5 Gaps That Undermine a Law Firm's Continuity Plan

A surprising number of firms already have something written down — a paragraph in the partnership agreement, an old memo, a verbal understanding between two partners. The problem is rarely that nothing exists. The problem is that what exists doesn't hold up when a designated successor, a state bar auditor, or a disciplinary panel actually looks at it. These are the five gaps that show up most often.

1. A Successor Who Never Actually Agreed to It

The most common gap isn't the absence of a name — it's the absence of consent. A firm names a "designated successor" in a document the successor has never seen, never signed, and may not remember agreeing to in a hallway conversation five years ago. When the plan needs to activate, the named attorney may decline the role, may no longer practice in the relevant area, or may simply be unreachable. New Mexico's Rule 16-119 builds consent into the process directly, requiring a documented "Notice of Plan" signed by the assisting attorney — a structure worth copying even where it isn't mandatory.

The Fix
Get the successor's written agreement on file, confirm it covers trust account access specifically, and revisit it annually — not just when the successor's circumstances change, but when yours do too.

2. Trust Account Access Left Undocumented

Rule 1.15 doesn't pause for a disruption, and neither does a client's expectation that their funds are safe. Yet trust account access is one of the most consistently overlooked elements of a continuity plan — bank relationships, signatory authority, and the specific steps required for a successor to step into an administering role are often known only to the one attorney who set the account up in the first place. If that attorney is the one who's unavailable, the gap becomes the emergency.

The Fix
Document the bank, account structure, signatory process, and any institution-specific requirements for adding or transferring signatory authority — and make sure the successor knows where that documentation lives before they need it.

3. File and Password Locations Nobody Else Can Find

New Mexico's rule is explicit about this for a reason: a succession plan is close to useless if the assisting attorney can't actually get into the practice management system, the document repository, or the email archive. Password managers tied to a single attorney's personal device, two-factor authentication routed to a phone nobody else can access, and cloud accounts with no documented recovery path are all the same gap wearing different clothes.

The Fix
Maintain a current, securely stored record of where client files live, what systems they're in, and how a successor would actually get access — including backup authentication methods, not just the primary login.

4. No Plan for Telling Clients Anything

Rule 1.4 requires keeping clients reasonably informed, and that obligation doesn't relax just because the disruption is the kind that makes communication harder. Plans frequently address who takes over a matter without addressing how, or whether, clients are told that anything happened at all — which becomes a much bigger problem the moment a breach notification obligation is layered on top of an already-quiet transition.

The Fix
Draft client notification language in advance, for both a routine transition and a data-incident scenario, so the successor isn't writing it from scratch under pressure.

5. A Plan That's Never Been Tested or Updated

No ABA rule specifies a tabletop exercise requirement for law firms, but disciplinary authorities and bar ethics opinions consistently expect continuity arrangements to actually be workable — and an untested plan that fails when invoked isn't meaningfully different from having no plan at all. The related failure mode is just as common: a plan written once, during onboarding or a single planning sprint, and never revisited as personnel, vendors, or office locations changed. New Mexico's rule requires updates as circumstances change for exactly this reason.

The Fix
Run at least one tabletop review a year, document what it surfaces, and treat any personnel, technology, or vendor change as a trigger to revisit the plan — not just the calendar.

What Closing These Gaps Actually Requires

None of these five gaps requires sophisticated technology to fix. They require documentation that's specific, current, and actually accessible to the person who'd need it — which is precisely the kind of work that tends to get deprioritized at firms without dedicated compliance staff, which is most solo and small firm practices.

Quick Self-Audit

• Has your named successor signed something acknowledging the role, including trust account responsibilities?
• Could that successor access your trust account without you walking them through it personally?
• Is there a current, secure record of file locations and login credentials someone else could actually use?
• Do you have draft client notification language ready for both a routine transition and a data incident?
• Has the plan been tested or reviewed in the last twelve months?

If more than one of those questions gives you pause, the plan exists on paper more than it exists in practice — and the gap between those two things is exactly where client harm, and bar exposure, tends to happen.