Legal Issues

Law firms are not immune from computer security breaches and computer crimes.  Indeed, given the nature of the legal profession, there are several significant issues that need to be addressed when implementing and maintaining an information technology system that stores information about the law firm, its attorneys, and its clients.  There are law firm proprietary secrets, case strategies, and information that are ostensibly protected by the attorney-client privilege.  Law firms, as a result, have a special incentive to maintain secure computer systems and to safeguard law firm and client information.  A review of the statistics concerning computer security breaches and computer crimes is absolutely staggering.  It is estimated that more than ninety percent of American corporations have been the victims of security breaches and that information is frequently stolen, viewed without permission, and in some cases altered.  Computer records and data, unlike paper, cannot be stored in boxes behind close doors and this problem has been noted in the legal journals one legal scholar concerned with computer security, for example has noted the obvious by stating that Crime of any sort, whether a mugging, terrorist incident, or computer hacking, prompts not only legal but architectural responses as well. Yet we as Americans think far too much about the law, and not enough about design.

This design emphasis, employing technology to secure proprietary and privileged information, is what law firm managers need to pursue in order to protect law firm data.  In a recent article in LTN Law Technology News, Kevin Woo describes new data loss technologies that can be incorporated into law firm information technology systems.  The goal, to be sure, is to more securely store propriety information and privileged information.  These technological innovations not only protect the theft of information, but they can also insulate law firms from charges of negligence or malfeasance that might lead to lawsuits from third parties whose information has been stored and then stolen from the computer systems.  Indeed, as the author notes The risk of not implementing a network or data security strategy is extremely high, as law firms deal in highly confidential information and have strict ethical obligations about how they handle and secure client data. (Woo, 2009, n.p.)  This is not a luxury quite the contrary, computer security is an affirmative obligation and a matter of attorney and law form ethics.  Some of the technological features include data access to only those firm members with a need to know, certain encryption features, and replacing passwords with fingerprint scans for particularly sensitive information.  Some of the newer digitial loss systems can even be customized to classify firm information in terms of sensitivity, to track firm employees computer viewing habits, and to report inappropriate computer information inquiries.  In sum, these new technological developments can help to secure proprietary and privileged information in the computer era and to help law firms satisfy ethical concerns.