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It’s hard to believe that the current pandemic has been with us for nearly six months — and will likely be around for months, or even years, to come. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to surge in some parts of the country, you’re no doubt wondering about the future of your law firm and its book of business.
One way to abate those concerns is to prioritize preparing your firm for whatever may come. Make sure you’re never caught flat-footed and take steps to ensure business continuity no matter what happens. Why? Because that’s the only way to ensure future success and stability.
The Importance Of Future-Proofing Your Law Firm
Future-proofing is a top concern for the majority of law firms. In fact, according to the 2020 ILTA Legal Technology Survey, 75 percent of responding firms indicated that their firms have disaster plans in place (up from 56 percent in 2014), and 22 percent of respondents shared that their firms are currently working on a disaster plan.
Of course, building business resiliency into your firm is more than simply creating an emergency response plan. The end goal is to ensure that not only does your firm get up and running quickly, but that it is also able to operate smoothly and efficiently in the weeks and months following a disaster without skipping a beat.
Future-proofing ensures that your firm is able to rapidly pivot and adapt to unexpected disruptions, thus allowing it to continue to operate and represent your clients’ interests even in the face of uncertainty. A major part of future-proofing your firm includes assessing risks to your firm’s business in the event that different types of disruptions occur. Typical business disruptions faced include pandemics, natural disasters, power and utility outages, and cyberattacks.
While this may seem like an overwhelming — or even impossible — task, it’s actually more attainable than you might think, especially if your law firm has a solid plan in place that includes the necessary technology.
For example, will your firm be able to keep the lines of communication open between its employees, the courts, and clients no matter what happens? Does your firm have technology in place that will allow convenient and immediate access to important case-related information even if employees are displaced from the office? If not, it may be time to replace the existing IT infrastructure with more modern cloud-based legal software in order to ensure that essential business operations are not disrupted.
Create A Plan That Addresses The Top Threats To Your Firm’s Business
When creating a business resiliency plan, one of top tasks will be to identify your firm’s primary business functions. For many firms, those will include a number of different business processes that affect employees and clients, such as marketing and public relations, lead management and intake, client intake and communication, case management, human resources, payroll, and IT needs.
Once your firm’s primary business operations have been identified, the next step is to identify the top threats to each of those functions. Of import is that different types of business disruptions will necessarily have varying degrees of impact on each identified business process.
For example, natural disasters may result in damage to the firm’s offices, employees’ homes, or both. The types and locations of the damage will obviously affect your firm’s operations differently, thus triggering only certain aspects of your firm’s resiliency plan. Other types of possible disruptions, such as pandemics, power and utility outages, and cyberattacks will similarly have disparate effects on varying aspects of your firm’s operations.
Note that some of those threats are universal, such as a pandemic, cyberattack, or utility outages. Others will be more specific to the where your firm’s offices are. For example, many potential natural disasters will vary greatly depending on location. You will need to identify the natural disasters most likely to strike your offices and affect your firm’s operations, and how to respond to them.
Once you’ve identified the top threats to each business function, it’s time to move on to preparing a recovery plan for each essential service under each disaster scenario. The end goal is to ensure that no matter what type of disruption occurs or how it affects the firm, there is a plan in place that will provide guidance in the midst of uncertainty.
Because every law firm is different — the resiliency plan will vary by firm. With that in mind, the top objective at the outset will be to prioritize the processes that are the fundamental to your firm’s day-to-day operations and the goal will be to keep those processes running smoothly no matter what happens.
Future-Proofing Your Firm Is Not An Option — It’s A Necessity
The bottom line: future-proofing your firm is not optional. Instead, it’s a key part of protecting your firm’s reputation and bottom line in both the short term and the long term. If your firm doesn’t yet have a business resiliency plan in place, better late than never. Take advantage of any downtime during the current pandemic to create a business continuity plan that your firm can rely on if there’s a COVID-19 surge in your area or if another disaster strikes down the road.
Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and Director of Business and Community Relations at MyCase, web-based law practice management software. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.