Maybe you’ve had this experience before: An important document is misplaced or several pages of a brief are incorrectly saved and disappear from the file. It’s frustrating to say the least, but imagine something far more disastrous.
What if all of your data—everything that you store electronically at your firm—vanished in a flash?
The Risk of Complete Data Loss
Total loss of your firm’s data could come from a myriad of sources. There could be a hardware malfunction, or a disaster such as a flood or a fire could impact the entire building. More insidious problems like an infection from a computer virus, or ransomware, a type of malware that encrypts your data and locks you out of it, could strike.
While such possibilities may sound alarmist, statistics tell a different story. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) estimated that, in the last decade, 1.7 billion people have experienced a natural disaster, and those disasters cost a hefty $1.4 trillion in damage. A recent study from EMC states that data loss and downtime costs companies a total of $1.7 trillion each year.
The Aftermath
Of course, some data would be recoverable after a disaster, but the time, expense, stress, and hassle involved in retrieving it would be tremendous. Any open cases would most likely need additional time to resolve and, depending on the type of data loss your firm experiences, all current and past clients may need to be notified of the breach. At the very least, it’s likely that a number of clients would take their legal needs elsewhere.
What if all of your client’s trial data was lost, would your firm survive?
The truth is, not many do, and those that manage to hang in there can be tied up in lawsuits of their own for years, not to mention the bad press and negative impact in reputation.
Luckily, a good disaster recovery plan that utilizes both on- and off-site cloud backup can protect your firm from the majority of risk factors.
Contact our customer service professionals to learn how we can help you build a disaster recovery plan that will protect your firm’s future.
