Who this is for. Partners and practice managers who want a short written plan for the outages a law firm actually meets. Our page on keeping your firm working covers prevention and response times. This guide is about what the firm itself does while something is down.
Boundaries. General information, not legal advice. Decisions about court deadlines, clients and the other side remain with the responsible practitioner.
1. Why write it down
During an outage, people decide quickly with half the facts. A short plan agreed in a calm week answers the questions that otherwise eat the first hour: who decides, who calls whom, where people work, and what can wait. A two-page plan that people have read is worth more than a thick folder nobody opens.
The four scenarios below are common for firms of 10 to 150 people. Each has a first fifteen minutes and a list of things to settle beforehand.
2. Office internet drops on a filing day
A document has to be filed electronically by 4pm, and the office connection goes down at 1pm.
In the first fifteen minutes
- Check whether several people are affected, to confirm it is the connection and not one device.
- Report it to your IT provider so the fault is logged with the internet provider. For our clients, we hold the account details and make that call.
- The person responsible for the filing moves to a working connection straight away: a phone hotspot, another office or home. Don't wait for a repair estimate.
Agree in advance
- which staff have phones with enough hotspot data for a large upload;
- that court and registry portal accounts, and the MFA method each uses, work from a laptop outside the office, tested before the day;
- a buffer: filings due today are ready by the morning where that is practical;
- whether a second internet connection is worth its cost for the firm.
3. A laptop fails on the morning of a hearing
A lawyer's laptop won't start an hour before they leave for court.
In the first fifteen minutes
- Call the help desk. For our clients, one person unable to work gets a response within 30 minutes, and most fixes are remote.
- If it can't be fixed in time, the lawyer signs in on a spare managed laptop. Files in OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams are there once they sign in.
- With no spare, a colleague's managed laptop, with the lawyer signing in under their own account, is safer than a personal device.
Agree in advance
- at least one spare laptop, charged and up to date;
- files needed at a hearing kept available offline on the laptop. OneDrive Files On-Demand can mark a folder as always available, which keeps the contents on the device instead of online-only;
- a second way for each lawyer to complete MFA, in case the phone is what fails;
- the hearing materials in a form a second device can open, in line with the firm's own practice for court documents.
A permanent replacement can be shipped straight to the lawyer and set itself up through Windows Autopilot, so nobody has to visit the office to configure it.
4. Microsoft 365 or another cloud service is disrupted
Email stops arriving or Teams won't connect, and it isn't only your firm.
In the first fifteen minutes
- Your IT provider checks the Service health page in the Microsoft 365 admin center, which lists the incidents and advisories Microsoft is working on. If the admin center itself can't be reached, Microsoft points to a separate service status page.
- Tell staff what is known, what still works and when the next update will come, using a channel that doesn't depend on the affected service, such as a text message group.
- List any deadline today that depends on the affected service, and let the responsible lawyer decide on an alternative within the firm's normal rules for that matter.
Agree in advance
- a staff contact list kept outside Microsoft 365, printed or on phones;
- who may tell clients or the other side about a delay, and what they may say;
- a list of critical dates for the coming week, kept somewhere that still works during an outage.
5. The practice system vendor has an outage
The practice management system is hosted by its vendor and is unavailable. Nobody can open matters or record time.
In the first fifteen minutes
- Your IT provider confirms the fault is the vendor's and not your network or sign-in, then logs it. For our clients, we hold the vendor account details, make that call and keep chasing until it is resolved.
- Staff switch to a simple fallback: time noted in a spreadsheet or on paper for later entry, and documents saved to an agreed temporary location in SharePoint for filing afterwards.
- Anything involving trust money waits for the system or follows the firm's documented manual procedure. Nobody improvises.
Agree in advance
- where the vendor posts outage notices, and who at the firm receives them;
- a regular export of critical dates and key contacts kept outside the practice system;
- the temporary save location and a naming rule, so filing afterwards is quick;
- what the vendor's contract says about availability and restores, kept on file.
6. Roles
Name a person and a deputy for each role. Outages tend to arrive when the obvious person is in court.
| Role | What they do | Usually |
|---|---|---|
| Decision-maker | Declares an outage, decides whether people work elsewhere, approves messages to clients | A partner |
| Coordinator | Keeps the list of affected deadlines and updates staff at set times | The practice manager |
| IT contact | Works with the IT provider on the cause and the expected fix | An internal IT person or the practice manager |
| Matter owners | Decide what each deadline needs, including any contact with the court or the other side | The responsible lawyer for each matter |
| Vendor contact | Logs and chases the fault with the vendor | The IT provider, where it holds the vendor relationship |
7. What to agree with your IT provider and vendors
- 7.1Response times in writing. How fast they respond when a team or one person can't work, and what happens outside office hours. Ours are on the uptime page.
- 7.2Who calls the vendors. Whether the IT provider holds the account details for internet, phones and the practice system, and is authorised to log faults.
- 7.3Backups and restores. What is backed up, where, how restores are tested, and when the last test happened. See backup and business continuity.
- 7.4Spare equipment. Who keeps spare laptops, and how quickly a replacement can reach a lawyer.
- 7.5A contact list that works offline. Staff, IT provider, vendors and the internet provider, printed and on phones.
8. Testing the plan
Once a year, spend half an hour walking through one scenario with the people named above. Choose a realistic day, such as a Tuesday with two filings and a settlement, and talk through what each person would do. Note what was unclear and fix the plan. Do it again when the firm moves office, changes IT provider or changes practice system.
9. Where we fit
Monitoring, scheduled patching, Microsoft 365 backup with restore tests, vendor liaison and our published response times are all part of the monthly fee. Keeping your firm working explains that side. Writing or reviewing a continuity plan is the kind of project we scope with you in the quarterly roadmap.
10. Sources
The Microsoft features described in this guide were checked against these Microsoft Learn pages. Anything we could not confirm there has been left out.
- How to check Microsoft 365 service health Microsoft Learn
- Query and set Files On-Demand states in Windows Microsoft Learn