Neither would your firm's server.

If your law office crumbled to the ground, would you know what to do? It's a coin toss, according to a recent American Bar Association study. The 2006 Legal Technology Survey Report found that only 54 percent of lawyers claim to have a disaster recovery plan in place. Another 25 percent of lawyers said they had no idea whether they had one or not.

And that's not good.

"Disaster recovery takes a long time to occur and if you don't have a business continuity plan, you can get to a point where you have no business. You'll have no customers and your employees will find jobs elsewhere," said Mike Semel, vice president of Business Continuity and Compliance Services.

Semel isn't just a local tech guy out looking to scare up some business. He's a disaster recovery and continuity super-expert. He is one of only 2,500 certified business continuity specialists in the world.

But what exactly is he talking about? Disaster recovery most people understand. Your business facility, for one reason or another, has been annihilated and you've got to pick up the pieces and move on. But what's all this continuity plan stuff?

It's the disaster prep plan. It's the recovery bible that's going to get your firm back up and running at, if not full speed, at least some speed.

After Hurricane Katrina, the affected legal communities lost virtually all records. The courts, a year later, are still virtually inoperable. Property records are gone forever. Even in firms that didn't lose everything (one had employees carry heavy servers down 28 flights of stairs to recover data) some still couldn't access the information because the tech experts with all the passwords had disappeared.

And it could happen anywhere.

It's not exactly an image that bolsters client confidence. It's Semel's job to make sure that doesn't happen. He goes into businesses, assesses and evaluates every possible threat — from flooding to toxic train wrecks to explosions in the warehouse next door — and formulates a backup plan. Data is saved in two secure backup locations (one in a private bank vault in his office here and another in Los Angeles) at the end of every day. You decide who needs to be on the ground hours after, days after and months after a disaster and several ways to contact them in the aftermath.

In preparing for the worst, people often overlook common problems. Storing data on tapes in a bank vault downtown works fine if your building burns down and your IT guy with all the passwords wasn't inside, but what if all of downtown is wiped out? What if the IT is in the hospital? Then there's the phone lines, staffing, and telecommuting to be worked out.

These are things you have to think about ahead of time if you want your firm to survive the worst.

"People often think that if something happens, they'll call someone in to pick up the pieces and they'll be up and running at full capacity the next day," Semel said. "A lot of businesses don't realize how difficult it is to pull that off."

It's also expensive.

A small firm could easily lose $35,000 to $40,000 a day after a fire guts its office. Without a strong emergency plan, it can take weeks to get the office back up and running on a basic level. Think of that, and suddenly the high cost (up to a $1 million in some cases) of backing up the system doesn't seem quite so steep.

The Federal government occasionally publishes disaster planning checklists, but they only cover the very basics and are susceptible to errors, Semel said.

"It makes me very nervous when the Federal government publishes free business continuity plans. That's good, but if your risk assessment is off, your whole plan is junk," he said.