Do You Have a BCP?

Beginning this issue, we bring you a monthly column on risk management by our regular columnist, Stanley Jeremiah.

As any good manager will tell you,
people don't plan to fail, they
simply fail to plan. Many an insurer will tell you, the only thing that is certain in life is uncertainty. Yet it is really surprising how little we plan for the uncertainties.

A BCP is a 'Business Continuity Plan'. Do not imagine that this is only for big firms. In fact, if you are a sole practitioner, while your BCP can be relatively simple, it will probably be far more important to preserving your practice.

A BCP is a plan you have to put in place in order to meet unexpected contingencies. What happens if you fall ill, who will cover for you? What happens if there is a fire in your office? Will you lose all your information, do you have back ups of your computer records, client file and data, accounts etc? Will you be able to contact all your clients?

There are cases in the United Kingdom where a solicitor's delay in obtaining the execution of a will was held to be negligent and even delay attributable to the hospitalisation of the solicitor was not a sufficient excuse, because in the view of the court, he could have arranged for a substitute for himself, to attend to the execution!

A BCP will include planning for disaster recovery as in the case of a fire or other unexpected events. Several law firms had offices in the World Trade Centre in New York and all were back working within a week. The largest company, Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, which had 600 employees in the World Trade Centre, was able to issue this letter on its website after the event, to 'Colleagues, clients and friends, our technological support has always included disaster recovery for all aspects of critical information ...'. I wonder how many law firms in Singapore would be able to respond with such confidence when faced with such unimaginable catastrophe and consequences.

The first stage in disaster recovery is the survival plan, that is, ensuring the safety of staff. The second stage is to assemble the 'A Team', that is, getting the key players together at a control location where they can assess the risk and damage and direct the recovery operations. The third stage is re-establishing the business by getting it up and running.

Do you have a contact list of all your staff and have you a system for contacting them in case of an emergency? As part of our BCP, when I worked with an international insurer, the management team were issued with a card with the home and mobile telephone numbers of everyone on the management team, which they were to carry with them at all times. Additionally,
I had the home and mobile telephone contact numbers of all my direct reports, and so it cascaded down. In this way, in an emergency, we would not be fumbling for contact numbers. Will you be able to contact everyone you need to if you can't get back into your office?

Big or small, there are many matters to address. Do you have alternative premises you can use, off-site facilities for your computer systems? Is there a mutual assistance arrangement with another law firm? Can you re-establish your IT systems, retrieve client records etc?

One of the biggest problems facing law firms is the prospect of losing paper-based files. You can back up your computer systems everyday and store that off-site, but you cannot back up your paper. That does not mean they cannot be safeguarded. Scanning is an option, especially for important documents.

Whoever is in charge of the BCP must be in a sufficiently senior position to be able to allocate staff and resources. The aim is to reduce the length of time your business is interrupted, ie the 'down time'. It is not sufficient to simply have a plan, there must be preparation and practice, so that when confronted with a disaster, people know what to do. No plan is perfect, of course, but planning and preparation will go a long way to reduce the damage and assist in a quick recovery, which will make all the difference in preserving the goodwill of the firm, if nothing else.

Stanley Jeremiah
Goodwins Law Corporation