If you plan to marry this Wedding Season, make sure that a high priority item on your Wedding Plan list is to get the legal aspects sorted out before you actually tie the knot. (As a side note, if you yourself aren’t about to marry, please think of passing this article on to any family or friends who are.)

We’ll look at why it’s so vital to understand the legal consequences of marriage upfront rather than try to correct a mistake afterwards, and we’ll share three important questions you should be asking your lawyer right now.

First up (and arguably the most urgent!) is the old question of what your three choices of marital regime mean. There’s still a lot of confusion on the ground around these options, and leaving it to the “default” is a terrible idea for most couples.

Many employees approaching the “Big Sixty” (there’s a lot of them with the youngest Boomers now turning 58!) will have no intention of giving up work any time soon and will be asking their employers if they can stay on. Some will stay on quietly, their retirement ages unremarked and unacknowledged.

Equally, many employers will want to keep such senior staff in place, but for those who don’t we have a warning – “age discrimination” is an “automatically unfair” form of dismissal which carries severe consequences for offenders.

We explain how to avoid any accusation of unfairness with reference to the case of an employee who stayed at his post for 9 months after reaching the agreed retirement age, then we’ll end off by sharing action lists for both employers and employees.

The Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (PAJA) gives muscle to our Constitutional right to fair, lawful and reasonable administrative action.

Considering how seriously bureaucratic decisions can impact us, not only financially but also in our personal lives, it’s important to know that PAJA is available to protect us whenever our rights are negatively impacted by such a decision.

Let’s have a look at how our courts can use PAJA to come to our assistance in a practical sense. We’ll refer to a recent High Court order against a municipality which had, through an “error in law”, rejected a service station’s building plans. We conclude with a warning to act quickly so as not to miss the time limits for taking action.

No matter how good your product and your service levels, the hard reality in business is that customer issues will arise. Perhaps they will be genuine problems or perhaps they are just misperceptions, but either way you need to act quickly and effectively to resolve them. Particularly in these times of online reviews making or breaking reputations so quickly and easily.

Here’s a tried and tested method to boost customer satisfaction generally, to change complaints into compliments, and to resolve all forms of conflict (it is equally useful for workplace and personal issues) with kindness and respect.

Read “How to Use the HEART Method to Improve Customer Satisfaction” on The Real Time Report’s website.