January 13, 2006
Law Firms Can't Protect Paper
The President of Juris, Inc., Stephen Collins, was one of two keynote speakers at the recent Houston, Texas, Managing Partner Forum organized by The Remsen Group, www.TheRemsenGroup.com.
Given recent events, it is not surprising that disaster recovery was one of the hot discussion topics. But this discussion was different from the usual checklist of prevention steps. What made it different were the real life stories and experiences from those shut down by Katrina. One eight-office firm had five of its eight offices shut down at the same time - all rendered inaccessible.
Their chances of full recovery are much higher than if these firms had suffered from more isolated individual crises. That observation was one of two important points to come out of the discussion. Law offices hit by Katrina were not alone. Because everyone was in the same situation, they got a competitive pass. Firms recovering from Katrina feel they learned a critical lesson—law firms have an obligation to be prepared and survival depends on it.
The second lesson is that "you cannot protect paper!" That is risk number one. You can replace office space, equipment, phones, etc., but without your "client and case stuff," you are out of business. The only way to protect the contents of paper is to convert it to electronic digits and images. Once you have done that, you have the ability to apply the same safeguards available to you to secure your computer records. But as noted in a prior post, traditional in-house backups are unreliable and nearby off-site storage faces the same risk as the law firm’s location. The right choice is to use an online backup service such as LiveVault.
Very large law firms view the proposition of digitalizing paper as impossible given the size of the task. It is a daunting task for any law firm. One firm pointed out that their off-site storage facility charges $3.00 to retrieve a box and $1.00 to store it. At $3.00 a box, the firm explained that it would cost $40,000 just to pull archived information for the purpose of scanning it.
Everyone needs to take a deep breath. This is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Every year that passes renders the archived information less essential to the firm’s survival. You don’t have to convert all the archived paper records. The key is to start.
Every one of us is at risk from something—hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, floods, vandalism, broken pipes, terrorists, etc. The two most important steps you can take to protect the survivability of your firm and the interest of your clients from disaster is to 1) start converting new paper through scanning and 2) start using an online service to back up that information and safeguard it.
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Filed under Disaster Recovery, Risk managment by Tom Collins