One of Christchurch’s largest law firms lost access to wills, deeds, powers of attorney and other legal documents for more than a year following the February 2011 earthquakes.

Cavell Leitch Law is a former tenant of the earthquake- damaged Clarendon Tower.

Cavell Leitch managing partner Julian Clarke said sorting through the thousands of files would take months.

Some clients’ affairs had been on hold while the firm waited for the retrieval of the papers, which included deeds, family trust documents, historical wills and powers of attorney.

“We’ve got court cases that have been deferred in the hope that we’ll get these documents out at some stage,” he said.

“And some of them are huge court cases. There’s one [in which] people are arguing over tens of millions of dollars, and we’ve got 16 boxes of evidence.”

He said the firm had limited electronic backup but the quake had sped up the move to digitised records.