Stories about New Orleans lawyers severely affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita prompted Rhode Island Bar Association President Thomas Lyons to make emergency preparedness part of his agenda upon taking office last month.
“It knocked some lawyers completely out of the field,” Lyons said. In Rhode Island, he wants to eliminate that from the realm of possibility.
Though the state has not recently experienced such a large-scale disaster, even smaller disruptions can affect progress in important cases, he said. For example, flooding of a local law office slowed progression of The Station fire cases for three weeks.
“Our goal is to come up with some sort of plan,” said Michael St. Pierre, chairman of the association’s emergency preparedness committee and principal of Revens, Revens & St. Pierre in Warwick. “We want to provide something worthwhile for our members, make them start thinking about [emergency preparedness].”
Protecting client files is one of the most important tasks, he said. “Clients’ records are sacred.” The obvious ways to protect the files are to scan them electronically and store the disks with the data off site. Or they could be copied the old fashioned way – on paper – and also taken to an off-site location.
“It’s a daunting task,” said Cristine McBurney, principal of McBurney Law Services in Pawtucket. “But when you look at the alternative, that time will have been well spent.”
McBurney knows firsthand what can happen to a law firm when disaster strikes. In 1993, a fire destroyed her entire office building, down to the foundation, killing one firefighter.
“The only files to survive were the wills, copies of wills, in [fireproof] cabinets,” she said.
After the fire, McBurney remembers rummaging through boxes filled with smoke and charred paper with her staff. They salvaged what they could and spent days putting their heads together to “figure out what we had lost.”
The staff worked at a warehouse owned by McBurney’s brother, she said. “We had so many cases we lost track of.”
Based on her experience, McBurney advocates that firms share non-case sensitive files after a disaster, and she will recommend that the committee add that goal to its list of ways to prepare for an emergency situation.
Committee member and lawyer John Barylick said that when a flood damaged his law firm in 2004, it “raised our awareness of the importance of computer backup” and protection of client files. The flood was caused by a frozen pipe on the fourth floor that burst and gushed throughout the building.
Though Providence-based Wistow & Barylick didn’t lose any client files “that couldn’t be dried out and recovered,” Barylick said it did lose computer equipment.
Now the firm has a “rigorous backup protocol,” he said, backing up computers nightly and storing the backups off site.
From the flood, Barylick learned the importance of storing hard files in secure places, as opposed to vulnerable places, such as a basement. But even that might not matter in the event of a catastrophe.
“You can only prepare for reasonable contingencies,” he said. “Given a perfect storm, a firm can cease to exist.”
“It only takes one hurricane to give you a very bad day,” Federal Emergency Management Agency Director David Paulison said Tuesday, when the U.S. forecast for this season was downgraded to nine hurricanes, four of them major.
Lyons said the New Orleans law firms that did survive had emergency plans directing employees to meet somewhere in another city where they could continue working.“I think a lot of the larger firms had something set up already,” he said, while many smaller firms did not – and that’s why it’s important for Rhode Island’s lawyers, many of whom practice at small firms, to have contingency plans.
In addition to backing up computer files and storing copies of client files off site, Lyons said it’s important to compile a list of contact numbers, especially cell phone numbers, of all employees and to conduct an inventory of office equipment.
“What I want to do is alert people to the possibility of a large-scale or small-scale emergency,” he said. “And to [the need for] having a plan.”
