Today, more than ever, law firms are in possession of large amounts of data. To meet internal and regulatory standards, almost all data is encrypted from end to end. Understanding the presence of risks and the level of compliance becomes impossible to measure in real-time. In effect, the environments of legal firms are more distributed, existing on cloud or third-party networks. Even fourth-party, or fifth-party, all have shared access that uses encrypted data for communication, as do IoT devices such as smart TVs, printers, surveillance cameras, or any other device using encryption.
Law firms are perceived as the weakest link in the data supply chain.By its very nature, this data will be highly confidential, privileged, price-sensitive and, in many cases, constitute personal data for the purposes of the UK GDPR Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 (UK GDPR). Moreover, with the introduction of new legal technologies, many law firms are beginning to become aware of the valuable nature of the aggregate market data they hold.
With the ever-increasing use of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence within the legal sector, anonymised and aggregate data will inevitably become a more valuable commodity informing positions on legal risk and new and innovative legal product services. Many firms are also moving into the legal technology consulting sector, giving them unprecedented access to client information and systems.
