From The Daily Record March 2014
Legal Loop: Why not disaster-proof your law firm today?
“According the American Bar Association’s 2013 Legal Technology Survey results, 58 percent of lawyers surveyed cited security concerns as the top reason that prevented them from using cloud computing in their law practices.
The problem is, the current file storage arrangement and IT set up of most law firms is anything but secure. Case in point — a Pennsylvania law office that literally went up in smoke last month, when the building in which their firm was located was destroyed in a fire.
As reported in the ABA Journal article about the fire, the building and everything inside of it was destroyed: “(T)hey felt fortunate there was no loss of life and only physical damage to cope with. However, at least one of the buildings appears likely to be a total loss, following a roof collapse. Inside were … documents and legal work that (would) have to be re-created.”
In other words, the firm apparently had no offsite backup for their client files and each and every file would need to be re-created from scratch. Unfortunately, this firm discovered the hard way that the failure to properly back up a law firm’s files offsite in digital format can lead to disastrous results.
Also reported last month by the ABA Journal was the story of another law firm that learned of the perils of failing to have an adequate backup plan. In this case, a North Carolina law firm stored its data on its computers’ hard drives. But, as explained in the article, a computer virus completely disabled the firm’s computers, making all of its files inaccessible: “Attorney Paul Goodson and his staff were unable to access his Charlotte, N.C., law firm’s files after they were locked up by a computer virus … Like other businesses in the city, the firm was targeted via email. Once an attachment was opened, the Crypto Locker virus took over. Thousands of documents stored on his computer were made inaccessible.”