Login | May 11, 2024
Cybersecurity developments in the law office 2022
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: January 27, 2023
Here we go, starting in on end-of-the-year reviews.
This one, from the National Law Journal, lists the top five cybersecurity developments of the previous twelve months that display not only the changes of the last year but where law office cybersecurity is heading.
First up—the growing adoption of cloud services in the legal community will help against common cybersecurity threats.
A lot of this has to do with the adjustments to remote work that the pandemic forced the business.
Almost three-quarters of law firms report that they have transferred their email services to the cloud by the end of 2023.
This is up from two-thirds or so at the beginning of 2022. Other law office cloud services have also seen an uptick, including payroll, document management, and human resources.
Obviously, hackers would be interested in any financial or personal data they could find on a firm, but the real treasure trove would be in confidential client documents. So the legal biz is finally getting the message, apparently. Twelve years on.
Next, courts also got the message with an increase in cyberattacks on their systems (see: City of Akron) and with, again, the remote functioning necessitated by the pandemic. Which isn’t over, by the way.
Courts are being advised to lessen the effects of cybersecurity attacks by segmenting their data.
The problem that this helps to solve is the fact that all of the data of most courts is just being held in one system, and that when the system is hacked in one place, all of the data becomes available to the perpetrators.
So to begin with, courts are starting to separate their various data into different storage solutions.
This is called a “layered” approach. I don’t think any of the local courts do this, but I’m not sure.