Technology and Data Security: Is Your Firm Ready?

Part 3 of a 3-part series on how the pandemic changed the litigation process.
Find part 1 here and part 2 here.

In today’s outsourced systems world, technology has created many possibilities for sharing and integrating different tools and content. Because of the options that exist, law firms both small and large can avoid investing in infrastructure and direct support for their systems.

However, this can generate increased exposure to cyberthreats as the liability risk is not fully passed on to the cloud provider when sharing client details and content in the cloud. With this evolving landscape, there are some practical things you can do today to improve and maintain an effective cybersecurity posture to ensure your clients’ data remains secure.

Confronting the Evolving Cyberthreat Landscape

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud infrastructure have matured to the point that IT has become democratized. The smallest firms can utilize applications and systems
that were out of reach ten years ago due to the infrastructure investment required to deploy and manage them. Even the largest firms are now leveraging SaaS and cloud technology to focus more investment on innovation.

This new norm has elevated cybersecurity risks for small or medium-size firms and has shifted those risks for larger firms that transitioned from self-managed systems
to SaaS and the cloud. According to a 2020 American Bar Association survey, 29% of firms experienced a security breach—such as a lost/stolen computer or smartphone,
hacker incursion, break-in or website exploit—in 2020, compared to 26% in 2019.

To read the rest of the article, download the PDF below.