BarTalk June 2003
Volume 15, Number 3

Lessons from Toronto and Asia

by David J Bilinsky

Be glad there’s one place in the world
Where everybody knows your name,
And they’re always glad you came…
You want to go where everybody knows your name…

Lyrics and Music
Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo
Theme to Cheers

But what if you can’t go to where everyone knows your name? What if SARS had really hit Vancouver and the simple fact of people coming into the office was not an option? What would have happened to your business? Recall that in Toronto, people were quarantined for a minimum of two weeks. In Hong Kong, authorities issued controls that closed down organizations and prevented people from going to work. What would be the hit to your bottom line if your entire office ceased to do any work for two weeks or longer (and recall, your costs don’t take such a holiday)? Once the quarantine period is over, what would be the costs of overtime, etc. in trying to play catch-up and restoration of the resultant loss of business and damage to your reputation?

Is your office equipped with a disaster-recovery plan? Does that recovery plan deal with the possibility that someone could come into your physical location and infect your employees thereby preventing your entire office staff from assembling? Most disaster recovery plans assume that a physical location could be destroyed (earthquake, fire, etc.) but it is implicit that at least some of the people in that office would survive the disaster and be able to get together and work from an alternate location.

SARS has done us all a favour akin to a vaccine that prevents a full-blown disease by exposing us to a small amount of the active agent that in turn, promotes an immunizing response. The events of 9-11 brought home the need for a disaster plan; SARS has shown that you need to identify the assumptions inherent in those recovery plans that would prevent the due execution of those plans. Let us run through some of the suggestions that have been put forward in this new world environment.

Prepare: PracticePro in Ontario created a booklet on Managing Practice Interruptions (available at: www.practicepro.ca/practice/Practice_Interruptions_booklet.pdf). This booklet is a great planning tool for thinking about and hardening yourself against the principle vulnerabilities that could seriously affect your law practice. Rather than cover the points that are in that publication, I commend it to you.

Remote Access: Law firms run on computers and data networks. Can your office network be accessed remotely, with full access to all computer systems (files, word processing, accounting, practice management, research and communications, plus any specialized packages that you may use) from wherever your staff happen to be (such as home)? The Gartner Group identified how telecommuting could lessen the impact of health crises such as SARS. Indeed, students in Asia were able to continue with their education via e-learning during the SARS crises.

Paper: In most law firms, the files are a mix of electronic and paper-based information. However, in a SARS situation, even if you have remote data access, you still could miss a limitation deadline due to the inability to go to the office and reference your paper calendar limitation system or review a paper file or documents on that file. Or you could be unable to review the file and do a closing. Or be unable to prepare for a trial scheduled for three weeks hence. Or to produce a bill that is badly needed by the firm for cash-flow purposes. September 11th, 2001 demonstrated the need for mirrored data systems – a duplicate of all data in an alternate physical location to bring yourself back up to speed if your office is destroyed. SARS demonstrated the need for all information on all files to be digitalized in order for your office to continue to operate in a distributed rather than a centralized manner. This is a watershed moment. Scanning, imaging, OCR’ing and moving to pure electronic files has been something that most people feel is ‘in the future.’ Well, the future is now. Abandoning paper not only makes sense from a loss-prevention and risk-management standpoint, it also makes sense from a workflow management perspective. People often confuse paper with information – not realizing that it is the information – independent of the media on which it is found – that is important. Information can exist and has maximum momentum and power when it is in a digital form – and can be analyzed, stored in a database, transmitted, shared, searched, etc. Indeed, that is the principle power behind Adobe’s PDF format – that the look and feel of information can be standardized across multiple electronic platforms. It is a paper-independent medium (which can be hard-copy printed but it loses, rather than gains, utility when you do so).

Telephone and communication systems: Do you have voice mail or do you use paper phone slips? If your office is closed, how do your clients contact you? Can you retrieve voice mail messages remotely? Can you re-route your office calls to your home number or cell phone? Can faxes be routed to your home? Can you fax from home? What about e-mail? Can you sign into your e-mail system? Can you perform legal research from home? How can you transfer dictation to your secretary? How can he/she transfer work product back to you? How do you transfer work product to your clients, government registries, and other lawyers? You may need to make arrangements to be able to deliver PDF’s to agents who can do government filings and deliveries for you. If you used digital dictation systems, your voice files could be transferred via e-mail.

Insurance: Business interruption insurance can at least help offset the costs, if not the pain, caused by business disruption in certain circumstances. Check with your broker to determine if you are adequately covered. Find out the downside to the insurance and what is not covered – and what you can do to reduce the impact of those factors. Consider what other steps can be taken to ensure that your business systems are robust and can survive a disaster – whether that threat is biological, physical or electronic.

While you hope that you never have to rely on disaster planning and training, it is comforting to know that you have taken all reasonable steps to ensure that following the disaster, there still will be somewhere to go where everyone knows your name. Cheers!

David J Bilinsky is the Practice Management Advisor at the Law Society of British Columbia. He can be reached on the Internet at dbilinsky@lsbc.org. The views expressed herein are strictly those of the author and may not be shared by the Law Society of British Columbia.

This article originally appeared in the June 2003 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.