Last week I wrote a post on planning for business continuity during unexpected interruptions in operations.  Ari Kaplan of Ari Kaplin Advisors wrote an article on Law.com that also addresses disaster recovery.  He tells of a miserable experience trying to recover data from a cracked hard drive when his child pulled his laptop to the ground when tugging on the power cord (an experience I have narrowly escaped many times with my children). 

 

He shares some tips he received from Jeffrey Brandt on protecting yourself from what he terms "data armageddon":

• Centralize Contacts - Keep all critical contacts on your person (ie, on a mobile device). 
• Remote Data Housing - Host your data remotely.  ** I personally don't think this is required so long as you have good, reliable backups that are kept offsite. However, for business continuity, having your data accessible from anywhere has its merits.  **
• Duplicate Or Near Duplicate Systems - create redundancy in your servers.  Replicate them so that if one goes down, another comes online.
• Secure Your Backups - keep backups offsite at a secure location.  Preferably in a fire-proof vault. 
• Map and identify your information - this is good advice to corporate clients as well - "in every subsequent litigation [it will have to explain] what happened and why it could not produce data for that specific date range". 
• Test Regularly - this is one that will bite if not followed.  Test your backups regularly to make sure your backup software is working properly.

There are several technologies that take advantage of "universal access" capabilities.  For example, LexisNexis has a product called NetDocuments® that hosts and manages email and documents offsite that allows access even from a mobile device.

Kaplan has an answer to those who balk at spending such time and money to protect their data:  "Although planning and preparing is not cheap, contact someone who has lived through disaster recovery and he or she will convince you that it is priceless."   

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®.  For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

 877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

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Planning is an oft-referenced theme on this blog.  Plan for increasing wealth, plan for economic down cycles, plan for disasters.  What about during interruptions such as the recent blackberry outage?

 

There are many things that can cause business interruptions.  Planning for them will mitigate the consequences those interruptions have on your firm's operations.  Not planning for them will cost you money.

 

What are some things you can do to prepare?  There are companies that make a living selling plans to businesses, but basic guidelines include:

• Business Impact Analysis:  Determine the effect an outage would have on the  firm's most crucial systems and processes. More or less identifying the important processes subject to interruption and how that interruption will affect business.  In a law firm, this includes (but is not limited to) telephone systems, computers, staff, software systems.  
• Plan what you will do if business interruption takes place:  This, of course, is the hard part.  Planning means taking the time to think of ways around the interruption - and gain approval for the procedure.  For example, if your office is unavailable, where are critical staff?  They need to have a place to meet to put in effect the plan.  Remote communication is easier now than it's ever been.  Cell phones help but what about email?  If your email servers go down, you will need a backup plan to send and receive communications.  There are services such as Mimecast Unified Email Messaging that can provide a seamless transition that clients won't notice - making it appear as if there were no interruption at all - so long as you have access to high speed internet or have a data-enabled mobile device.  In the case of an interruption of internet access, there needs to be a secondary plan to know where your people are.
• Always have good, redundant, and off-site backups available:  All the benefits of technology are in vain in a disaster situation if you have no backups.  It has been reported that 25% to 30% of backups don't save properly.  When was the last time your office checked to make sure the backups were working?   Services such as LexisNexis Data Backup and Protection Services provide continuous automatic off-site storage of your data.
• Run a drill or two to test the processes: It is paradoxical to interrupt the business day to test processes geared to mitigate interruptions in the business day.  But it has to be done.  Otherwise you may not find the flaws in the plan until you put the plan in action - not the time you want to find out that you left out an important facet.
• Review the plan annually:  Don't just dust off the Y2K disaster readiness plan and change the cover page.  Times change, technologies change, and needs change.  Make sure you are up to date on all your systems and their effect on your business.

A sample business continuity and disaster preparedness plan, courtesy of ready.gov, can be downloaded by clicking here.

 

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®.  For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

 877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

 

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I would be remiss if I didn’t add my drum beat to Dennis Kennedy's post Lawyers Continue to Move Toward the “Papermore” office. Dennis notes the following comment from the ABA: “According to the 2006 Legal Technology Survey Report, 61% of attorneys save email related to a case or client matter by printing out a hard copy."

When you start digging into it, you will find law firms keep paper copies of bills even when their accounting system automatically archives those bills electronically. States mandate the retention of paper copies of trust ledgers. Not only do most law firms keep documents in their original paper form, some actually take the time to convert electronic documents into paper for “retention” purposes.

This fetish for paper runs against technology and business trends. It places law firms and clients at an unnecessary risk. Paper was yesterday’s precedent, but that is changing. It is not the most efficient mode of communication, and it is no longer the most secure method of retaining information. As I noted in a prior post discussing the lessons learned by law firms in Katrina’s eye and in the post about the fire that destroyed 170,000 files, you cannot protect paper! 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.

In his post, Dennis credited Ross Kodner for championing the cause of the "Paper LESS" for years. There has been progress. Unfortunately, rather than becoming less dependent on insecure paper, many appear to be going in the opposite direction, converting electronic content into paper document.

Old ways die hard!

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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On July 26, 2006, the Grapevine section of the United Kingdom-based online publication The Lawyer.com reported on UK firms desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of 170,000 files destroyed in a massive east London warehouse fire. The publication noted that in the aftermath of the fire, one firm has new plans to convert all paper documents to electronic records.

The warehouse fire is another reminder. It could happen to you!

As morepartnerincome has previously noted, electronic scanning is the only way to realistically protect the contents of paper documents from destruction in a disaster. As a bonus, you gain all the other advantages of digitized information and images.

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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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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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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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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Rita on the wake of Katrina is another reminder. Personal safety comes first! Then your livelihood and that of every law firm employee depends on having a recoverable backup; but backup tapes and discs are fragile — destroyed by water, heat, trauma and mishandling.

I have seen too many law firms suffer financially or even close their doors because they did not have a readable backup of their critical data. In the case of Katrina, backups that firms relied on were destroyed. That destruction has occurred even when the law firm had taken the extra step of placing their backups off-site. One hundred and thirty Juris® clients were affected by Katrina. The Juris team as of today has not been able to contact 19 of those firms to provide assistance. Next week, Juris service team members will begin contacting over 200 Juris law firms that appeared to be in danger from Rita. In all likelihood, some of those firms will not have recoverable backups. Some of those will never reopen their doors.

It doesn't have to be that way! There is an alternative. Online backup and recovery services provide a safe and secure alternative that can mean the difference between recovering from disaster or going out of business.

This issue is too serious to ignore.

Two of the major providers of online backup & recovery services are Livevault and EVault. I prefer Livevault at www.livevault.com. Law firms using Juris Law Office Management Systems can call 877/377-3740 or e-mail info@juris.com for more information about Livevault's online backup and recovery service.
 

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Here we go again.  Rita is aiming for the Texas Coast and Houston area!

 

The American Institute of CPAs published an uncopyrighted checklist for CFOs dealing with disaster response.  The AICPA's advice is consistent with that in previous posts.  The first obligation is to see to employees’ safety and security, then to the operations, and finally to the financial situation.  The last step in the checklist is what should have been done to prepare for the contingency of a disaster.  If you recall, in prior posts we set out three simple steps that if carried out would materially increase the chances of a law firm’s survival:

 

• Have a clear policy that lives of employees are not to be put at risk to protect the firm property.
• Make sure that employee contact information, as well as information on key suppliers, customers and others, are in the hands of the right people.
• Take steps to protect the critical information of the law firm by using an online backup service.

The AICPA checklist is as follows:

 

Disaster Response—A Plan for CFOs and Controllers

 

When a company faces a disaster, whether it is a local or regional situation, it must address a variety of issues in a timely manner.  When this occurs, chief financial officers, controllers, and other senior finance people have a responsibility first to the employees’ safety and security, then to the operations, and finally to the financial situation.  These checklists help walk the finance executive through disaster response in a series of phases, outlining issues that need to be addressed to understand damage and minimize ongoing risks.

 

 

Action
1.      Identify and locate all employees.  Determine whether any employees are missing.  Identify employees traveling, determine a means for communication, consider security issues, and review travel plans and requirements.  Evacuate employees in high risk countries, if applicable.  Stop travel to those same countries.
2.      Understand the needs of employees’ families to determine whether any support is needed that the company can provide.
3.      Organize a system for staying in contact with, for example, key employees, vendors, customers, insurance agents.
4.      Review and assess any new or additional security requirements needed for plants, IT systems, and employees, for example
5.      Assess transportation issues, and determine whether temporary housing may be needed.
Action
1.      Consider employees, benefits, and HR issues.  Are alternate means of payroll delivery necessary?  Consider health and disability insurance issues, life insurance, personal leave, and cash loans or advances to employees.
2.      Consider behavioral issues, such as grief counseling, productivity, and back-to-normal plan.
3.      Assess business status.  Are we able to operate right now?  Determine, for example, immediate or impending deadlines, due dates, customer and supplier needs.  Assess the state of your technology and systems.  Determine when the last backup took place.
4.      Identify a key spokesperson for the company.
5.      Consider immediate needs, such as space, communications equipment, skills and roles that need replacing immediately.  Redeploy people as needed.
6.      Identify and communicate with employees, customers, clients, key owners and shareholders, insurance companies, creditors, banks, suppliers and vendors, strategic partners, and analysts.
Action
1.      Look at operational risks, such as work-in-progress, cancellations, no-shows, refunds, lost revenues, and undeliverable materials.
2.      Understand the operational risks of customers and suppliers. Work together where possible to minimize the risks to all parties.
3.      Determine assistance available, such as credit lines, disaster loans and grants, people and expertise, hardware and software, professional bodies, and trade associations.
4.      Consider technology issues.  Were technology partners affected?  Are redundant systems operational?
5.      Establish plan for alternate postal deliveries.
6.      Ascertain the status of your assets.
7.      Contact competitors.  Consider outsourcing production to them so you can meet the needs of your customers.
8.      Assess you financial status.  What is your cash position?  Cash burn rate?  Immediate cash needs?  Can you access the cash?
9.      Determine whether insurance policies are available covering, for example, key individuals, other life, property, business interruption, and disability.
10.Determine availability of records.  Where are the last available financial statements?  Check with auditors and attorneys.  What records do they have copies of?
Action
1.      Does the company have skills and equipment that could assist in disaster recovery if this is a wide-scale disaster (that is, affecting others outside the confines of the company)?
2.      Consider current business plan and what cannot be executed.
3.      Develop a new business plan based on the current situation.
Action
1.      Develop a disaster plan with two backup or alternate plans.
2.      Develop and maintain a list of key contacts, including families, insurance companies, customers, and suppliers.  Also consider identifying other service and professional resources, such as engineers and restoration specialists.
3.      Maintain a closet of emergency supplies on site, including some food, water, flashlights and batteries, a source of heat, and a source of communication.
4.      Identify key Web sites that could help in disaster recovery.
5.      Distribute disaster recovery information to all employees in the form of wallet cards or other means that are easily accessible.  Distribute two copies of the complete plan to all key employees: one copy for home, one copy for office.

 

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One of the reasons so few firms have a disaster plan is that we tend to make them too complicated.  A simple plan is more workable and you are far more likely to develop and follow such a plan.  Complex disaster plans are likely to be destroyed right along with paper documents in a real disaster.

In 2002, the Juris® Users International Group held a panel discussion on disaster planning and out of that discussion came elements of an effective and simple plan—three steps that every law firm can implement. 

Here are the steps as set forth by the panel:

     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 life or the life 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 were not economically available in 2002.  They are available today.  They are far superior to in-house backup procedures and methods.  In-house backups often prove unreadable when required and as the New Orleans situation demonstrates—locally maintained off-site backups face the same risk as the law firm itself.  Juris, Inc. has partnered with LiveVault to provide secure continuous backup service to Juris law firms.  On-line backups are always current, always secure and are available even if you are operating from a different location.  You may want to reconsider imaging to protect your paper documents.  Imaging is the only technology that facilitates the protection of documents using traditional computer backups.  And you gain all the other advantages of digitized information and images.The above three steps are the essentials and if implemented will materially increase the ability of the firm to survive in a crisis.  There are three other steps that take your plan to a higher level.  How thoroughly you should pursue the added three items depends on the risk faced by your present location.  Are you at high risk from water, earthquake, fire, or terrorist attack, for example?  The three additional items involve Facilities, Equipment and Insurance.

    1. Address the issue of where the firm can set up a temporary operation.  This may be as simple as identifying the homes of certain partners preparing a list of options, including branch offices or client locations.  It is a good idea to identify and establish contact with a commercial real estate organization that you can call on a moment’s notice.  Your plan could be as elaborate as contracting for backup space.  This depends on the degree of risk faced at your present location.  Generally, the space issue can be resolved after the fact, provided steps 1-3 have been carried out.
   

    2. Address the equipment and phone issues.  This can be as simple as identifying portable equipment and cell phones owned by the law firm but assigned to individuals that can be called in for firm use in a crisis.  It can be as elaborate as contracting with an offsite disaster recovery facility or maintaining a server, network and minimum equipment at an offsite facility for emergency use.  This issue can usually be resolved in a reasonable time period after the fact, provided steps 1-3 are in place.

    3. Provide additional insurance to finance payroll and operations during the period of business interruption.

To summarize, the three essential disaster preparatory steps your firm should have in place include:

    1. A communicated policy for putting personal safety first;

    2. Maintain personnel contact information in the hands of the right people;

    3. Use a online backup service like LiveVault to protect critical data.

Juris clients can learn more about LiveVault services available through Juris, Inc. by calling 877/377-3740 or by e-mailing info@juris.com.  Law firms can also contact LiveVault directly by going to www.livevault.com.
 

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