As a small law firm, you probably direct most of your budget to marketing, client acquisition, and supporting attorneys. What you might not focus on is IT and cybersecurity of your data. Small businesses are especially vulnerable to phishing and malware, and a particularly strategic attack can bankrupt a business. Attorneys need infrastructure to manage client case loads, so some of your budget should go towards IT costs and protect client data.

With infrastructure and software comes the responsibility of data storage, stopping data breaches, compliance, and numerous other technology-related issues. Cybersecurity should be deployed with productivity infrastructure, but most small law office owners don’t know where to start. The next few sections are practical advice for allocating IT budgets for small law firms.

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Use the Cloud for Advanced Technology

It’s normal for a law office to have a few workstations connected on a Wi-Fi router. The Wi-Fi router might be the ISP router, or you might have your own managed router connected to the ISP router. This setup is standard, but you need more advanced equipment for extended technology if you want it to be effective.

Let’s say that you want to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) or you want to work with data archiving for discovery. These features are expensive to host in-house, but you can pay a much smaller monthly fee for using advanced technology in the cloud. Cloud providers charge you for the technology that you use rather than paying high costs upfront.

When you work with cloud platforms, remote employees can access infrastructure, making them more productive. Cloud infrastructure must still be monitored and secured, so have a professional look over your settings. A managed service provider can help with deployment, configuration, and management if you don’t have the internal staff to deal with cloud infrastructure.

Data Backups and Disaster Recovery

To stay compliant and protect from data loss, law offices should invest in organized frequent backups. Backups are a part of a disaster recovery plan when the unexpected happens. Let’s say that you suffer from a system failure. Backups can be used to recover data so that it isn’t permanently lost.

Backups require extensive security to ensure that malware and insider threats don’t compromise client data. Most businesses choose to host backups in the cloud. The cloud protects them from data corruption after hardware failure, and backups can be retained long-term without running out of storage space. The cloud makes it much easier to scale storage when more space is needed.

A regular backup plan should be automated. The frequency of backups depends on the amount of data stored every hour. Small offices might get away with one or two backups a day. A managed service provider helps determine the best schedule for a small business to limit data loss after a disaster.

Antivirus and Antimalware Protection on All Devices

Most business owners know that antivirus software is necessary on workstations, but they forget about the importance of endpoint security, mainly antivirus software installed on smartphones. Smartphones can be an attack vector for more advanced threats. Insider threats are common from smartphones where users copy data or don’t secure their personal devices from data theft.

Endpoint management and security might seem like an unnecessary IT cost, but it greatly reduces the chance of a remote device being the source of a data breach. Should a lawyer lose their smartphone, the device should have remote wipe services installed to protect from data theft. Antivirus and antimalware installed on remote devices also protects from malware.

Ransomware is a particularly devastating attack that can destroy client data and costs thousands for a small business to recover. Having backups reduces data loss, but ransomware still must be eradicated from the environment. Antivirus and antimalware software stops known ransomware from becoming a major cyber-incident on your environment. Both protections can save law firms thousands in lost data, incident response, reputation damage, and recovery.

Email Filters for Phishing

Lawyers are targets for phishing campaigns. A phishing email might contain a link to a malicious website or include an attachment with code to download malware. Without email filters, your IT environment is vulnerable to many advanced phishing attacks that play on people’s emotions and inability to detect a threat.

Email filters are built to detect phishing and spam email messages and block them from accessing a targeted user’s inbox. They essentially remove the threat from accessing a human, so you avoid the human error of a common cyber-attack. Removing spam also frees up storage space, so you aren’t storing terabytes of nuisance email messages. 

Most small law offices host email services in the cloud, so many of your popular email filtering solutions can connect to a cloud email exchange server and start blocking malicious messages immediately. A managed service provider is also good for email filtering, because they often have a vendor already configured. MSPs can have your environment protected from email-based threats within minutes.

Compliant Managed Service Providers

Compliance as a Service (CaaS) is one way law firms can set up an IT environment without the expense of a full-time compliance officer. Violations for compliance can bankrupt a small law firm, so all your infrastructure should be reviewed for vulnerabilities and potential data breaches. For any currently installed infrastructure, an MSP with compliance professionals can review it for any violations.

Everything from allowing vulnerabilities on the system, failing to back up data and create archives, failing to log an audit trail, and leaving client data open to unauthorized access could be a compliance issue. You might need additional infrastructure or simple changes to your network configurations. A managed service provider with knowledgeable staff can help.

Corporate Technologies has staff for every IT issue, deployment, and compliance related review. We help law firms with their IT to identify their infrastructure needs and plan an environment to facilitate business growth. Whether you need full-time help desk support, monitoring, or cloud management, we can help.

To get started, contact us today to see how we can help your law firm.

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