Creating a Legal Event Team

Yet, even though legal events are often as unavoidable an eventuality as those mentioned above, and at least as disruptive as any of those events, most organizations fail to prepare and plan for legal events until the organization is knee-deep in the event and scrambling to react. That remains true, even though in many businesses today it is not if, but when, corporate counsel will need to guide the organization through a legal event. Organizations are well advised to think about and prepare for legal events in advance, and to take an approach similar to that used to address other processes.

The most effective action you can take to prepare your organization is to create a Legal Event Team that has the mandate to prepare for legal events, and to act when a legal event occurs or might occur. The primary purpose of a business continuity plan, for example, is to help ensure that an organization can quickly recover from a business interruption event, minimizing losses to employee productivity, revenue generation, shareholder value, and other operations. A Legal Event Team serves a nearly identical primary purpose: to help ensure that a legal event is handled in an orderly fashion, with as little impact to operations, costs, and employee productivity as possible.