engineer James Damore, then employed at Google. This memo led to a huge massive controversy in the market. He was also fired from Google for violation of the code of conduct. He was accused of sexism. According to the sources he wrote in the memo:

Google's political bias has equated freedom from offense with psychological safety.

This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.

The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.

Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression

Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression

Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.

Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

 He wrote about women and their weaknesses and as an employee of the company, he cannot publicize such unlawful statements. So keeping in mind, Pichai fired him for writing such a memo. It is important to maintain the ethos of a company and not let anyone have sexist sentiments which can offend and go against the values of the company. 

These are a few examples of how as a founder of a company, a lot rests on the way situations are managed and dealt with. As a founder, one sets a precedent for the company and for its users.