Turning a Blind Eye to the Eye of the Storm

Published February 24, 2015

Teenagers, we complain, tend to speed or text while driving because they have no sense of their own mortality. Teenagers, in other words, never think the worst will happen to them.

Adults are no better. In terms of disaster preparedness and recovery planning, we tend to ignore the issue because we think that the worst will never happen to us. Many of us do manage to prepare some kind of disaster plan, but, having prepared the plan, many of us fail to review it regularly and update it.

Even if we’ve experienced a disaster in the past, we tend to think, “Well, we’ve gotten over this hurdle, and therefore we’ve got a number of months, years, or decades before it will happen again.”

A good example is Hurricane Katrina. Katrina was not the first time that a storm hit that area. There’s a book written about the previous storm that wiped out a third of the United States; it was written in 1927 and predicted that a similar storm would happen again. And, yet, people in the area were generally unprepared.

The same thing is true with law firms and day-to-day activity. We tend not to think that what happened across the street will happen to us, and so we become complacent. Some firms have disaster preparedness plans that address the issues of importance to them, but many tend to put their plans away in a drawer and forget about them. Firms tend not to review their plans every six to twelve months to make sure that the plans are still appropriate—to make sure that the people who were supposed to do X within the plan are still engaged with the firm or still have the same phone number.

The point is this: Don’t forget the second step of planning—regular review and update.

Categorized in: Management

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