Preparing for the worst: Don’t wait until disaster strikes to have an action plan

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For days after a fire destroyed Jen Hanna’s law office, she returned to the charred pit, hoping to meet the clients she could no longer contact.

“I had no way to reach them,” said Hanna, an immigration attorney and partner with Holevoet & Hanna LLC, Madison. “It was just sitting and waiting for them to show up at the burned out building, hoping that they called me, realizing something had gone drastically wrong.”

Four months into her solo practice, Hanna had amassed about 40 cases. But she lost them all in April 2012, when a fire destroyed her Madison office building, along with nearly a dozen other law firms. She also lost her paper calendar, where she scribbled the names, phone numbers and addresses of each new client.

“That was the really irreplaceable thing that I lost,” Hanna said, a hint of sorrow still detectable in her voice more than two years later. “My entire digital library was backed up, so I didn’t lose my templates and my letterhead. And CCAP records helped with recovering my attorney calendar.

“But I lost all of my equipment and all of my hard copy case files. The biggest thing was that I lost all of my handwritten notes. I hadn’t been backing those up at all.”

If it happened today, Hanna said, she would be prepared. She now backs up all documents online and scans in handwritten notes. She has a disaster plan and she reviews it every few months. She also has insurance.

Hanna had almost none of that when her entire office was buried under a pile of ash and rubble. She thought she had plenty of time to figure that all out.

“That’s human nature. Who assumes a fire will hit their office building?” said Thomas Watson, senior vice president of Wisconsin Lawyers Mutual Insurance Co. “But it is something to think about.”

Fear the worst

Unfortunately, Watson said, too few attorneys ever entertain the idea of how their practices might fall apart, let alone plan for the day it does.

Often, he said, that starts with failing to grasp the scope of a possible disaster.

“For purposes of business continuation planning, I think ‘disaster’ should be defined very broadly,” Watson said. “Anything that interrupts your ability to continue to provide legal services to your clients could be a disaster, large or small.”

That could mean a serious illness or injury, death of a partner or employee, a natural or environmental disaster, a technological breakdown, or an act of terrorism.

“Even something like a partner going on maternity leave or being in a serious car accident and laid up for six months or longer can cause serious harm,” Watson said. “Who takes over those files? The court system and the clients can’t wait for your firm to get back to full-strength. You have to be able to carry on seamlessly and cover court hearings or meet existing deadlines.”

There are ways to prepare, no matter how daunting the task may seem.

“If you think of nothing else, at least consider backing up your network or computer system,” Watson said. “Even if, as an attorney, you just don’t think that much about a fire or a flood or a tornado, at the very least think about making sure you minimize the risk of your system being compromised, crashing, being0- hacked into.”

That’s not necessarily easy, however, especially for solo attorneys.

But, Watson said, having digital backups can provide a crucial stepping stone toward damage control and, with any luck, rebuilding. Once the digital fail-safes are in place, it’s a matter of knowing what do and who to contact if disaster strikes, whenever and whatever form it takes.

Every bit helps

That strategy saved Irene Wren, another attorney whose office was destroyed in the 2012 Madison fire.

At the time, at least half of her files were stored in the cloud, and she had extensive insurance, including income continuation, which filled the gaps in the months after the fire.

But, like Hanna, Wren lost irreplaceable records, some on external hard drives, many others on paper.

“A lot of us had a paper practice more than an online practice, and we watched it all go up in flames,” recalled Wren, an immigration lawyer and partner with Wren & Gateways Law Group LLC, Madison. “I lost a lot of information that I could look in a folder and say, ‘Yes. For this kind of problem, you call this person or this number.’ I lost all that, and it that was quite devastating.”

Wren was in a new office within a month, but she underestimated the time it would take to fully recover from the fire. For her, that was nearly seven months, partly because she was dealing not only with fallout from the fire, but her aging parents also required care at a moment’s notice.

For Hanna, it took nearly three months to settle into a new office. But, despite her paper losses, she was back to work within three days, partly because of the online case management system she adopted before the fire, but also thanks to a local firm, which invited Hanna to set up shop in its office until she could find a permanent location.

“Being offered office space, having people bring by boxes of office supplies, it really helped me keep in perspective the nature of the disaster,” Hanna said. “I felt like the community had my back.”

Helping hands

Often, said Linda Albert, it’s that sense of community that makes the difference in a recovery.

“It’s hard to prepare emotionally for an event like this,” said Albert, a licensed clinical social worker and manager of the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Lawyer Assistance Program. “It’s difficult, because for most of us our basic assumptions about life are we are not going to have this type of event occur. And that’s what makes it traumatic.”

That’s why Albert has a team of 150 volunteers, mostly attorneys and judges, who have been there and done that, whether it’s a cancer diagnosis or a fire.

“We activate our volunteers to go be with that person, someone who has experienced that same type of trauma,” Albert said. “They can immediately identify with where that person is at, what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking.

“It can inspire hope. It instills that internal motivation.”

It helps to feel understood, she said.

“I think it is so important after an event like this for people to be validated on how hard this is,” Albert said. “And that it is usual and expected to feel defeated and angry and wonder if you even want to rebuild.”

For Hanna and Wren, that was never a question. But both admitted there were times, even months after they were back to “normal,” when they wondered when the fallout from the fire would really end.

At those times, Hanna said, she tried to appreciate what she had learned.

“Even after having been through a disaster, you can get complacent,” she admitted. “You think, ‘Lightning never strikes twice. It’s not going to happen to me again.’ So, I try to be vigilant. I try to reassess every few months … it requires constant self-monitoring.”