Every day, more law firms are transitioning to practice management platforms in an effort to become more efficient with their time, while best optimizing their organizational workflows. Unfortunately, one of the biggest hesitations firms still have regarding the technology is, “how safe is it?”

Of course, security should be a top priority for law firms, especially in today’s digital climate where data breaches appear in news headlines almost daily. However, the fear of new technology shouldn’t act as a roadblock to progressive behavior toward better firm capabilities and enhanced client relations. Law firms that are slower to adopt management platforms are running the risk of opening potential gaps in their security measures. Today, unencrypted email communication is one of the biggest threats to sensitive information being illegally accessed. Furthermore, with lawyers becoming more mobile in their professional and personal lives, work is being conducted via various public and private internet connections, as well as across multiple devices. This potentially puts law firm and client information in the crosshairs.

Cloud-based law firm software has changed the legal landscape. By utilizing new security measures through powerful platforms like Salesforce, law firm management platforms are able to usher in a new era of security.

Safer Physical Storage

Sensitive information stored on personal devices or internal servers might seem safer due to its close proximity, however, cloud storage provides better company privacy and security. Cloud servers provide physical separation from an on-site breach by housing information in geographically dispersed data centers This significantly reduces the likelihood of your data being accessed by unauthorized users. In addition, top-cloud service providers like Salesforce safeguard their servers with items such as fences, guards, biometric devices, cameras, and more.

Secondly, a cloud-based law firm management server provides protection against natural disaster outages and localized equipment failures. By storing firm information in multiple data centers across the world, vital company information is always accessible and able to be recovered regardless of environmental factors that may affect your company and employees. This storage method also allows for easier recovery in the case of potential information loss or compromise.

High-Grade Encryption

To best safeguard against potential threats like hackers and malware, cloud-technology takes several encryption steps to minimize risk. Litify’s Salesforce-based legal platform employs TLS encryption for data in transit between end users, the platform, and any integrations. Our document management and generation capabilities are encrypted at rest by default as well as optional field-level encryption at the platform level. Data encrypted at rest and transit by 128 or 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), protects data from unwanted internal or external access.

Improved User Protection

It is common for a company’s employees to be their biggest security risk. Poor password design and clicking links in phishing emails are all common mistakes that can open companies to potential hacking threats. Cloud-based management platforms like Litify help reduce the risk of employee error or carelessness, leading to security concerns. On a user-facing level, law firm management platforms invoke two-step authentication. This helps ensure platform users are in fact who they say they are.

On Litify’s platform, in addition to a username and password, law firms and companies can choose to enforce that users verify their identity through the use of TOTP tokens, U2F protocol tokens, other time-based authenticators, as well as SAML 2.0 integrations. Added user-security features include secure portals for communicating with clients, colleagues, and other legal partners. Built on Salesforce, Litify’s platform is regularly monitored by security analysts that catalog network actions to better understand user habits and build identifiers of possible threats to data security.