What Your Law Firm can Learn from Panama Papers Leak

With major financial and government leaks being all over the news, it’s easy to overlook much greater leaks from legal offices. You’ve probably heard of WikiLeaks or about the Luxembourg tax files and maybe about the HSBC tax incident.

Each of these issues were caused by leaked information, often with disgruntled employees as the main cause to these problems. You probably didn’t hear anything about the Mossack Fonsenca leak in 2013 though, where more than 260 GB of information was leaked out about tax evasion and money laundering.

This is the largest recorded leak in history and it was from a group of more than 40 law firms. Even if you aren’t in the business of helping the rich launder money, your law firm can learn a lot from this catastrophe, and use the information from the case to secure your own company in the process.

What Happened?

It should be no surprise to anyone that digital information is now here to stay, and that means that delicate information is packaged up in an easy-to-share format for anyone who would like to do so. The laundering company got involved with Bashar al Assad, a man known for corruption in Syria.

In 2012, a single person, or a group of people, leaked more than 2.6 terabytes of data from the company to a German Newspaper. The incident shows how a set of people had too much access to the company’s substantial pool of data, and how little security or control solutions were put in place to protect that data.

Well Trained Employees

In law, sensitive information is almost always being passed around. Before you trust employees to take care of this information and protect it, it is important that you take the time to train them to do so properly.

That means you need to have protective software such as client management tools and password protected company phones, and then you need to teach the employees how to use that technology properly. It is only through proper training that you can ensure the information is going to be kept safe and that you won’t have any problems in the future at your company.

You will likely have to spend a week or two after hiring each new employee to ensure they know what they are doing, but the time spent is worth it for the added layer of protection it will provide your company with. After all you are only as good as your weakest employee is.

Manage Data Carefully

While many small law companies make the bulk of company data available to all their employees due to poor management procedures, this doesn’t have to be the way you run your own company.

There are advanced software solutions that make it a simple thing dividing information between your employees based on rank and need. If you employ one of these solutions you can provide just the data necessary to the job itself to your employees and add more protection overall.

Considering cloud computing

As a law firm, it is likely that you are sending around delicate information through email and putting it at risk without even realizing that you are doing so. As surprising as it might be, it is important that you realize email isn’t secure. There are many ways for emails to be hacked into, and a disgruntled employee could easily send along information from an email to whoever they like with the click of a button.

That is why it is important to make sure you use cloud computing solution for you and all your law firm employees. An encrypted cloud computing solutions will ensure that your data and email aren’t intercepted by uninvited parties, and it give you and your client’s data a save storage that you have complete control over. You can control who has access and only give out information to reliable employees.

It is vital that you take all the careful steps to preserve the critical data that your clients entrust you with. Relying on state of the art technology and careful practices can allow you to do just that.

Contact NexStep for a safe and secure cloud computing solutions for your law firm, our IT experts always work hard to ensure a secure and protected cloud encryption for your sensitive documents.