When your law firm and its partners and IT team worked on the firm’s crisis management plan, also known as a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is the go-to when disaster strikes. Disaster can come in the form of fire, flood, vandalism or something like #coronavirus. How to avoid crisis management plan mistakes — we can help.

Many business owners were blindsided by the coronavirus and the mandates to shut down offices and plants and send employees home. Those businesses – mainly white collar businesses like accounting firms, law practices and healthcare offices – were able to scramble and send their employees home to work. This lead to issues that many business owners and law firms didn’t foresee, especially if they didn’t have a crisis management plan in place.

What were some of the issues?

1. Providing the employee with the hardware and software to do his or her job
2. Tracking where the company laptops and desktops ended up
3. Stretching the IT staff to its limits
4. Helping work from home staff connect to the company network
5. Assuring the work from home staff are not opening the company data up to potential breaches

How To Avoid Crisis Management Plan Mistakes

Did your BCDR work as well as it should have? Did you have a BCDR in place? Did the individuals involved in the plan know, and properly carry out, their roles in the midst of the crisis? If your key personnel didn’t know their roles, weren’t able to perform their responsibilities and any of that cause a catastrophic network fail, how will your company rebound? We want to help you learn how to avoid crisis management plan mistakes

If you have a crisis management plan in place for your law firm, ensure you don’t suffer these five potential mistakes. If your company doesn’t yet have a crisis management plan, give us a call or schedule a consultation to talk with one of our WareGeeks Solutions experts and let’s get one in place. Heading back into the office will bring with it its own, unique challenges and those too can be addressed in the crisis management plan.

How To Avoid Crisis Management Plan Mistakes

Don’t make these BCDR mistakes

1. Writing it, but not testing it. The BCDR is only as good as its execution and how will you know it will work if you don’t put it through its paces? You won’t. It needs to be tested and tweaked if deficiencies are found. Did the employees carry out their tasks properly and were they given the tools necessary to do that?
2. The coronavirus highlighted the need to prepare for medical emergencies when writing the BCDR. If your firm became infected by someone with coronavirus or if one person had it and that prompted a shutting down of your office, do you know whom to contact for that cleaning? Do you have a person in place to fill the role of that employee/those employees who may have been impacted? Your law firm’s crisis management plan mistakes need to be avoided and it needs to prepare for health emergencies as well as natural disasters and you also need to talk with local medical personnel to make certain they are equipped to handle any influx from your office.
3. Not enough communication with internal staff as well as external resources. Being reactive in the event of an emergency will lead to chaos, potential loss of life and potential loss of company property and data. Your law staff needs to trust you know what you’re doing in the event of an emergency. You need to be transparent with everyone in the firm when putting the BCDR into plan and practice. How will employees communicate with team members if phone lines go down? It is important to plan for this. Understanding how to avoid crisis management plan mistakes is key to communication.
4. Physical planning matters. If your office was flooded or if a fire broke out, what are your evacuation plans? Do your employees know how to get out, how to communicate with other staff and fire, police and medical authorities. Remember all of the fire drills you did when you were in school? The fire drills were run to assure that everyone would get out safely in the event of an emergency. Practice your “fire drills” before they are needed.
5. Write it and forget it. The crisis management plan should be front of mind. Don’t write it and file it in a binder on a shelf. Don’t write it then put it in the cloud and forget it. The BCDR needs to be in a place that everyone who is involved can readily access it – consider having each principle printing out a copy and taking it to an off-site location. Cloud storage is great – if you can get online.

The company’s BCDR needs to be prepared to address the beginning, middle and the end of the crisis. For example, when the coronavirus shut down orders are lifted, what are the plans for a seamless reintegration of staff to the office? What are the plans for continuing to assure the safety of employees? How will you disinfect and assure social distancing once the office opens back up? It’s not like coronavirus will disappear simply because the states are re-opening; the risk of reinfection and another rise in infections is a possibility.

Do you need help creating your company’s business continuity and disaster recovery plan? Schedule a call with one of our crisis management experts today.

Also, download our BCDR checklist – it’s a great way to do a self-assessment of your current plan or to help you focus in on what needs to be in your plan.

We save our clients time, money and offer peace of mind. Don’t let your business become a statistic. How to avoid crisis management plan mistakes and help prepare crisis management plans.

WareGeeks Solutions help organizations transform technology, operations and service delivery to meet business challenges. We seek to understand your business needs and apply our in-depth knowledge of Data Protection, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) and Cyber Security whether in the cloud or your data center environments to drafting a roadmap for transformation.