[ by Larry Goldfarb ]

What does the lower Manhattan legal community do when its offices are shuttered and power and logistics are scarce, they adapt.  They certainly can't take a week off.  They had to file briefs in courts around the country, respond to clients overseas, and continue to hammer down time-sensitive deals.

So how did they get it done?  Mostly, lawyers stayed out of lower Manhattan and worked from home, though that wasn’t a strategy that everyone could employ.  "For those of us who live on the Upper East Side and just had our lights flicker briefly Monday night, it wasn’t really a problem," said Charles Platt, the partner in charge of WilmerHale’s New York office, located at 7 World Trade Center, which has been without power all week.  "But for lawyers in suburban New Jersey whose houses were damaged or ruined by flooding, working from home hasn’t always been easy."

That lawyers with cell phone service and an internet connection could get their work done from home owes in large part to the fact that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, law firms got serious about disaster preparedness.  They bought fleets of backup servers and placed them in places like Wheeling, WV., and Dayton, Ohio.  They drew up contingency plans in the event that an office had to close for days or weeks. And many firms in lower Manhattan took up space in Midtown Manhattan that they could use in a pinch.

The preparations paid off.  "Even post-[Hurricane] Irene, we continued to tweak things to make sure we wouldn’t have issues," said the head of one large law firm headquartered downtown.  "Our servers are all backed up outside the city, and everything during Sandy worked really pretty seamlessly."  Perhaps the biggest challenge for lawyers: letting clients know how they could be reached, given that phones were dead throughout much of lower Manhattan.

Some firms, like Sullivan, posted lengthy messages to clients and others on their websites. Generally, however, lawyers said they kept in close contact with clients all week via e-mail or cell phone.  "Our clients were unfailingly sympathetic," said WilmerHale’s Mr. Platt.  "And many were in similar circumstances."  Rodgin Cohen, the legendary banking lawyer and senior chairman of  Sullivan & Cromwell, conceded that there were a few headaches early in the week for the firm, located at 125 Broad St. in lower Manhattan.  "It was a rocky first day,” he said. “I’m not going to say our systems worked seamlessly, because they didn’t. But they did work sufficiently."  According to Mr. Cohen, things improved over the course of the week.

For more information, please read [WSJ, 11/2].