We have an established Emergency Preparedness Program and organizational structure that includes people, resources, and plans at the firm and local office levels.

We apply a project management approach for managing the Emergency Preparedness Program and engage employees in planning and awareness efforts throughout the year to keep preparedness "top of mind."

Our personnel—whether in the office or at home—can access comprehensive information regarding building and city plans, business continuity plans, disaster recovery plans, and emergency procedures on our intranet.

We have documented infrastructure and technology disaster recovery procedures, and IT and business leads work together to regularly review, validate, and refresh plans for critical applications—both individually and collectively.

Our formal Disaster Recovery (DR) plan identifies Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) for each of our applications and processes.

We have developed and implemented DR solutions to meet these objectives. Our DR site, located in Eagan, Minnesota, has the hardware necessary to support the applications critical to continuing business in the event of an emergency.

Our IT team uses database log shipping and file mirroring techniques to maintain updated duplicates of our clients' critical information.

Our global IT team is trained to handle these emergencies and regularly tests our DR procedures. Our professional practices and our data systems' recovery practices are specifically designed to protect client documents, information, and work product.

And all of our case management, document management, knowledge management, financial systems, and human resource systems are all integrated into our DR plan. Our DR plan also includes communication recovery and redundancy, including voice and fax calls, an e-mail continuity service and pin-to-pin Blackberry communications.

We have partnered with a number of strategic providers, to maintain a redundant IT co-location site, to have temporary workspace on standby—if needed—in the event of an operational interruption, and to offer alternative communication channels when normal phone and/or email services are not available.

Lawyers and support staff are ready to work remotely as needed—be it at another office or at the client site—to ensure business demands are met in a timely and professional manner.