How to Protect Your Law Firm’s Digital Transformation Initiatives

Article

August 26, 2024

A Five-Part Series

The global COVID-19 pandemic drove dramatic changes, placing a spotlight on key business outcomes and accelerating digital transformation efforts in law firms. Each of these outcomes, coupled with how people and processes can be empowered digitally through the application of technologies, will be explored in this five-part series for firms. The series aims to provide insights into the five critical business outcomes:

Understanding Your Customer
Optimizing Your Business
Innovating For Growth
Enabling Your Workforce
Protecting Your Digital Assets

Part Five: Protecting Your Digital Assets

As the legal landscape continues to rapidly evolve, firms across the globe are prioritizing their digital transformation efforts by leveraging advanced technologies and automating processes to improve agility and enhance overall service and operations. As digital initiatives advance, ensuring a strong cybersecurity architecture with an impenetrable foundation focused on security, privacy and reliability of an organization’s underlying systems will be mission critical to mitigate risk and minimize disruption.

While digital transformation has endless potential for law firms, it introduces new risks in the areas of cybersecurity, intellectual property and regulatory compliance. Considering the wealth of sensitive information law firms manage, they are prime targets for security breaches.

A cyberattack can decimate a firm and result in financial losses, reputational damage, legal repercussions and identity theft. The key areas listed below highlight four ways law firms can advance their security efforts.

Advanced Technologies and Automation

Standardizing and automating firm practices can transform productivity and significantly improve quality and accuracy, thereby reducing errors and waste. Business Process Automation (BPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are advanced technologies that use software to improve outcomes. By implementing these technologies, law firms can automate time consuming tasks, such as:

Managing Documents
Updating Templates
Creating Digests
Answering Standard Client Questions

Elevating efficiencies and productivity gives law firms the ability to compete with other digitally advanced firms. Likewise, these technologies can also function as a safety net by eliminating simple practices and processes often overlooked by busy firms, like failure to act on a time sensitive issue.

Security-First Workforce

As we discussed in Part Four of our series, digital transformation is about people, process and technology, with the most important aspect of any transformation being people. A firm’s workforce is the first line of defense against a security threat. As firms advance their digital initiatives, employees may struggle to keep up with growing risks. It’s vital to build defensive measures throughout the entire firm that hold each employee equally responsible for sustaining a security-first mindset.

Firms can achieve this through implementing a structured and reoccurring security program with push notifications or scheduled. This allows employees to receive the most relevant information regarding security and best practices to both manage and mitigate risks. Additionally, employees should have access to, and be prepared to implement, a strong security incident response plan (IRP).

Employees should know how to detect and identify an incident, respond to it and mitigate any consequences. Routine risk assessments and practice tests should be conducted to assess firm readiness. A knowledgeable and prepared workforce is a powerful medium to keep organizations secure.

Data Management and Asset Protection

Data can be a firm’s greatest asset, as well as its greatest demise. Taking proper inventory of software systems and data locations can help firms assign ownership and categorize risks. Strong authentication, authorization and encryption controls around infrastructure and data is a necessary first line of defense.

Clearly defined data exchange policies and protocols are necessary for employees and vendors to thoroughly understand and practice for risk mitigation. Clear data tagging, retention practices, and backup and recovery plans will help firms with clean data management and loss prevention, as well as ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.

With so many third-party entities, thoroughly vetting a vendor for their cybersecurity policies and procedures should be a critical first step., Before conducting outside business, firm’s should ask vendors for their policies and stances on:

Indemnification
Cyber liability insurance
Timing parameters around incident notification

ESG as a Priority

While Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategies can be a significant growth area for law firms, disruptions can significantly harm a firm’s potential. With ESG now a business framework that leverages data and metrics to determine an organizations impact, law firms must prioritize and manage risks both within the firm and externally.

Internally, firms must operationalize ESG practices by clearly defining their mission and values and ensuring employees have the proper understanding and resources to implement ESG practices throughout their daily work and interactions. Likewise, firms should vigilantly analyze clients and third-party affiliated vendors to determine if their ESG values align with the firm’s. New ESG processes and risk assessments should be conducting annually within firms as this area is constantly evolving.

About Cherry Bekaert Digital Advisory

Cherry Bekaert’s Digital Advisory team is comprised of strategists who have broad industry experience and keen business acumen. Utilizing an agile and flexible approach, we help examine what you want to achieve with a focus on people, process, technology and culture. We are here to help organizations manage risks, enable growth and support sustainable operations. Leveraging our strategic process, we help digitally enabled organizations – especially middle-market companies – do more with less.

Cherry Bekaert stays on top of the latest technology trends, but we know that technology is not a one-size-fits-all solution. We are here to guide you on what technology makes sense to adopt as it pertains to delivering the highest value to your organization.

Interested in learning more about protecting your firm through their digital transformation efforts? Listen to Scott Duda, Leader of Cherry Bekaert’s Professional Services Industry practice talk with team members in the Firm’s Digital Advisory practice as they talk about digital transformation, benefits of protecting your digital assets, and where to get started.