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Cybersecurity presents one of the most significant threats to your law firm’s future financial security and ongoing stability. Despite this, many firms do not have sufficient policies in place to manage and protect the sensitive and confidential information they routinely handle.
Legal cybersecurity is an ever-evolving and highly specialised field, making it challenging for law firms to implement robust protections, mainly if they manage data on their own in-house servers.
Law Firm Responsibilities for Cybersecurity
Upholding cybersecurity in the legal industry is one of the essential responsibilities of law firms because it protects confidentiality and the entire practice. While on the surface, a breach might seem straightforward to resolve, the true cost of a security breach includes:
- Loss of billable hours
- Loss of files and property
- Legal fines and fees
- And damage to your reputation
How to Protect Your Firm from Cybercrime
It is crucial for cybersecurity for to be a law firms first priority. Your firm must adopt a cybersecurity policy and strong protective measures.
To stand up a cybersecurity program for your law firm, follow these steps:
Obtain a risk assessment, which should be done by a third-party security professional.
Establish authentication and access controls. Authentication requires logins so only authorised staff can access files and data. For example, multi-factor authentication (login and a separate code sent to a mobile phone) is the gold standard. Access control determines who can access phones, computers, and your network. Controlling these two points is the most critical step you can take.
Implement security tools. These include firewalls, spam filters, anti-spyware software, data encryption, anti-virus software, and intrusion detection software.
Adopt a cybersecurity policy and plan, that includes email usage, internet usage, data retention policies, password requirements, and more. Therefore, be sure to educate your staff on common and prominent threats and have them sign off on the firm cybersecurity policy.
Create an incident response plan, so that everyone on your team knows their responsibilities and is trained to respond if there is a data breach.
Buy cybersecurity insurance. It is crucial for mitigating expenses from data breaches.
Obtain cybersecurity certifications, which not only educates your employees but provides evidence to clients that you take security seriously.
Adopt legal technology. Perhaps the most helpful legal industry trend for cybersecurity protection is adopting legal practice management software.
Is Cloud-Based Legal Tech Secure?
Cloud-based legal technology, like Smokeball, provides a wealth of advantages and benefits for your firm, not the least of which is professionally managed cybersecurity.
Your firm likely needs to have the same high-level resources and skilled staff that Smokeball provides. While it might seem as if the safest solution for legal security is to maintain your own server in your office under your control, this approach makes you the most vulnerable to a breach.
Smokeball provides robust, constantly updated protections for legal cybersecurity. When your firm uses Smokeball, all of your client data, files, and confidential firm information are stored remotely on servers. The servers use the AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform, the gold standard on which Dow Jones and NASA rely.
Multiple layers of protection are in place with data collated in more than one location, so a rare outage in one locale does not impact your workflow. Your information is stored, constantly backed up, and carefully monitored to protect it from viruses, malware, spyware, and ransomware.
When you have Smokeball as your legal practice management software, you get crucial security benefits, placing the arduous task of protecting your firm with dedicated and skilled professionals who implement immediate updates, patches, and fixes 24/7/365.
Smokeball’s Security Protects the Legal Client Lifecycle
- Intake of client data
- Confidential communications with clients through a secure online portal, including file transfer
- Document preparation and storage
- Research and planning
- Calendaring
- Internal firm communications and collaboration
- Online signatures
- Online filing
- Online billing and payments
Is your Firm Protected?
Book a demo now to find out how to use Smokeball to boost your firm's cyber security.
