Of the multitude of businesses affected by the destruction of the Word Trade Center, many were law firms. In addition to the World Trade Center, a number of other buildings were severely damaged or rendered inaccessible. The New York Bar Association has estimated thousands of lawyers were displaced — at least 1,343 of which had practiced in the twin towers themselves.

Nowhere to Work
So what happens when a law firm suddenly has no office, no computer systems, no network, no Internet access, no furniture, no office equipment and no telephones? What happens to pending cases and clients? What happens when confidential client information is literally buried beneath millions of tons of rubble?

The focus on these issues is in no way intended to diminish what is most important — the thousands of human lives lost and irrevocably altered. However, the resumption of business activities is essential for national economic survival.

The events that took place in the weeks immediately after the World Trade Center horror will serve as the stuff of legend and myth as well as instruction in endless textbooks, case studies, procedure manuals and guidebooks.

In those first days following Sept. 11, New Yorkers mobilized. Displaced lawyers, having accounted for their people, began the seemingly insurmountable task of jump-starting virtually destroyed legal practices. It has been estimated that more than 12-million-square-feet of office space suddenly was unavailable for occupancy. New York lawyers showed their true mettle, establishing temporary offices in Midtown, Uptown and anywhere a conference room meant an emergency planning meeting could take place. Yahoo!, American Online Inc., MSN and Hotmail e-mail accounts became vital lifelines to connect lawyers, their staff and their clients. Thacher Proffitt & Wood, one of the World Trade Center law firms, scrambled for office spaces, bought new computers and literally rebuilt an entire firm in just a matter of days following the Sept.11 attacks.

The various New York Bar associations quickly moved to consolidate resources to assist firms with everything from finding office space, to buying the plethora of equipment and supplies that combine to make up the business of practicing law.

Some in the legal community recognized many law firms needed systems to restore off-site data backups and that many lawyers would be scrambling to replace inaccessible or destroyed computer systems. Ross Kodner, in conjunction with the New York State Bar Association (www.nysba.org), and with co-sponsorship from the New York County Lawyers Association (www.nycla.org) and The Association of the Bar of the City of New York (www.abcny.org), along with the assistance of Dale Tincher from legal Web design firm Consultwebs.com, built Legal TechAid (www.microlaw.com/nyrelief). Legal TechAid is the official Web resource of the New York Bar Association focused on being a clearinghouse for technology relief and recovery information for displaced lower Manhattan lawyers. Two e-mail postings to the country’s legal technology listserves asked for volunteers to help and yielded commitments from 60 of the nation’s top legal technologists and legal technology vendors who were willing to provide free services to help those lawyers in need.

American Lawyer Media and its LegalTech technology conference division quickly mobilized its resources, and New York LegalTech program offerings during the Sept. 24 and 25 show were modified to include sessions and panels focused on disaster recovery and planning. Exhibit hall floor space for a “Technology Triage” area was donated and manned by technologist volunteers. Also, LegalTech waived registration fees for displaced lawyers. And across the nation, the legal technology industry responded with readiness to help.

Learning From Disaster
So what can a law firm do, to the extent that it’s possible, to plan for and prepare for disaster? What can a law firm do to protect itself and its clients and their interests from all the natural and liveware-wrought perils that can disrupt or derail a legal practice? No situation could ever drill home the need for disaster planning and system redundancy more than Sept. 11.

In the past, articles about disaster recovery and data backup were not particularly popular. Continuing legal education programs on these topics brought in attentive, but disturbingly small audiences. Now that will change. The need to be prepared, not only for ensuring the continuation of a law practice, but the protection of its most valuable assets — its liveware — has become all too clear.

Law firms need to take action and have a comprehensive disaster plan prepared. The plan should include a list of the possible disruptions that can affect the ability to practice law and the safety of a firm’s people. Also, data protection planning must be a part of any comprehensive disaster plan. This should include a detailed strategy for data and program backup. Such a plan should anticipate multiple factors that can affect the ability of a computer network to generate work product and be accessible when needed. For example, you can insulate your firm from a hardware failure inside the network fileserver(s) by using redundant hardware components such as:

• A RAID array of multiple hard drives or “duplexed” pairs of hard drives and hard drive controllers
• Dual processors (which also have the pleasant side-benefit of positively impacting network performance)
• Dual power supplies and dual fans and chassis cooling systems
• A complete real-time mirrored redundant server system if there is room in the budget, or another fileserver ready to step in instantly and take over network operations if the main server fails
• Bulletproof data backup.

Back Ups and Testing
Bulletproof data backup doesn’t mean buying a minimalist and barely functional $300 Travan tape backup system or attempting to backup on a spanned set of 30 CD-R disks. It means a real tape backup system that can be counted on: an ADR drive or a DAT (digital audio tape), DLT (digital linear tape) or AIT drive. It also means having multiple alternating backup tapes. It means backing up everything on the network server or a key standalone PC, every single day, without fail. It means storing the most recent backup tape or other media out of the office and out of the building. It means cycling out heavily used tapes every year or two and replacing them with fresh backup media. It means you should have a healthy distrust for your backup system.

It must be tested regularly by randomly selecting files from a recent backup tape, restoring them and checking their accessibility (there is no such thing as too often in this restoration process). It also means a firm should purchase two tape backup devices, storing one out of the building in a safe place where it’s ready to install and use to restore backed up information if the primary tape backup device fails or is damaged.

You need to be prepared for physical damage to your computer systems and coping with and surviving worst-case scenarios. Companies such as Ontrack Data International (www.ontrack.com) and DriveSavers (www.drivesavers.com) have performed what often seem like miracles, managing to recover data from hard drives that have been crushed, scorched, torched, melted, flooded, driven over or worse.

But you need to plan ahead. Include the possibility in your written disaster plan with a procedure describing “What to do if … .”

What about your paper files? Most law firms have not yet adopted Kodner’s Paper LESS Office approach, scanning all their paper documents to build electronic files (which can then be backed up). Maybe this is the best answer to protect a firm’s paper files. It’s obviously impractical to make photocopies of all paper files and store the duplicate paper off-site on any kind of real-time basis.

Deploying the Paper LESS Office approach, aside from its daily operational benefits, means there is a duplicate to every paper file stored electronically on the computer system and backed up nightly.

Information on the Paper LESS Office is at www.microlaw.com/cle/paperless.

The Importance of Being Redundant
Data redundancy is something you should look for in the law office software systems you purchase and deploy. What does this mean? It’s best illustrated by two examples:

1. Document Accessibility — If you use a document management system (i.e., Worldox, iManage or DOCS Open), there is a function generally referred to as “document mirroring” or sometimes “document shadowing.” This means every time a user saves a document to its nice, neat, organized Windows folder on your network server, a copy of the document is stored on that user’s local hard drive. In the event of a server failure, rendering the network-located documents inaccessible, the user is able to work on perhaps the last 90 days of documents he or she had previously saved. When the network is again operational, typically the locally worked on “mirror” documents are synchronized automatically back to their proper “original” locations on the network server. This, in and of itself, is a reason to implement a document management system — aside from all their “frontline” document management and work product retrieval benefits.
2. Case Management Synchronization or Replication — Many case management systems today allow synchronization of network-located case information to laptops. The idea is simple. It allows a mobile lawyer working away from the office access to a range of case information, calendaring and docketing entries, addresses and contact information and so forth. A secondary purpose is focused on disaster prevention. It makes sense to synchronize a case management system to multiple PCs (laptop and desktop PCs) in the office every day. If there is ever a network failure, there are multiple computers able to access this mission-critical information. And further, once the network operation is restored or a damaged or destroyed network fileserver is replaced, the individual PCs only need to re-synchronize their case managers to the central system to restore normal operation.

The bottom line is tragedies can’t be avoided. Sometimes they just happen. Whether it’s Mother Nature wreaking havoc, or human-created disasters — stuff happens. But the effect of the tragedy on our people and our technology systems can be minimized by anticipating the worst case scenario, and planning for it. Please take our advice. Your life, law practice and the well-being of your clients could depend on it.

BRUCE L. DORNER is a solo attorney with his main office in Londonderry, N.H. He is the chairman of the Technology Board of the ABA General Practice Solo and Small Firm Section and a member of the ABA Standing Committee on Solo and Small Firm Practitioners. He also speaks on law office technology and management. (callmylawyer@attglobal.net)

ROSS L. KODNER is a lawyer who saw the light and became a legal technologist 14 years ago for MicroLaw Inc. Kodner is chairman of the ABA Law Management Section Computer and Technology Division. (rkodner@microlaw.com)

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Updated 12/05/01
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