The legal system encounters thousands of clients a year, all looking for a variety of services. While the flow of business is steady, operations can easily be sidelined by a cyberattack or natural disaster. A single ransomware incident, server failure, or extended power outage can halt access to case files, court documents, email correspondence, and billing systems—everything a firm relies on to serve clients and meet court deadlines.
Because law firms handle highly sensitive information and are bound by strict ethical and regulatory obligations, the impact of downtime goes far beyond temporary inconvenience. Extended outages can disrupt court appearances, delay filings, jeopardize client matters, and expose firms to compliance violations and reputational damage. Even a brief interruption can have a cascading effect on case preparation and client trust.
To mitigate these risks, law firms should make disaster recovery planning a priority if they want to be prepared for the inevitable. This includes proactively identifying critical systems, defining recovery time and recovery point objectives, and implementing a backup strategy that ensures business continuity when unexpected events occur.
Firms that invest in comprehensive disaster recovery—combining local and cloud backup, secure storage of client data, and tested recovery procedures—are in a much stronger position to maintain operations and protect both their clients and their reputation when disaster strikes.
Creating a policy to follow during emergencies is a great step forward, but many still are not making their plans comprehensive enough to overcome a disaster's fallout. In fact, according to FEMA, 40 percent of businesses are affected by events like earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, but 31 percent of affected organizations were still unable to operate up to six months after the disaster occurred, the Daily News reported. This not only shows the truly devastating effects of this situation, but also is a clear wake-up call to review and revise disaster recovery plans.
If your law firm were to be hit right now with a severe storm or cyberattack that took out your systems, would you know what to do to restore your assets and resume business? Without a capable plan, you could miss court appearances as well as lose vital income and client data. In fact, just one hour of network downtime could cost your firm $60,000 in billable opportunities, according to Axcient. These consequences alone should put disaster recovery planning at a high priority.
"Follow the
3-2-1 backup method to guarantee minimum downtime."
Once a law firm understands the potential risks, it will be important to establish a capable, written disaster recovery strategy and ensure it is communicated across the organization. This document should clearly define roles and responsibilities, outline step-by-step directions to get through the disaster, assess damages, contact clients, notify courts and opposing counsel as needed, and resume business once everything has been restored. It should also specify which systems and data sets are most critical, where they are stored, and in what order they must be brought back online to minimize downtime and revenue loss.
According to the American Bar Association, it's also essential to analyze risks and security to better protect business assets. This includes regularly reviewing your firm’s infrastructure, identifying single points of failure, and documenting how you will maintain access to client files, email, practice management systems, and billing data in the event of an outage.
For example, if there's a vulnerability that could cause a disaster, methods should be put in place right away to head off any potential future issues—whether that means applying security patches, segmenting networks, tightening access controls, or updating your backup and recovery procedures.
When it comes to employee devices, this could mean establishing strong authentication processes, enforcing policies for remote and mobile access, encrypting laptops and portable drives, and ensuring that important company data is backed up on a regular basis rather than stored only on local machines.
Standardizing how and where case-related data is stored—and verifying that it is included in your backup routines—helps reduce the risk of data loss if a device is lost, stolen, or compromised by malware.
For a small- to medium-sized law firm, it will be especially critical to follow the 3-2-1 backup method to guarantee minimum downtime. This means having three backups, using two mediums, with one stored off-premises. Using 3-2-1 best practices, your law firm can ensure that even if your Internet goes out or your hardware is destroyed by a storm, your data will still be safe and secure. This will help you be among those who are able to recover quickly and retain customer loyalty.
In practical terms, researching backup for law firms is a good start to ensure your disaster recovery plan includes a reliable, secure solution designed to restore critical case data and keep client matters moving forward.