Preparing for disasters: ideas from those in the trenches.

• Author: Stickel, Amy I.

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The scenarios that no one wants to think about--or in some cases, can even imagine--are the ones that, unfortunately, require the most forethought: 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, even something as "simple" as a burst pipe that floods the office of a small firm.

If some disaster hits your law firm, do you have a plan? A real, concrete, workable plan? If you don't, once you finish this article, you need to get to work on one--now.

"The marketing department is the one department that can truly understand the communication process in a disaster recovery plan," said Edward Poll, principal of LawBiz Management Company. "Marketers must be--and can be--the lead person."

For marketers, who have more than enough to do in their day-to-day roles, carving out the extra time to prepare for eventualities that may never happen can seem like an unnecessary burden, Poll said. But it is time well-spent.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Carol Todd Thomas and Ashley Bond could attest to that. At the time, Thomas was chief marketing officer at Jones, Walker, Waechter, Poitevent, Carrere & Denegre, L.L.P., and Bond was director of marketing at McGlinchey Stafford PLLC, both based in New Orleans. Even with solid plans in place at the time the hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast, both firms struggled--along with the rest of the Big Easy--to continue business as usual. But having that plan made all the difference, in the immediate aftermath and even in the days that followed.

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"People who prepared were far better off than those who didn't," said Thomas. In fact, when Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, the Jones Walker plan was still fresh in many employees' minds. That's because, as part of the firm's standard protocol, the disaster plan had been reviewed just months earlier--before the start of the hurricane season.

At the time, Thomas and others at the firm realized there were some holes in the public relations and marketing aspects, as well as with information technology. The firm also decided it was a good time to increase insurance coverage; a realization that was very wise, in retrospect. Like many disaster plans, Jones Walker's plan involved maintaining contact via cellphones. The firm also expected to able to locate clients and employees after the emergency.

Neither of those things worked as expected. "The cellphones wouldn't work and people ended up in places they didn't mean...