Crisis management planning – the important role of legal counsel in effective
When a crisis hits your business, it can escalate quickly. This could put your financial stability, brand and reputation, people, suppliers, customers, and shareholders into jeopardy, as well as opening your organisation up to significant legal and regulatory risks.
Much attention is paid to management of a crisis once it has occurred. However, it’s far better to invest time and effort into how a potential crisis can be avoided or mitigated. As the saying goes – “prevention is better than cure”.
A well-structured plan, developed with your legal counsel, is the best way to ensure a swift and effective response, along with a strategic approach to the management of unforeseen events that could harm your business.
Sound obvious – but the recent Economist Impact survey highlighted a clear need for stronger collaborative alliances between organisations, their law firms, and other expert advisors to avoid the preventable, and overcome the unavoidable.
Five key considerations for effective crisis management planning
Legal risk assessment and regulatory due diligence: Review existing contracts, policies and procedures to identify out of date practices or gaps which could expose legal issues, liabilities or compliance failings and trigger a crisis event. Likewise ensure your business adheres to all relevant legislative and regulatory duties including data privacy laws, reporting requirements, and industry-specific regulations.
Supply chain exposures: Review supply chain relationships and contracts to identify areas of risk exposure and potential problems, which could escalate into existential events that threaten the stability of your business and its ability to trade.
Training and communication: Put in place a clear communication strategy (both external and internal) to ensure consistent and accurate messaging both before, during and after a crisis has occurred, as well as how information will be shared and who will take responsibility for communicating with different stakeholder groups. This should include handling media requests. Additionally ensure all members of staff have undertaken up-to-date training on how to prevent, mitigate and respond to a crisis.
Scenario planning: It is wise to identify every potential crisis scenario your business could be exposed to – for example cyber-attacks, data breaches, natural disasters, fire, power outages, theft, accident, injury and other potential events. It is then important to develop specific protocols and procedures for how your business would respond to each scenario – including communication, legal support, incident management, corporation with external agencies etc.
Post event review and lessons: Put in place the right processes, lines of responsibility and legal partnerships to handle potential investigations or inquiries by external agencies and regulatory bodies. Likewise, ensure you have protocols for evaluating crisis response, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing revisions to crisis management plans.
Why is legal counsel so important to effective crisis planning?
Shifting societal expectations, geo-political and economic uncertainty, the rising incidence cybercrime, and an increasingly complex legal and regulatory landscape all serve to make effective crisis management planning more critical than ever.
Expert legal counsel is your best line defence when it comes to pre-empting potential crisis events before they arise, building financial, legal and reputational resilience, and planning for future challenges in the most strategic way possible.
Leverets has extensive experience in developing robust crisis management plans on behalf of large enterprises and SMEs.
We can work with your business to help create the right crisis management plan for your unique needs. This may include audits of existing policies and procedures, assessment of vulnerabilities, ensuring adherence with relevant legislative and regulatory requirements, implementing best-in-class practices, and evaluating training needs so your people are ready to act in the event an of a crisis.
Get in touch today.
