Practical Law Firm Cybersecurity

With some ominous findings from the UK as a springboard, this article outlines major security threats to law firms and suggests some practical defensive strategies. The UK finding, from security firm RepKnight, was that 1.16 million email addresses held by 500 of London’s largest law firms were found on the “dark web.” Passwords were available for most of them. Some of the suggestions in this article will be in the category of widely known by only sporadically applied. ( E.g., encrypt your emails and files.) Others will be news to many readers. All of them, it’s safe to say, embody a truism about cybersecurity that is the most powerful obstacle to what most agree are “best practices”- namely that security measures almost inevitably entail some sacrifice of convenience.