Don’t Let “Shadow IT” Take Hold In The Legal Department

“Employees are now becoming empowered to take workplace technology adoption into their own hands,” writes Wafik Guirgis in Today’s General Counsel. It sounds like the introduction to a rah-rah article about workplace empowerment and democratization, but it’s anything but. When employees download software to enterprise computers there is risk, but it’s acute in a legal department, where information being held can be so critical. The question is, why are attorneys tempted to do it? Guirgis says the answer almost always has to do with a flawed relationship between IT and legal. He suggests how companies can go about insuring that relationship remains a constructive collaboration and doesn’t get short-circuited.