July 26, 2006
Law Firm Business Interruption
Dennis Kennedy wants his electricity back. It went missing a week ago in St. Louis after freak thunderstorms. The Greatest American Lawyer loses data when lighting strikes and Evan Schaeffer’s natural gas generator kicks on. The Juris team helps St. Louis clients recover from the extended St. Louis power loss.
All this is another reminder that it can happen to you. Are your prepared? Business interruptions and disasters can happen at any time. Think you are safe? What if a water pipe breaks over the weekend? What about a fire? The water, heat, and smoke damage from even a small fire can shut down an office and put data and paper files at risk.
I noted in a prior post that one of the reasons so few firms have a disaster plan is that we tend to make them too complicated. A simple plan is workable and far better than none.
1. The first priority is personal safety—always protect lives first. Establish evacuation and reassemble procedures. Make sure everyone understands that no one is to risk or endanger their lives or the lives of others for paper, media, or any other material or firm property.
2. Second, maintain current employee contact information (including an alternate contact outside of the area for use as an intermediary) and get the contact information in the right hands and in various forms, including a printed document. Establish calling "trees" so that by contacting a few people, information can be disseminated quickly to everyone.
3. The next priority is to protect the survivability of the firm by making sure that critical information is safe before the occurrence of a disaster. Online backup services are now economically available. They are always current, always secure, and are available even if you are operating from a different location.
The above three steps are the essentials and, if implemented, will materially increase the ability of the firm to survive in a crisis. For more information on business interruption planning, use the morepartnerincome search feature and search for “disaster” or select the “Disaster Recovery” folder.
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