This past week Texas experienced the consequences of what is being called a one-in-a hundred years winter storm. And in this week’s conversation, we review what lessons we learned from the event and what opportunities are emerging out of it.
Liel explains what measures helped Nanato Media remain operational and swiftly make decisions regarding their clients’ campaigns in light of the Texas winter storm events, from keeping the lights on, remote teams, and campaign strategy adjustments
As Texas is coming out of this darkness, the question if this blackout will be the new BP oil spill emerges.
Grace shares how Hilliard Martinez Gonzales LLP and Brent Coon & Associates, with the expertise of X-Social Media, are laying the ground for what could become the next big class action.
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Liel: [00:00:00] Last week, a brutal winter storm has battered large parts of the central and southern United States, forcing millions of people to search for the basics for survival. I’m Liel Levy, co-founder of Nanato Media, and this is in Camera, a podcast where we kindly ask you to please visit our episode notes and donate to help our communities in need.
Liel: [00:00:51] Welcome to In Camera Podcast, Private Legal Marketing Conversations, Grace, how are you today?
Liel: [00:00:58] February 19? 19 is it Grace?
Grace: [00:01:03] It is.
Liel: [00:01:03] I lost the entire sense of time. I feel that from the last time we’ve talked to the today, I’ve gone through an entire period of like the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks get completely left out for years. Was it years right? In a deserted island. That’s exactly how I feel today after what we’ve gone through here in Texas this past week. But first, how are you today?
Grace: [00:01:35] I am doing just fine. I was more worried about you, considering you were the one in Texas, not me.
Liel: [00:01:42] Well, Grace. Thank you. I appreciate that. And you know, your good vibes always with me throughout the mess. But I think, you know, as we were just having a brief conversation offline, there’s a lot of layers that can be unfold here when it comes down to the incidents that we’ve just left now here in Texas, right. There is a sign of how we as an agency were able to keep up our operations uninterrupted during this time. Right. Which is super interesting to learn from because we’ve talked a lot about contingency plans here and crisis plans and all of those things. And it’s not really every single day or month or sometimes years that go by without you actually having to go down to them. But when you do, you know, one of the things we always say is now this is the time to actually revisit those documents and see how can they be improved for when the next time comes. I think it’s very easy for us, and particularly now as we’re starting to move out of this like our minds already start to forget very quickly, super quickly, how challenging some of these aspects were. And while we were prepared to face some of the challenges that we were faced off. There were some others that actually had a more significant impact than probably we initially anticipated. So for those who are in Texas right now, just like me, this is actually the time that you need to take all of your documents and plans and revisit. Were we prepared enough? What do we need to do the next time, Grace? And so I can share with you a Grace that operationally, we actually were able to sustain everything in place. We did not lose access to any of the main platforms that we operate, all of our operations from the other great advantage that we have. And this is another one of those things that I mean, businesses need to start building and accounting for as a way of also being better prepared for when things happen. Is the advantages of having part of your team remote, but not just remote at home, remote in different locations. Right. Because part of our team are not actually based here in Texas. And the fact that they were unaffected entirely by these who actually gave us great support for those who were actually struggling a bit more due to shortage of power, due to shortage of ability to leave our locations and so forth and so on. And so that’s another great element. And one of the reasons why, you know, as we are adapting to this new reality post-covid, we may want to consider, you know, what the risk actually an advantage on not having the entire organization under the same roof, under the same location, because when things like this happen, then you have other areas of your team that are basically potentially untouched. Right. Particularly when we’re talking about natural disasters. Right. And you know very well this.
Grace: [00:04:46] Yes, that’s what I actually wanted to ask you. That question is so you seemed very prepared in terms of like being able to keep your stuff running at the very least. Right. In terms of that type of thing, your business continuity, which is what they call them.
Liel: [00:04:59] The business business continuity. Correct.
Liel: [00:05:01] And, you know, and great business continuity plans that include what they call disaster recovery. I used to work in retail and you used to work in customer service in hotels. So you know everything when it comes to the evacuation plans and kind of how all that stuff is a hundred percent. Right, as part of your plan. So when you do, you have all of your. I’d say everything that you do. Is that online? Would you say just about everything? Because, you know, some people like they might have a CRM that has a server that’s located inside of their office or they mean, you know, they might not have like a what they call, you know, a server location that is kind of tornado proof, hurricane proof and all of that. So because they have physical hardware and software on that location, so everything you do is online.
Liel: [00:05:47] One hundred percent. We’re we’re 100 percent on the cloud. We have backups that are actual, physical, and they are here in Austin, Texas, but there is really not one piece of data or file that we cannot access cloud-based. So that was really to our advantage. And the other thing is that we are a lean operation in the sense that we do not handle a lot of very, very heavy files. Right. But even all of our video files and everything, all of our content here at In Camera that we record every single week, everything is still available on the cloud, which would be the heavier or most robust files that require more band. But it’s still all available. And I’ll tell you what, it’s not cheap to have all of these massive data on the cloud, but one hundred percent pays off when these kind of situations happen because you really don’t know where things are going to get hit. And so I think going back to all of our conversations here, it pays off to have your physical backup, but also have your cloud backup right with you. If one or two, if one or the other gets compromised. And yeah. So listen, first, it was very straightforward, right? It was keep ourselves online so we can actually continue communicating with the rest of the team, but most importantly, to continue our operations in handling our clients campaigns unaffected. Right. And one of the things is we actually did, right, for our clients here in Texas is we actually evaluated that the circumstances of each market to really understand is it worth the push now harder with the campaigns or is it worth our while to cut out a little bit in some aspects? Right.
Liel: [00:07:46] And in some cases, it was not a flat formula. It’s not that we just kind of like pull the breaks on everyone or we actually invested heavily on everyone. I can give you an example. Some of our TV campaigns, actually, all of our TV campaigns that we were currently running in Texas, we stopped them. Why? Because if we are in a market in a circumstance where local authorities are encouraging the people not to use TVs in order to save electricity, you want to make sure you’re actually not showing a TV ad that would kind of like go against that indication that you’re supporting now a platform that we win, explicitly told to try to stay away for leave alone the messaging and everything was not necessarily relevant. So is one of those scenarios where can you actually adapt quickly enough to change the messaging, to be relevant to the current circumstances and not come across as tone-deaf? Or you’re just going to put up a message out there on a campaign that it’s completely irrelevant to what’s happening right now and the difficulties that our local community is going around here in Texas.
Liel: [00:08:56] So all of these is playing part into what we’re doing. And the same goes for our online campaigns, right? How can we tweak how can we adjust the messaging of all of our advertising so that it’s actually relevant to the current circumstances and the type of cases that potential people are having now. And so these are things that you need to be thinking on as you’re going along. And I think, as I was telling you, while this particular incident really stretched us up all the way to our limits because the actual outages happen in an area where both we live and our agency is located, we were still able to keep our operations running because we had enough preparations that allowed us to do so. But the first thing that I was telling you right now before we jumped into the call is we certainly need to make some upgrades. So if these were to happen next time, we’re not kind of like thinking ourselves. Wow, we’re really cut it short this time. Let’s just increase our bandwidth here. So if anything as catastrophic as this can happen again, we have more mileage in our tank to take us the extra mile and that it’s actually quite literal, more more mileage in our tank because that’s really where it went down to this time. So, Grace, that was quite an experience. And I know you go a lot through these kind of things almost every single year in Florida, right?
Grace: [00:10:24] Yeah. With hurricanes, we’re quite prepared in terms of that because I’ve been through quite a few of them, including one of the most major ones back in the day when I was a child. And I’m going to date myself here, which was Hurricane Andrew. Hurricane Andrew was one of the most massive storms that we ever had. And, you know, they did very well in terms of upgrading the infrastructure here. However, if you get a Category six or above a four, it’s still not quite… Things are going to happen exactly like they did in Texas, as a matter of fact, regardless of whether we have the infrastructure upgrades or not, but because we know they’re coming, we’re prepared for them. And we have these disaster recovery plans as part of our business continuity plans where we you know, we know we have generators. We know we have our stuff located in specific spots, like, you know, what we call it, the NAP or Terremark type of location, where it’s bomb proof. It’s hurricane proof. It’s flood-proof. It’s everything proof. If you have physical stuff that you need to have redundancies for, you know, because we’re a software company. So there are times that we have specific stuff in different locations.
Grace: [00:11:34] And as a matter of fact, we have stuff in Wisconsin. We have stuff here in Florida in the in that type of a location. And then we have stuff in New York as well for some of our equipment. You know, some of the software stuff that we run needs the kind of stronger servers. And so that’s what we do. But to your point, though, like, you know, I’m glad that at least you were able to have you know, we were talking about it offline, as you said, you know, you had gas and you had, you know, the option to to use the gas. Whereas here in Florida, I have only electric. I didn’t have we don’t have gas, at least not some people do, but the majority of us do not. And you have to specifically have it installed in your house. So gas I when you told me that you had gas, I was like, thank God for that. Because, you know, I think whoever it is, you think thank for that, because that’s the only way that you’ll be able to continue cooking and doing all the things that you need to do and in your case, run your business out of your location.
Liel: [00:12:32] Yeah, Grace. And one thing I, I don’t know if it has come up before here on this podcast, but we were actually a solar-powered agency, so we actually have solar panels on our roof. And usually that’s the energy, all the energy we need to run our agency. But two issues here, right? Number one, they were completely covered by snow. Right. And it was really unsafe to try to go up and clear them. And even if we would have gone up to cleared him, there was really limited, very, very limited sunshine during the past few days to actually power up those panels. Right. And we hear that not just happen at private businesses or residences, but actually, the entire state was not able to sustain generation of electricity to solar panels just because the weather conditions were not enabling power generation through solar panels. So, I mean, again, it’s just one of those realizations that your systems are not going to be always bulletproof. And we live in a world that things get tested to the limits. You know, we used to live in the mindset of. Yeah, but, you know, the odds of that happening are one in a million to the point is that those one of the million circumstances are starting to happen way too frequently. And so to take that approach when it comes down to your business decisions is really not wise and not safe. What do you think?
Grace: [00:14:05] Yeah, a thousand percent. I mean, look at covid, right? What did that do to everybody that did that to the world, as a matter of fact? So there’s no way that you can’t look at what’s happening in the world as a whole, what’s happening individually in states, in the United States, what’s happening everywhere, as you said. And so if you don’t have a business continuity plan, you will not continue operating.
Grace: [00:14:26] It’s as simple as that. And so this is always a good time to take a look at what you do, how you do it. Add your paperwork or documentation, but actually do something about it, like you said, because. Yeah, you know, as we were speaking offline before, you know, this kind of is going to bring us to the next topic. But, you know, there’s you can’t rely on the insurance companies. You can’t rely on the power companies to make sure that you have what you have or need in place. How could you? You know, you were talking about the rotation of the power. Right. Can you say a little bit about that and what happened with the rotation of power?
Liel: [00:15:00] Well, you see, I’m no energy expert and I really struggle explaining or trying to understand, even myself the reasoning behind how local authorities thought about going about managing the Texas grid. But I can tell you the initial idea was to do power rotations in the sense that in order to be able to better control the grid and distribute energy in a more realistic way, the idea was, OK, we’re going to switch down certain areas and allow others to have energy. And then over a period of 40 or minutes or one hour will then do the switch. The thing is that the whole system backfired on their face when they executed the first such shutdown. They were not able then to bring the grid back on. For noone. And just some very particular areas in all cities were the ones that remained with electricity because of the part of of their grid network, what institutions that were powering, which in most cases were government buildings, hospitals, and some real necessary infrastructure that the city needs. But everything else got shut down.
Grace: [00:16:16] So, you know, I’m Hispanic, as are you. And in Nicaragua, they have a lot of rolling blackouts. It’s just kind of the way it happens. And they know when is coming, you know, because you do shut down parts of the grid because they can’t run it. They can’t run it. They just are third world countries. So there’s not going to happen. Right. So I understand the concept behind what they did, but this is what I know that now this is going to go to bring up all of these class action lawsuits, all of these potential issues against the power companies and against the insurance companies that are going to start denying claims when everything is melting and bursting. And, you know, power was right out. Yeah.A
Liel: [00:16:59] hundred percent. Yeah. So I actually I remember already the first day, the first night when the power went out, I was going through my Twitter feed and trying to follow the local authorities and see what news and developments they were issuing. Right. Because that was the only way that we could actually efficiently stay connected and informed. And it was really incredible to see the amount of comments and people who were already on day one talking about a class action against particularly Ercot. Right. Which is the grid manager, you know, the grid authority here in Texas.
Liel: [00:17:41] And I know you actually received an email from X social media recently that’s already contemplating the marketing for such a potential lawsuit. So why don’t you give us a little bit more information and any insight on what are the chances of this actually becoming a thing?
Grace: [00:18:04] Huge, huge chances. So let me start with a little bit of the email itself. Right. So even just the topic, it kind of catches your attention. And, you know, we’re all about attention-catching grabbers and stuff like that. So it says Texas power grid failure. Next, BP oil spill question mark. Well, yeah, it very well could be. Why do I say that? And why am I so confident that this is probably going to happen because of the hurricanes that we have here. And after Hurricane Andrew, after certain hurricanes, you will always have insurance companies that are going to deny claims. And at the time that Hurricane Andrew hit, they hadn’t updated the infrastructure. FPLs are here for Florida Power and Light. They had an updated infrastructure in a very long time, although they had been charging you extra fees for upgraded infrastructure for years and they never updated it. So if that same situation is what is happening or happened, which it sounds like that’s what happened in Texas, they were not prepared for a 100 year storm. They were not prepared for this type of cold. They weren’t insulated. Now, I’m not saying that they potentially should have known. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe there was infrastructure upgrades that just couldn’t account for what they call an act of God. A lot of times in claims, right. However, the amount of people, the level of issues and specifically what they’re mentioning in the email that I’d like to read out loud has to do with the specifics of. What if a company has little chicks, little, you know, they sell chicken and they’re baby chicks that are incubating the lost power?
Liel: [00:19:50] Right. That’s the other thing, right, Grace? Because, I mean, because of the sheer size of the event, we haven’t really started looking at, as you’re seeing, the impact that this has had on businesses, the property damage that’s going to come out of this. And most importantly, there has already been loss of life due to this event. Right. It’s going to be a matter of how much of this was preventable, how much negligence was here. And it seems like there is going to be a fight here against holding some authorities accountable here. I mean, it does have the potential from what I’m hearing.
Grace: [00:20:28] Yeah. So, I mean, I’ll give you what it says here about specific to people. Right. Not just commercial losses, which we’re all very aware of, the commercial losses that are going to happen because, you know, if you run a business, which most of you attorneys do, they’re listening to us. You know that the commercial losses are going to be fairly standard when it comes to a natural disaster. Right. It’s going to be, you know, claims that you have to put against because of X, Y, Z business wasn’t operating for this amount of time or whatever. Now, when we talk about the individual people and the potential for those types of claims, what they’re specifying here is that the second part would be injury and death from the cold hitting elderly people that get hypothermia or worse. So that’s why I’m saying, like, this is a huge potential on the side of Texas, because we don’t have cold here. So for us, it’s like, OK, yes, it could be sweltering heat. And potentially, if they have no power when they’re sweltering heat, they could pass away. Yes, they could get heatstroke. Now, the cold, though, there’s nothing to do once there’s the person could potentially die. And that’s what we’re just about to get into when it comes to this whole Texas power grid failure. And they’re specifying in here that the defendants will include, you know, local power companies and insurance companies, which is what we’re talking about, because there’s going to be the what happened to us during Hurricane Andrew is they immediately denied all claims on the house.
Grace: [00:21:52] Just so you know, fought for probably close to 10 years to get any money out of the insurance company that we had for the homeowner’s insurance because they were trying to claim it was an act of God and they just denied the claim outright, which is sometimes that happens. I’m not saying all insurance companies. I’m not saying that that’s happened to everybody and that that won’t happen, you know, specifically or will happen. However, I think it’s important to note that this is something that is like Liel said was popping up from day one. And why? Because people expect that their city, their state is going to protect them and protect the elderly and protect the people that can’t protect themselves. And I’m sure in many, many people feel that that that wasn’t done one way or another. I don’t know what you think about that, Liel.
Liel: [00:22:39] I mean, I’m assuming and I guess, you know, these first remarks potentially may have been more emotional, but at the same time, there seems to be here substance. Right. And that’s why I really called to my attention when you said that X social media is already setting up potential campaigns to really get a head start on these potential lawsuit. Right. This can clearly seem to have the potential of becoming a class action. So I was very interested in hearing Grace. What is it that they’re doing? What is it that they’ve already put up in place? What are they offering law firms who are interested in partaking on these efforts?
Grace: [00:23:17] So I think it would help if I just kind of give you the framework of what they’re saying. And so, you know, they’re talking about it. You know, I’ll just read off the first paragraph kind of it says, in this situation, you have a 100 year winter storm that hits Texas. You have local power companies not able to deal with the demand and supply needs during this period, resulting in three to five million people without power for 48 hours or longer in 15 degree weather. Sorry, that’s very hard for me to comprehend. I’m a Florida baby. That is insane that you guys dealt with 15 one five degree weather. That, to me, sounds like Alaska.
Liel: [00:23:53] It looked like Alaska around here Grace.
Grace: [00:23:56] White out crazy. This will create a lot of commercial claims, property claims, and personal injury claims. So he believes and this is coming from Cocounsel Partners and Hillard Martinez Gonzalez LLP and Brent Coon and Associates. So they’re the ones that are really kind of starting this and working with X Social to really kind of get out to all the people that are out there and dealing with this. And so we’re going to are actually going to be getting involved in some of this. And I’m not sure exactly how or when, but we are going to be getting involved in this because this is honestly, we understand how horrible these types of things can be. And we would like to put our hat in the ring and go for the good fight when it comes to this as well. So that’s why I’m so interested in, you know, living in Florida with all hurricanes and things that we go through. This, to me is super important to protect the people, including the commercial property and the business owners like yourself who had to deal with this. And it shouldn’t have happened to that level, you know, potentially could have mitigated it significantly. And that’s basically what he’s saying in this e-mail.
Grace: [00:25:03] So you know what they’re saying that in the BP oil spill in California, wildfires, the majority of the commercial losses, you know, were commercial losses from the event. You know, same kind of here with the commercial operations, things that need power kind of went to waste or things that have to grow will have the largest damages. Food, right, in Texas. Right. You guys grow a lot of stuff that feeds the United States and even within your own state. So the loss of the food growth, the stuff that got frozen, because the stuff that you normally put in in heat boxes and you keep it kind of nice and moist so that it grows during the cold season, there’s no power to what the rolling effect that that’s going to have on those types of commercial losses are going to be pretty significant. And so, of course, as I mentioned before, this is where they close it off. And that, to me, is one of the most important sections, the injury, and death from cold hitting elderly people that can’t protect themselves because they have no means, no way of getting warmth or heat or even potentially being able to leave the house to talk to anybody, especially during covid.
Liel: [00:26:12] Right. It was bad. And then you have those sorts of scenarios. Right, because people were pushed away to a certain extent, have to leave their homes and lose shelter elsewhere under circumstances that would such extreme weather. It was just dangerous. It was just very, very risky to start off. And as you said, I mean, people went through extremes here in order to try to keep themselves warm or survive this. And unfortunately, it just led to disaster one too many times, leading to fires, to inhalation of toxic fumes. And I mean the counterthreats. This is continue to grow and it’s very sad, I think, Grace.
Grace: [00:26:55] Yeah, I agree with you completely. I mean, and I even saw, like when I saw the black ice and the car accidents on the freeways because of this crazy storm and them not being able to stop people from driving because they have to get somewhere to try and be safe in the middle of a blizzard, you know? Look, I’ve been there. I’ve been in a situation where it’s in the middle of a hurricane. And guess what? It’s to a point where that Category two hurricane just became a Category four. And there’s nothing you can do. You can’t leave your house. You can’t go anywhere. But you have to, because if not you, everything will be blown away. You know, luckily at this point, we do have construction that can handle up to a Category four. But anything above a Category four, I’m leaving my house. I don’t care if it’s hurricane outside, but guess what? That’s exactly what’s happens to people. They are like, OK, it’s just hit a Category four hurricane. It’s going to be a Category five. My house is gone. I am not going to even be able to survive. So now I gotta get out. So, you know, we’re people. Yeah, we try to stay home.When we can.
Liel: [00:28:01] And that’s one of the main disadvantages that we’re here. Right, Grace, is that level of awareness and understanding of the threat that you face. For instance, in Florida, you have embedded in you. You know exactly what are you know. Where you need to draw the line. And I think that’s one of the things that was not here. And I think that allegation can go both ways, right. From the people who actually suffered through it and for the people who actually really were responsible of getting us into this mess in the first instance. Right. Because while there was a lot of a conversation going on as to how much of this was preventable, their argument of, well, how unlikely was this to ever happen? And then for and therefore justify that, you know, chances of these were so minimal that we cannot be a whole to blame for not taking enough action on something that was not even on the scope of recent events. Yeah. Likely events to hit us. So I guess that’s going to be the defense argument. And I don’t know Grace, what do you think like how soon do you think you see this thing moving and really getting started?
Grace: [00:29:13] In a week or two in the next 30 days? This is just going to hit the airwaves and it’s going to explode because the level of which in Texas is such a massive state with so many people with such an influence on the rest of the country, it really does. It has a major influence on the rest of the country. I mean, there’s so many things that come out of there. I used to work in steel, you know, in the steel pipelines and certain things would come out of there. So, you know, it’s going to hurt a lot of people and a lot of businesses in an already very difficult time with covid.
Liel: [00:29:45] Right.
Grace: [00:29:45] I mean, just logistically, it’s going to kill a lot of businesses that were already on their last legs.
Liel: [00:29:52] Yeah.
Grace: [00:29:52] So the reality of this is going to move quicker than I think any of us really know or understand. Now, it’s going to be a big fight. It’s going to be a massive fight and they’re going to do everything in their power to say exactly like you said, that this was an unexpected act of God. There’s no way that they could have predicted a hundred year storm. Yeah, which is understandable. Like you said, it is understandable to a degree, but it’s called mitigating risk.
Liel: [00:30:18] Right. S
Grace: [00:30:19] o, you know, that’s where it’s going to line up, where the issues are between what they already knew or didn’t know. Right. It’s always in the discovery of any potential documentation or emails between anybody saying, I knew that this might happen or this is a potential to happen. But for-profits or for X, Y, Z, we put profits above people. And that’s where the lawyers and where our people come in to fight the good fight of preventing that type of thing from ever happening again, which is what happened after Hurricane Andrew here. Everything built to Category four standards. Now, as I said, we feel Category five or six hits everything. Everything’s gone. So should they have built it to a Category five or six standards? I don’t know.
Liel: [00:31:04] Well, Grace, I think that’s our first takeaway. Right. Don’t build just to sustain the worst that you know, build for an extra layer. Right. I mean, because what we are seeing, you know, they can tell us as much as they want, but this is an 100-year event. But the bottom line is that over the past two years, we’ve already been through three or four, one in 100-year events. Right. And so the bottom line is that your emergency contingency continuation plans need to be built to go beyond those, you know, worst-case scenarios as we know them and go for an extra step.
Liel: [00:31:45] What do you think?
Grace: [00:31:46] Yeah, that’s how we always look at things. You know, it’s called redundancies and the reason you have redundancies in place is so that your business and your life even can continue, and the only way to do that is to plan for not just the worst, but the absolute worst that could potentially happen in the end of everything. And you have to plan for that. And that’s what you do when you create a business continuity plan. You plan for the most absolute worst disaster that can potentially happen. And we do that because we live in a hurricane world here in Florida. And so they build for not build, but they create these plans based on the fact that the business as a whole will be completely down, potentially the building itself indefinitely. So you need to build for that type of issue. You need to create plans for that type of issue. When I say build, I mean build your plan, build your plan based on what can happen and the worst that could happen and plus the worst that can happen on top of that, because that’s how we live. And like you said, it’s embedded in my DNA because I’ve been in Florida my whole life. So as part of my DNA, it’s what can happen and then add another two thousand to that in terms of potential risk and issues that can happen from there. You know, because I have a small fridge at my home. I have a small generator. I have a little propane tank and propane-driven like stovetops. So, you know, all those little things that you could do for your business as well, like know that if things freeze, you need to do this. If this happens, you need to do this. You need to do this. That’s, like you said, the first takeaway, build it out, do it, because you know that this is the worst that can happen and add another thousand to two thousand percent of potential issues on top of that.
Liel: [00:33:33] What would you make or take away number two?
Grace: [00:33:35] I’d say my main takeaway number two is don’t just have, like a plan, and put it on the shelf. Seriously. Take a look at it. And included as part of your day-to-day operations that you check the things that you’re putting in your plan.
Liel: [00:33:51] Yeah, test that out. Right. Test it out. It’s that thing. Because when you put when you have them in writing when you think and you just put up a document for the sake of having it, but you don’t go back to actually touching things physically and actually running an exercise of putting yourself and your team through that motion, you may not identify broken links that can have really a significant impact if at any time you need to execute these.
Liel: [00:34:22] Right, Grace? I mean, whether it’s, as you say, your power generators, whether it’s your chain of communications, whether he’s testing out your mobile Internet connection, whatever it is, make sure that you set some time and it obviously doesn’t have to be every single week. But you do want to do this maybe periodically or depending on the likelihood of how, what are the chances of you’ve seen yourself in this situation, you want to check and be well aware of what works and what are some of the challenges that you may face so you can start troubleshooting them now or when you’re in a point where you have more resources and more availability to really handle things? Right. And also understand, I mean, one of the important things of these exercises is to understand what gets priority and what needs to be pushed down the scale of what’s actually not important to to be happening during a situation like that and already have made those decisions ahead of time. So when things are happening, you can actually, with a lot of confidence, particularly your team, can already know and make decisions without having to hesitate or have to come back to you to to talk about things.
Liel: [00:35:35] And I think it’s probably one of the most important reasons why you want to have these systems put in place ahead of time. And as I’ve said, I mean, after the event, after the event, I’ll make that my take away number three is always improve them. They’re not static. Things happen, circumstances happen. New technology, emerges, there are new solutions. So you want to make sure that you’re always keeping one ear to the ground as to what you can do better and most importantly, to debrief these incidents in a way that not only you’re actually getting information based on how you experienced the events, but get the rest of the team to give you their input and to let you know what work, what did and what could have been done better and improve overall your plans based on that.
Grace: [00:36:25] Yep, and the takeaway three point one, in addition to what you’re saying, I feel like people need to remember that they have to when they do these things again, don’t put it on a shelf, relook at it and go through it. Right. I mean, we do our evacuation plans here. We’ve gone through a potential fire hazard. We’ve gone through and, you know, know that this is here. This is there. So just make sure you do that. I can’t stress it enough. Everything is a continual improvement process and everything you do. And I couldn’t say enough times how many times Liel and I have said that at the end of every one of these podcasts. But that includes everything you do, even on a business continuity plan to improve, improve, improve because things can always get better and better and better.
Liel: [00:37:10] That’s right, Grace. And I guess well, you know, getting to the class action, I mean if this falls under your plans and interests and you see this being an opportunity for you, then this is the time. Right. We oftentimes talk about how things reach a point where they become way too popular, that it’s almost like unrealistic to try to pursue becoming part of a certain Mass Torts. But this is another example of something that is just inflating. It’s just on that early stage where it can make a lot of sense for you, depending on your law firm, your size, your budget, and the type of law that you practice. This could actually be a great opportunity.
Grace: [00:37:59] You know, a hundred percent and you know, these things don’t come across. Yeah. Every so often. So, I mean, well…
Liel: [00:38:06] Let’s at least, we hope… That’s what we hope, right. We’re only month number two in 2021. So yeah, we’ve already been through quite a lot. Let’s see what’s ahead of us. But Grace. One step at a time. One episode at a time. Right.
Liel: [00:38:24] Next week we’ll be back for another private label marketing conversation, or some sort of conversation, right.
Grace: [00:38:30] That’s right. I’ll be here.
Liel: [00:38:32] All right Grace take care.
Liel: [00:38:38] If you like our show, make sure you subscribe. Tell your co-workers, leave us a review, and send us your questions to ask@incamerapodcast.com. We’ll see you next week.
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