Preparing for a Confidentiality Disaster

Published February 17, 2015

Disaster preparedness is disaster preparedness is disaster preparedness. In other words, no matter who you are or what type of business you own, preparing for a disaster involves essentially the same issues . . .

. . . with one exception, that is. In terms of law firms, the thing that is different—the thing that makes disaster preparedness rise to a whole new level—is client confidentiality.

An example of a disaster that can compromise client confidentiality is financial collapse. There is a firm of which I’m aware that economically just closed its doors, and the landlord couldn’t get paid. So, the landlord got a writ and got permission to clean out the entire suite of offices. In doing so, he took all the paperwork and threw it in a dumpster. There were tax returns and client files—and all were now open to public scrutiny.

Was that a disaster? Sure it was, for the law firm. Was that a disaster for the individual clients? Maybe, maybe not. I am not familiar enough with the case to know. But what I do know is that now the idea of confidentiality has been thrown out the window because the lawyers had to get jobs, had to relocate, had to make sure that their flow of revenue was still on the table so that they could feed their families—they seemingly didn’t care about the rule of confidentiality.

Apart from the issue of confidentiality, though, the concerns in a disaster are the same for every organization: they’ve got to provide for their leadership, and they’ve got to provide for their care of their individual staff members and professional people. In addition, they’ve got to consider the well-being—the well-being above and beyond confidentiality of their clients—which are akin to the core customers of other businesses.

Categorized in: Client Relations, Ethics, Management

Audience type: Administrators, Associates, Large Law Firms, Small Law Firms, Sole Practitioners