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By Jared Correia, IndyBar Law Practice Management Consultant, Red Cave Legal Consulting
Email is good for email, but when law firms start to try to expand the uses of email into broader technology functions — that’s where they run into trouble. Like when attorneys try to convert their productivity software into case management software. (In case you haven’t tried it, that doesn’t work because productivity software is decidedly not a relational database.)
Emailing sensitive documents can be a problem, too. When you email something, it passes through a number of different servers before it reaches its final destination. Some of those servers are likely to be unencrypted, which means that to ensure document security, you’ll need to encrypt the file itself or your email system. That’s a whole other step and maybe an entirely new software to buy. It’s also largely avoidable.
With modern document repositories (like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive) and law practice management software (like Clio and MyCase), those systems offer the ability for users to invite customers, clients and colleagues to access documents within those systems by creating a password or passcode. Thus, the person invited to access a document is doing so on the user’s system, meaning that that document does not go anywhere = the data doesn’t travel but remains in the encrypted container at which the user stores it. This is a crucial differentiation from the email method. In this case, the user continuously controls the location of the document and the document remains encrypted.
This is yet another reason to move to a paperless office environment and yet another reason to move in the direction of cloud-based software.•
Not sure your law firm’s data is secure? We can help. The IndyBar offers FREE law practice management consulting services through Red Cave Law Firm Consulting. To request a consult, visit indybar.org/lpm and start running your law firm like a business.
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