When a law firm loses its office, its servers or its internet, the first hour determines how the next week goes. Who decides? Who calls the carrier? Where do people work? Which systems come back first? Firms that have answered these questions in advance recover faster and communicate better with clients.
A disaster recovery plan does not have to be a hundred pages. For a small or mid-size firm, ten to fifteen focused pages is more useful than a binder nobody opens. Here is an outline you can adapt.
1. Purpose and Scope
Write two or three sentences describing what the plan covers: cyberattacks, hardware failure, fire, flood, severe weather, power or internet outages, and loss of key staff. Note which locations and systems are included.
2. Roles and Decision Authority
- Incident lead: the person with authority to declare a disaster and make decisions, with a named backup.
- Technical lead: your IT provider or internal manager.
- Communications lead: the person who contacts clients, courts and staff.
- Records lead: the person who tracks deadlines and critical matters.
Include after-hours phone numbers and alternates for each.
3. Critical Contacts
Keep a one-page list, printed and stored offsite as well as digitally:
- Partners and key staff
- IT and security provider, including emergency lines
- Cyber and property insurance carriers and policy numbers
- Internet, phone and power providers
- Landlord or building management
- Key software vendors
- Outside breach counsel, if you have one
- Your bank
4. System Priorities
List systems in the order you need them back and assign each a target recovery time. A typical sequence is:
- Internet and network connectivity
- Identity and sign-in services, including MFA
- Email and calendar
- Document management and file storage
- Practice management, billing and time entry
- Phone system
- Accounting and trust accounting
- Everything else
For each system, note where its data is backed up, who is responsible, and how long the firm can tolerate its absence.
5. Deadlines and Court Obligations
Law firms have a unique dependency: deadlines. Document how you will access your calendar and docket if systems are down, who will contact courts for emergency relief if needed, and where an offline copy of upcoming deadlines is kept. A weekly exported calendar is a simple safeguard.
6. Alternate Work Arrangements
- Can staff work from home securely, on managed devices?
- Is there a backup office, shared workspace or partner firm arrangement?
- Are laptops or loaner devices available?
- What is the backup internet option, such as a cellular hotspot?
7. Recovery Procedures
Document, step by step, how each priority system is restored: where backups live, how to reach them, who has the credentials, and what order to follow. Store the instructions somewhere that does not depend on the systems being recovered.
8. Communication Plan
- Internal: how staff will be notified if email is down, such as a group text or call tree
- Clients: draft templates for outage, delay and data-incident notices
- Courts and opposing counsel: who contacts them and when
Rule 1.4 on communication and Rule 1.6(c) on protecting client information both bear on how you communicate during an incident, so involve ethics counsel as needed.
9. Data Security During Recovery
Recovery is a risky moment. Make sure temporary workarounds, personal devices and emergency accounts do not weaken confidentiality. Plan to close temporary access when the event ends.
10. Testing and Maintenance
- Review the plan twice a year and after any major change.
- Run a tabletop exercise annually with partners.
- Test a real restore of critical systems on a schedule.
- Update contacts whenever staff change.
- Record lessons learned and revise.
Keep It Usable
The most common failure is a plan that lives only on the file server that just went down. Store copies in several places, including printed, and make sure the people named in it have read it.
How We Help
Counsel Cyber helps law firms draft, test and maintain disaster recovery plans alongside their backup and security programs. If you would like a template started for your environment, we can help you fill in the specifics.