Associate Insight - Leverage secure cloud collaboration to protect highly sensitive information and deliver efficient workflows

The internet and widespread availability of broadband have helped to radically change the way that companies, including legal firms, conduct their business, transforming communication and collaboration between management and board members, clients and partners,firms, regulators and authorities.

Online collaboration and secure file share and sync are two of the biggest benefits provided by this transformation and popular consumer file sharing tools that are intuitive, easy to use and familiar, like Dropbox and Google Drive, have been adopted in increasing numbers by employees. But sharing high-value confidential and sensitive data on public consumer storage platforms creates very real security and compliance risks.

How do insecure collaboration platforms put law firms at risks?

The dangers are magnified for legal firms because many of the files and documents they handle are commercially sensitiveand confidential. Large volumes of client matter-related documents frequently need to be shared within and outside the organisation, but while legal firms want to benefit from the advantages of online collaboration, they can’t afford to make any compromises when it comes to protecting the information entrusted to them.

How the sensitive information is sent and where from is a cause for concern. Are employees using personal email accounts? Are emails encrypted and secured? Who has access to the documents? How can that access be safeguarded and controlled? Are documents accessible to mobile or remote employees? If so, does the firm know who is accessing them and where from?

Versioning of documents is also an important consideration to ensure changes can be tracked as documents are distributed within and outside the organisation. Is there an audit trail to track all changes? Deal/transaction bibles at the end of the transactionsare created manually or with expensive custom tools and are frequently shared via physical media, such as USB sticks, which carry their own security risks, because they can be lost or stolen. Distributing information packs manually at partner/board meetings creates another security concern as sensitive information could fall into the wrong hands or be mislaid. 

This takes care of the concerns about the data, but what about the messages sent along with the data. Encrypting email in a way that is easy to consume externally, and allows administrators to continue to have access to partners’ email without exposing sensitive data is not simple.

One way of achieving this would be to create a secure, automated workflow through the implementation of a cloud collaboration solution. This would remove the vagaries of human choices that can lead to data or document loss and provide a number of benefits to businesses.It can also speed transfers and drive huge productivity gains, delivering competitive advantage to one firm over another.

So what should law firms and managing partners look for?

Ideally, they would find a single platform that can suit all their requirements, including collaboration, file sharing, transactions/due diligence and board communications. At the very least, any solution should:

1. Be easy to use and provide secure access to documents anytime and from anywhere in the world, probably via a web browser. It would allow employees to securely manage and collaborate on confidential documents and other information within the local infrastructure, across the Internet and on mobile devices.

2. Be able to set security categories depending on confidentiality level or document classification and be hosted on servers in certified high security data centres in the UK that meet national and international data protection regulations.

3. Integrate seamlessly into the firm’s existing infrastructure.

4. Allow firms to send secure links to files directly from Outlook with protection and encryption of email body and attachments.

5. Incorporate secure email functionality into the platform.

6. Incorporate versioning to allow users to keep track of edits and the document history and provide an audit trail to track all changes.

7. Automatically create secured, watermarked PDF portfolios via workflows for deal biblesand partner meetings information packs.

8. Incorporate rights management technologies to ensure document protection all the way down to the user’s desktop, including the capability to define the time to access documents and permissions to edit them.

One platform that meets all of these requirements is Brainloop Secure Dataroom which resolves the challenges of protecting confidential documents and providing efficient workflows to collaborate with people inside and outside the company while meeting compliance requirements. It enables users to share highly sensitive documents internally and with external partners – in a secure and traceable way – while delivering security throughout the organisation and beyond.