Why Legal Businesses Should Prioritise Resilience
lack of contingency plans around risks represents an ethical, financial, contractual and regulatory liability
We know legal businesses can no longer ignore business resilience. Disruptions carry very real operational and financial risks with substantial consequences.
Investing in resilience delivers major benefits.
We know that major disruptions knock key systems like IT infrastructure offline for extended periods, meaning that legal teams may be unable to deliver client work. And we know that for client-service driven businesses, even short outages can impact delivery along with client relationships and trust.
And there are many downstream consequential effects.
Ethical breaches or violations
Events like cyber attacks introduce potential for sensitive client data exposure if security measures fail. Lack of contingency plans around these risks represents an ethical liability for firms entrusted with highly confidential client information. Resilience planning accounts for these risks.
Contractual, regulatory, or insurance requirements
Firms must comply with contractual terms, laws, or insurance policies requiring a resilience plan or minimum level of business continuity capabilities. Failure to meet these standards has contractual, regulatory, and financial implications. Proper resilience planning helps meet externally imposed standards.?
Financial impact of disruptions
Outages and other continuity incidents often carry direct financial costs—from immediate revenue losses during downtime, to long-term productivity decline, to contractual penalties for service problems. Resilience planning aims to minimise these financial risks and their bottom-line impact.
Opportunity amid disruption
While many legal teams focus solely on risk mitigation, resilience also enables organisations to pursue an upside amid disruption. The operational flexibility inherent to resilience helps businesses innovate and capture new opportunities during industry changes. There's real strategic value to this.
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Best Practices for Prioritising Business Resilience
Firms looking to improve their resilience posture may want to focus on best practices, including:
Business impact analysis
This critical first step allows teams to identify their most important assets, operations, and staff members. Teams can then prioritise resilience efforts around protecting the critical people, information, systems, and supplies revealed through this analysis.
Continuity, operational recovery, and contingency plans
Using findings from the business impact analysis, teams can form plans to restore critical operations during disruptions. Testing these plans via tabletop exercises helps determine plan efficacy while familiarising staff with response procedures. Teams should also revisit and iterate on plans regularly.
Assessing risks from a resilience perspective
When evaluating business risks, legal teams should adopt a resilience-focused view examining risks not just from a likelihood and impact perspective but also based on how well positioned the company is to endure the risk. This approach may reveal areas where operations lack resilience to likely disruptions.
Reviewing insurance policies from a resilience standpoint
Insurance plays a major role in business resilience. However, subtle exclusions or coverage caps in policies can undermine expected recoverability. Conducting an insurance review is critical to confirming that policies match resilience needs in areas like business interruption and cyber incidents.
Prioritising resilience alongside competing initiatives
Resilience efforts often stall when other business priorities dominate time and budgets. Leaders should seek explicit commitment of resources toward resilience programs, ensuring initiatives receive appropriate prioritisation even when they compete for resources with pressing client work and operational issues.
unprecedented events have a way of disrupting even the most resilient operations
The Bottom Line
Industry norms suggest business disruptions are a rare or remote concern, but unprecedented events have a way of disrupting even the most resilient operations. By focusing on resilience practices today, legal teams position themselves to withstand the unexpected while protecting client service delivery as well as ethical and financial interests. Prioritising resilience not only manages risk but also creates strategic opportunities for innovation and growth during times of industry change. With so much at stake, legal businesses can’t afford to ignore this critical area.