The well-publicised Mishcon de Reya £1m fraud case, when its client was duped into buying a London property from a seller dishonestly posing as the owner, has sent ripples of alarm throughout the legal community. Although conveyancers are an obvious target for the increasing threat of rogue house-owner and buyer deposit redirection fraud, it’s not just conveyancing practices that need to be on their guard. As a legal practice, you’re tempting prey for cyber criminals, not only because you hold large sums of money, but also vast volumes of valuable client information. The number, variety and sophistication of cybercrime grows daily, ranging from distributed denial of service attacks and phishing scams to hacking and ransomware.

If the recent furore about McKenzie Friend Marketplace shows anything, it is that the profession remains acutely sensitive to the apparent threat of competition by unregulated entrants into the legal landscape. But for an outside observer, the whole McKenzie Friend debate remains curiously overblown: if not a storm in a teacup, a storm at least in a teapot. For all the characteristic sturm und drang of the Law Society’s response to last year’s senior judiciary consultation, there was pretty widespread agreement among most respondents that McKenzie Friends are here to stay.

I recently sat on a panel debate in Manchester, with the debate entitled – ATE insurers and sub-£250k claims. Whilst the title of the debate was probably written ahead of the government’s consultation paper to introducing fixed recoverable costs in lower-value clinical negligence claims, where £25,000 rather than £250,000 is being recommended, it nevertheless raised an interesting point on how after-the-event insurers can make premiums proportionate to damages, especially for cases worth less than £25,000.

You’ve heard about ransomware – a hacker infiltrates your IT systems, locking them down until you pay a ransom. Some studies now estimate that over 50% of businesses have experienced this type of attack in the last year, and it’s particularly prevalent within the legal sector. Previously, firms could protect themselves by having a solid disaster recovery plan in place to ensure they can get back up and running in the event of a disruption. However, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – the new EU-wide regime which comes in effect on 25 May 2018, irrespective of Brexit – means that this approach alone is no longer adequate and security measures must be strengthened to prevent attacks.

The legal and property industries have, arguably, been slower than most to take up technology and embrace big data in the digital age. But the reality is that, for many years, they didn’t have to. Compare the traditional conveyancer or estate agent with some of their high street neighbours, such as retailers, banks or building societies; the internet forced many of them to start shifting their business online over a decade ago. Meanwhile, professional property and legal services were largely insulated from the online revolution. But now we are seeing digital and data-driven competition heat up, with technology an essential tool of productivity.