By Legal Futures Associate LexisNexis [1]
The beginning of the New Year is a perfect time to reflect on what went well as a business, where there is room for improvement, and what you can learn from the wider industry ready for the year ahead.
The latter end of 2023 certainly proved to provide a reality check where data security was concerned within the legal sector, so what better way to start 2024 than evaluating your own firm’s standpoint?
With cyber incidents on the rise, it’s important to ask yourself, are you confident that your law firm’s data security is being prioritised? Do you have a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) in place? And, if not, why not?
Is the legal sector particularly at risk of cyber-attacks?
To answer in the simplest form…yes. According to the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) Cyber threat report for the UK Legal Sector [2], law firms are a prime target for cyber criminals and other attackers. The sensitive information handled by law firms on a daily basis means no matter the size of your legal practice, your business will be at risk if data security is not being made a priority.
So, what can I do about it?
I am glad you asked! There is a lot that can be done to prevent future cyber-attacks to keep your client data safe and uphold your business’s reputation, but only if you make a conscious effort to do so!
Prevention is cheaper than the cure!
Within any law firm, the database house’s the firm’s; and therefore your clients’, data. So, when a cyber-attack occurs, if there are no data security measures in place, that data is immediately put at risk. In worse case scenarios, confidential client data is taken, sold, held to ransom and/or wiped out completely.
So, the most sensible option is to prevent your business’s susceptibility to an attack – but how? Here are a few things to consider:
- Educate your team – Provide best practice guidance around scam detection and conduct cyber security training.
- Governance – Introduce data security policies and establish a DRP to ensure a set of ‘rules’ are in place and supported by the senior tier of the law firm.
- Heightened technology defences – Make it difficult for attackers to reach users with anti-spoofing email tools to highlight phishing attacks.
- Invest in data encryption – If your firm’s cyber-security is compromised at any point, your confidential client data is ripe for the taking. However, by investing in an out of the box solution that is tried and tested, easy to deploy and works seamlessly with your Visualfiles™ application; such as OpenEdge® Transparent Database Encryption module (TDE), your data becomes unreadable to the attacker and therefore no longer an attractive target to cyber criminals.
- Ensure there’s a back-up strategy – Even if you have gone to the extent of securing your data with an encryption solution, your practice is still vulnerable to data inaccessibility and unplanned down time at the time of attack. Implementing a data replication tool such as OpenEdge® Replication Plus means that you are simply adding another layer of resiliency and reliability to your Visualfiles™ system. The tool helps to protect the potential loss of the database. It automatically duplicates the changes on the production database to a set of mirrored databases at hot standby sites, so that the targeted databases remain running throughout a failover transition. This allows the transition process to finish faster, reducing database downtime and consequently, Visualfiles™ downtime.
These are but a few considerations to be made when reviewing the secureness of data within your business. Yet, the point is, if your data security isn’t at the top of the list of priorities for 2024, it should be.
For more information and recommendations regarding security threats I the UK legal sector read read the NCSC’s full report here [2].
For more information regarding the OpenEdge® TDE and OpenEdge® Replication Plus solutions for your Visualfiles™ system, contact your Account Manager today [3]!