Stemming the flood of information

I received a couple of interesting emails today. One was from the bank manager, warning me not to speak to anyone purporting to be my bank manager or a member of my bank's fraud department.

The second was from a rather new organisation called Lender Exchange, which is some sort of alliance of certain building societies and banks designed to reduce the duplication of the information we have to give panels, and, it might appear, sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of firms they want on their panels.

I suppose my beef with all of this is that I appear to be constantly churning out information (some of it of a very sensitive nature) to third parties.

The Conveyancing Quality Scheme (CQS) wants shed loads of information. Most years, one or another of the building societies requests that we fill in a sheaf of forms. Every year we have to give out mounds of information in order to renew our professional indemnity insurance (PII), and now even the previously simple task of renewing practising certificates comes with a particularly annoying piece of software which asks some extremely difficult-to-answer questions. Some of the information is highly sensitive and, again, we are never too sure who has access to this material.

With technology comes the ability to hack into information.

Email is a godsend but also an abomination: never has it been so easy for the fraudsters to pursue their nasty little (and sometimes not so little) crimes. There is such a huge pile of data out there that any halfway reasonable hacker should be able to find their way into it.

From the Lender Exchange perspective, I found it mildly surprising how much information was required. I also thought it a little annoying that they take your bank details before telling you how much it is going to cost you each year. But I gave them all the information: bank details, credit check information, details of how the firm is run and all kinds of other weird stuff, such as how long I have lived in my house.

I suspect very few members of the profession are aware of who has access to this information.

Perhaps it is protected, but obviously actual people will have to screen it at some point.

All this brings me back to the bank manager, who is concerned about crooks who might be impersonating the bank and accessing your accounts for the purposes of fraud.

Fortunately I know my manager's voice well.

But I am worried about all the information that is flowing out of my firm to banks, building societies, CQS and all the rest. How safe is this data? Who has access to it? Should it be better protected? There is literally a flood of highly sensitive and confidential information leaving my firm by electronic means on a very regular basis, and that is cause for concern.

Fraud is bound to increase as the crooks get even more sophisticated. They stopped robbing banks many moons ago; now they regard solicitors' client accounts as fair game.

Let's hope our confidential information is well-protected - hopefully as well-protected as Cosmo's dinner time bone, which is high up on a filing cupboard covered in two plastic bags. I doubt he will manage to get to it.

Russell Conway is senior partner at Oliver Fisher

www.oliverfisher.co.uk

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