June 16, 2006
Test Your Law Firm's Disaster Preparedness
J. Craig Williams, Esq. of www.MayItPleaseTheCourt.com fame was another example of the faculty strength for last week's ALM’s Law Firm Business Forum in LA.
Craig addressed Disaster Recovery and laid out a straightforward test to determine if your plan is adequate:
- Can software and data be restored?
- Is critical replacement hardware available?
- Can accounting, billing, calendaring, and email systems be brought up with ease?
- Is the projected time and effort to restore operation proportional to the problem?
As helpful as Craig’s presentation was, I was disappointed that he appeared to favor in-house backup systems over online backup services. Working with almost a third of U. S. midsized law firms, my experience is that in-house backup systems are problematic, and in-house backup procedures are frequently flawed, rendering backups unusable. In the case of the New Orleans disaster, some off-site backups were damaged right along with the law firm’s onsite backups. In other cases, the backups were incomplete or unreadable.
Vendors like LiveVault (www.livevault.com) provide continuous backup services, enabling recovery as of the moment of system failure. Online backups can be restored 24 hours a day from any location including temporary locations. They are more expensive than the in-house alternative, but what is a little more cost when you are talking about the life or death of the firm?
I found particularly interesting Craig’s explanation that services are available to deal with missing laptops and mobile PDAs. The services let you send a command over the internet to the missing device that locks and destroys all records on the device. Be sure to read his related post on the subject were he recommends two software products Lojack for Laptops and RemotePROTECT for cell phones.
Earning more partner income is only the beginning. After you earn it, you have to protect it from risk. A number of New Orleans clients we worked with never reopened their door.
Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.
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Filed under Disaster Recovery by Tom Collins