Disaster Preparedness & Recovery
Planning for Law Firms
Edward Poll
LawBiz® Management, Co., 2007
All firms, from sole practitioners to multi-state “Big Law” firms, can benefit from this brand new publication from law practice guru Edward Poll. Poll is a nationally known coach and law firm management consultant. He has practiced law on all sides of the table for 25 years — as a corporate general counsel, government prosecutor, sole practitioner, partner and law firm chief operating officer.1
In Disaster Preparedness, Poll not only lays out the reasons why you need a disaster/recovery plan, he walks you through all the steps you need to take to get there. So many publications on this topic scare, but don’t offer much in the way of concrete steps to ease your worries. Certainly, law firms and lawyers have always needed to have disaster recovery plans, but in the post-Katrina, post-9/11, post-Virginia Tech world, it is clear that the plans must be more than off-site data backup and a telephone tree.
The book begins with an overview of the issues involved and wisely cautions that “you can’t create an acceptable plan within a couple of days or weeks.” The book defines “disaster” broadly — including disasters caused by nature, technology breakdowns, health issues (such as an epidemic or environmental catastrophe), crime (workplace assaults, bombs and cyber crime) and personal matters (death or disability of a firm principal).
Poll stresses throughout that an effective disaster recovery plan must have buy-in from the most senior members of the firm or it is doomed to fail. This includes regular “fire drills” in which senior partners must participate.
Points made that I had never before considered include the fact that, with some disasters, the whole region’s disaster recovery infrastructure may be overwhelmed and you should think beyond your local geographic area when making your recovery plan. This includes the possibility of office space somewhere outside your region and storing backup data not just offsite, but perhaps out of state.2 As a sole practitioner, I appreciated the fact that virtually every chapter included advice and tips aimed both at larger firms and at the small firm or sole practitioner.
Poll uses examples and lessons learned from law firms navigating their way through Katrina and in New York after 9/11. The example of the law firm Thacher Proffitt highlights the benefits of practicing what Disaster Prepared-ness preaches. Miraculously, though 142 of the firm’s 200 lawyers worked in Two World Trade Center, not one employee died in the attacks. The book cites from an article from The American Lawyer, posted on the firm site:
Only hours after the towers collapsed, partners were calling in to an open teleconference line that one of them had thought to reserve, first to report that they, and whoever else they’d encountered in the chaos, were OK, then to figure out how to reconstruct the firm. The next day a committee of Thacher Proffitt partners, including two who’d made harrowing escapes, was out surveying office space in Manhattan, and a truck was on its way to Dell Computer Corporation in Texas to pick up 300 new PCs for the firm. By Thursday, Thacher Proffitt had a handshake deal for three floors in the building on West 42nd, complete with 200 existing phone lines. The following Monday — only six days after the attack — Williams signed the lease, and lawyers, staff and computers started moving in.3
Chapter 10 (“Practice Planning”) includes a very helpful section on ethical considerations to review when making a disaster recovery plan. In essence, Poll argues, a failure to plan for disaster can be seen as an ethical failure, as it is a failure to provide competent legal representation to clients.
The last chapter, “Getting More Information,” points the way to other helpful resources, many of them on the Web and many of them free. Just one example is a very helpful free handbook published by the American Bar Associa-tion, available at http://www.abanet. org/lpm/katrina/disaster_recovery_ formbook.pdf.
While the Appendix, “A Real-World Planning Example: A Quick-Start Summary,” is helpful, I would like to have seen some more-detailed examples of plans, in particular more examples for different size firms. Still, all in all, this book is a great addition to the law firm management bookshelf.
Disaster Preparedness & Recovery Planning for Law Firms, by Edward Poll (LawBiz® Management Company, 2007), 133 pages. Order at www.lawbiz.com, also available at Amazon.com for $67.
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D. Jill Pugh is a sole practitioner in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Her practice focuses on employment law, and she is the 2007-2008 vice chair for the KCBA Solo/Small Firm Section and the 2007-2008 co-chair for WSTLA’s Employment Law Section. She can be reached at jill@employmentlawwa.com.
1 See full biography and list of publications at www.lawbiz.com.
2 This point reminds the editor of a New Orleans colleague whose firm was displaced to Baton Rouge for several months after Hurricane Katrina.
3 See http://www.tpw.com/publications.cfm? id=1213, Thacher Proffitt Web site, reprinting “Back on Their Feet,” Alison Frankel, The American Lawyer, November 1, 2001.
