What Legal Professionals Should Know About Cybersecurity

What Legal Professionals Should Know About Cybersecurity for Law Firms

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The number of cybersecurity incidents is rising. Sadly, fraudsters find legal firms to be desirable targets.

Here is an explanation of why law firms of all sizes should increase their cybersecurity spending and what they can do to keep their offices secure.

Why Law Firms are Popular Targets

Because law firms store sensitive (and valuable) information about numerous organisations or entities in a single database, they are frequently the target of hackers. As a result, businesses become “one-stop shops” for hackers who can now access the needed information for numerous companies from a single source.

Furthermore, if a hacker tried to access a database owned by a particular corporation directly, they would probably run across more advanced security procedures than those used by the law firm. Prime targets are those with access to more data.

Businesses may suffer significant financial losses as a result of cyberattacks. According to IBM’s annual Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach in 2021 was $4.24 million, with prices for companies that adopted remote work costing on average $1.07 million more than those that did not. The analysis, which analyses trends and average costs across 17 industries and 17 nations and regions, identified compromised credentials as the most frequent site of attack for 20% of all breaches that looks into.

Unsurprisingly, one of the top challenges listed by a third of respondents to the 2018 Aderant Business of Law and Legal Technology Survey was cybersecurity. In the United States, cybersecurity went from ranking sixth in 2017 to becoming the most often mentioned issue in 2018.

Three Steps to Protect Your Business

You may take many steps to lower your risk of encountering a cybersecurity issue. Here are three things you can do to get things going.

Create a policy for acceptable use.

Employees’ responsibilities regarding the company’s network, software, computers, laptops, and mobile devices are clearly stated in an acceptable usage policy (AUP). It lays forth precisely how and when workers should use company-provided technology and mobile devices, such as cell phones and tablets.

The potential for employees to intentionally or unintentionally undermine your company’s security is one of the primary reasons to install an AUP. Nearly 34 per cent of security breaches, according to Ipswitch, a vendor of IT management software, causes by employee behaviour (intentional or accidental).

An AUP helps train staff to recognise potential cybersecurity issues and ensure they know their obligations around technology use. A thorough yet simple-to-read AUP can significantly lower your company’s cyberattacks and data breach risk.

Utilise cloud computing technology

When asked why they prefer on-premise or hosted solutions versus cloud-based systems, many (if not most) law firms would point to security as their primary concern. However, the reality is that cloud-based solutions are much more secure than on-premise or hosted software (and over 30% of study respondents from Aderant concur).

Although an on-site IT staff has many other duties, they may do recurring network vulnerability checks. SaaS-based legal solution providers have staff members responsible for ensuring their IT infrastructure is reliable and secure.

Furthermore, because cloud solutions update automatically, you can be sure that the platform is always running the most recent patches and that the provider has fixed any known vulnerabilities. Additionally, compared to hosted or on-premise alternatives, cloud-based solutions are typically less expensive and simpler to maintain.

Create an incident response strategy.

Ideally, there won’t ever be a data breach or cyberattack at your company. In all likelihood, you must be ready for the day it occurs. Every company’s cybersecurity programme needs to have an incident response plan.

Your company’s actions as soon as it becomes aware of the problem will influence how severe (and costly) the harm is. The following steps make up an efficient incident response plan:

Establish a team for incident response planning.
Identify the incident’s type and scope.
finished with the first reports
Escalate the situation as necessary
Inform those who impact organisations
Investigate and gather information
Reduce potential dangers.
Implement recovery strategies

Your incident response plan and other security rules and procedures should review and updated regularly. Your company needs to be proactive to maintain effective cybersecurity defences because current threats are constantly changing, and new threats are emerging virtually every day.

Avoid making your legal practice a cautionary story for other procedures. Take the necessary actions immediately to protect your workplace from internal and external threats.