Friday, June 3, 2016

Content Management for the Modern Law Firm

Why is using tools like Dropbox or Box potentially hazardous for your company?

, Legaltech News

While technology has enabled us to send documents to colleagues anywhere from across the ocean to across the office, it has also opened doors to all sorts of threats that can have severe consequences for a business. This reliance on web-based and software solutions for office tasks has led to the creation of various tools for collaboration and communication, many of which, despite high favorability among employees, may not meet the security and integration standards of the modern enterprise or law firm.


In the Eyes of IT, This is Serious

If you're reading this article, then it's almost certain you know what Dropbox is. There's also a significant chance that you use Dropbox and similar tools for collaboration. In 2013's Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, the company's CEO claimed that users were saving 1 billion files a day to Dropbox storage.

Despite the popularity of Dropbox and other consumer information sharing tools, their use can be a headache for IT. That's because, when using commercial content management tools, IT doesn't always know where company data resides, explains Tim Van Caeyzeele, IT manager for Belgium-based HR law firm Clayes & Engles. In addition, with consumer tools, IT doesn't necessarily know where servers are located, which can be problematic when sharing data due to regulatory compliance and governance.

"We are not in control; we have no clue where our data is going to," Van Caeyzeele says. "I have no idea about [a company's] security policy, their theft prevention policy, etc. It may be secure, but I have no idea. They don't [communicate] with us because we don't have a contract with the company. So it's totally uncontrolled."

Van Caeyzeele notes that there have been instances when his firm was unable to find data from users who had stopped working for them, because to transfer files, "they had created a Dropbox file, then closed it down. And they don't understand why IT doesn't have the data."

"The end user, from their point of view, [thinks] 'IT knows all and has it all,'" he adds.

Given the highly-sensitive nature of their information, some law firms are investing in technology that allows for more secure sharing of documents. According to ILTA's 2015 survey on legal tech purchasing, 10 percent of firms had purchased content/document management solutions in the past 12 months, while another 10 percent planned to do so in the coming year. The American Bar Association's (ABA) 2015 Legal Technology Survey found that nearly 22 percent of lawyers are using a document management system for document collaboration, while a little over 12 percent utilize firm intranet.

Perhaps not surprisingly, nearly 95 percent of respondents reported using "email attachments" for document sharing, a platform that Ryan McClead, business transformation and innovation architect at enterprise collaboration tool provider HighQ, describes as "essentially insecure online storage."

"We talk to law firms all the time. [They say], 'Oh, we don't use those types of things. We don't use Box or Dropbox. But if you actually go through and see what people are doing with their domain email address, there are lots of people using these things, and IT isn't aware of it, and the firm management isn't aware of it," McClead adds.

Companies are aware of cybersecurity threats. Among respondents to a 2016 Consilio survey of Legaltech New York attendees, 27 percent said their organizations "rarely" or "never" address shadow IT risks, despite 61 percent reporting being "very concerned" or "concerned" with security risks posed by cloud-based applications. An NTT Communications survey of IT and business professionals in Germany, France, the UK and Spain found that 77 percent of respondents were openly using third-party cloud applications, despite most knowing shadow IT use was breaking company policies.

The Employee Dilemma

When companies provide secure platforms for employees to share information, why do some still turn to shadow IT? Ken Grady, lean law evangelist at Seyfarth Shaw, says "the challenge with [content management solution adoption] lies in the users much more than it lies in the systems right now."

The problem, he says, is that content management solutions "depend on a sort of fatal weakness," which is users must "be consistent" and up-to-date about uploading information. However, "people just tend to be not very diligent" about that.

"It's human nature. What you're asking people to do is a not very interesting task that sort of breaks up the rhythm of their thinking and their day. So, you get some information, you know the systems should be updated because of that information, you must either stop what you're doing, go into the system, especially if it's one that you're not constantly logged into, find the record, update the record, and then go back to what you were doing," he says. "It is not the task that they want to jump to do, and so it tends to get lost a bit in the wayside."

In addition to user interest, simplicity is essential to getting users onboard. When it comes to using content management tools for collaboration, users "will always go towards the easiest solution," explains Ben Di Marco, CIO of law firm De Grandpré Chait. "So if on a Sunday night [lawyers] need to share their document with a client, they want to be able to do it quickly and easily. They're not going to call IT."



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