Law firms the world over have founded their success on the maxim ‘knowledge is power’. By the very nature of their business, lawyers occupy an enormously privileged position, being privy to the confidential documents, private conversations and sensitive information essential to commercial life. Yet with great power comes great responsibility, especially as we move into a position where the bulk of this information takes electronic form.
Protecting client confidentiality is holy writ for the profession, but how can we square this need for secrecy with a world in which a critical document concerning an initial public offering or an acquisition can be emailed to someone in the blink of an eye? We need look no further than the headlines to see the chaos that lax IT security policies can lead to: whether this be 24 million child benefit records copied to CDs and lost in the post, or the website of a major broadsheet newspaper (the Telegraph) brought down by hackers.
