Crisis Management for Legal Teams: Ensuring Business Continuity During Disaster

A phone call at 3 a.m. on a Friday morning wakes you up — it’s your CEO telling you there’s been a fire at the office. You didn’t see it coming — no one did. And the burning question is: Do you have a crisis management plan to help keep the business going?

Threatening, destructive, and disruptive events happen all the time. Natural disasters, scandals, financial collapse, data breaches — even a global pandemic. 

The goal isn’t to obsess over every horrific scenario. But in a world of calamity, it’s important that in-house legal forms a crisis management team and a plan that outlines what to do when things go wrong for your organization. More than this, having the tools and technology that help mitigate and even prevent future crises before they happen is key.

What is crisis management?

Crisis management is the process of mitigating or preventing crises that a business entity might face, usually through policies, plans, and processes.

Crises can include natural disasters (fire, earthquake, volcanic eruption), financial issues, or data breach incidents. To maintain the flow of business no matter what comes your way, your team can facilitate putting crisis management plans in place to ensure business continuity.

Preparing a crisis management plan

A crisis management plan can help companies cover their bases, protect their neck (and reputation), mitigate risk, and limit disruption to the business.

Key parts of a crisis management plan are:

Assembling a crisis management team 

This is usually a cross-functional effort in which various team members are responsible for creating the plan and running point in the event of a disaster. 

Understanding your current risk profile

All risk isn’t created equal. Complete regular risk audits so  you know what issues are likely to trip you up. This information will help you determine how to focus and create your crisis plan.

Creating a response plan

The crisis management team creates policies and procedures that guide the organization through crisis responses. For example, the plan should include information on how to communicate the crisis to internal and external clients, outline reporting obligations, and prevent disruption to customer service.

Leveraging legal technology

Managing a crisis manually is its own crisis. Use technology to find and deliver time-sensitive information to customers, stakeholders, and regulators. You can also set up reports to keep an eye on risk markers like force majeure termination and when immediate notification of a data breach is required. 

Learning from your mistakes

Is the crisis avoidable in the future? What measures can you put in place to further mitigate risk? It’s important that after the storm has cleared, the crisis management team reviews the incident and optimizes its plan according to what they learned. 

Benefits of crisis management

Crisis management has tons of benefits for your business and is generally a good practice. Some benefits include:

Maintaining trust among your customer base

Customers feel like they’re in good hands when a company swiftly and efficiently responds to crises. Crisis management helps you protect your company’s reputation and bolsters customer faith in you.

Keeping business going

A crisis can bring business to a screeching halt. Trying to manage the crisis ad hoc takes time from employee tasks. Good crisis management assigns a responsible team and maps out steps for handling it, allowing the business to continue generating revenue as it rides out the storm.

Providing peace of mind

You don’t have to worry that the CEO will wake you up out of the little sleep you managed to get to inform you of a disaster. You can rest assured knowing the business is protected because of how carefully you’ve considered and implemented a crisis management plan.

Preventing crises before they happen

Leveraging a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution like LinkSquares gives your team the power to get ahead of a potential crisis. For example, in the face of new data privacy regulation, access all your executed agreements in our contract repository, then use Smart Values to extract key contract data and make proactive changes to your terms.

Takeaways

Disaster will almost always catch you off guard, but it doesn’t have to catch you unprepared. Now more than ever, it’s essential for teams to build a crisis management plan to control your controllables in the event of financial collapse or a data breach. CLM technology can help your legal team manage risk and come out on the other side of a crisis in one piece. Work with your team on formulating a plan and adopting technology that gives your business the best chance of success.