Is your firm Ready(.gov)?

In my continuing effort to provide practical tips, I provide some tips on disaster readiness. A few years ago, in California, disaster readiness meant earthquakes and sometimes flooding. Today, it includes terrorist attacks. So, here are some tips to make sure you are prepared for the next disaster.

1. Keep a list of all employees home numbers, email addresses, cell phones, and emergency contact people. This should be distributed to everyone in the office and taken home. You never know when you might need to reach someone at home, or someone's emergency contact, so have this information with you.
2. If the office is closed, have a pre-set location where you should go. It could be someone's house, or higher ground, or a big store. Just make sure you have a meeting location.
3. Make sure you have someone or several people designated to call 911 in the event of an emergency. This will ensure that 911 is called.
4. Provide training on CPR for your employees. You may also want to consider a portable defibrillator. Heck, isn't a few hundred dollars worth saving someone's life?
5. Keep a fire proof safe on premises. You may have some things that need to be kept safe - including client property.
6. Make sure you have some written plan for the firm in case something happens to you. For a solo, you might want your spouse to have the plan. But, you should also consider having a friend who is an attorney having a copy of the plan as well. You may need a bar member to wrap some things up for you.
7. BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP. Nuff said?
8. Since #7 was skimpy, keep a copy of your back up off site. Its redundancy planning and it makes sense.
9. Keep a written disaster plan and give it to each employee. Make sure everyone knows what to do in case of an emergency.

And last, but not least.............drum roll please.............(only because you were trying to figure out how this relates to the title)....................

     10.  Go to www.ready.gov and read through it. It has great information on disaster preparednes. It is well worth a 30 minute read.

I hope these steps remind you that we all need to prepare for a disaster.

------Jonathan