Allen & Overy may have lost up to 170,000 documents in the Iron Mountain warehouse fire - but because it digitises everything, the firm is confident it has avoided disaster.



The fire at the Iron Mountain document storage facility in London on 12 July that has reportedly affected Allen & Overy (A&O) and other major law firms has thrown up a valuable lesson in disaster recovery.



A&O was metaphorically firefighting last week as the fire brigade did the real thing in east London, playing down the impact of the loss of a reported 170,000 documents.



That figure was an outside estimation, said Joe Greenan, global head of safety and security for A&O, that was likely to be lower in reality, but probably 'not far south of that'. The word that Mr Greenan and his colleague, Dave Burwell, the firm's chief information officer, have a problem with is 'lost'.



'For every contractual document that's there at Iron Mountain, as long as it's not more than nine years old, we're confident we have a digital copy stored on our document management library,' said Mr Burwell.



The possible loss of so many documents can teach valuable lessons to law firms of any size: the importance of routine scanning of all documents, electronic document storage, efficient backing up and the remote storage of multiple digital copies of documents. Every time any document comes into A&O, it is scanned and stored in at least two separate places, said Mr Burwell, before the fee-earner sees it.



This kind of routine digitisation of in-bound documents started at A&O nine years ago, which at the time might have seemed a Draconian step to take in document management. But Mr Greenan and Mr Burwell are now able to sit in an office and say 'there's no possibility that any document that's an original document would not be available' because of the Iron Mountain fire, thanks to the rigorous application of IT and process to document management.



The connection between document management and disaster recovery is obvious in IT terms: once you have the first worked out, the second becomes a much more manageable task.



'You'll find I think that still many law firms are not retaining e-mails securely,' warned Mr Burwell. 'Some of them are still trying to print them off, but that's an incomplete process.'



And, though even he would admit that getting every fee-earner to file every e-mail correctly is an uphill struggle, Mr Burwell is confident that A&O is getting close.



Research in 2005 by the Law Society for the Software Solutions guide found 36% of firms polled said they had a full documented disaster recovery plan in place, and another 29% said they have a 'basic plan in place'. But disaster recovery is not just about IT, and having a disaster recovery document does not mean the end of the road has been reached, cautioned Mr Greenan.



'There's a subtle difference between a document and a plan,' he told the Gazette. 'I think what most people have is a document, when what they actually believe they have is a plan, but it's only really when you've tested it that it becomes a plan.'



Mr Burwell agrees that testing what your firm has determined to be a plan is vital. He and Mr Greenan run through dummy disaster scenarios four times a year, he said, to be sure the firm's plan is achievable.



'If you don't test these things and knock the bugs out of them over and over again, and if it doesn't become automatic to people on the ground what they have to do when disaster strikes, they'll be running round like headless chickens,' he said, 'and you'll be in trouble.'



Rupert White