The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

You know what’s really scary?   Losing your law firm data.   Even so, many law firms don’t utilize effective data backups. Every business needs to backup its electronic data; but, the imperative is even more important for law firms, which have ethical and fiduciary duties tied to their client relationships.   And, although it’s now 2018, many law firms subsist on remarkably thin data backup systems.   This is true even though law firm data loss is not an extremely rare or impossible occurrence.   Fires, floods, natural and manmade disasters -- those all still wipe out law firm data.   So, if you’re concentrating on securing your law firm data backup, there’s no time like the present to get a handle on it. This is a three-step method to making sure your data is recoverable: (1) Set up a physical data backup.   It doesn’t really matter what it is (some firms still use backup tapes) -- just have something in place.   (If you’re p...

Most lawyers have a general understanding of what encryption does.  (If you don’t, let me introduce you to Wikipedia .)  Nevertheless, most attorneys don’t feel like they have a comprehensive plan for managing encryption in their law firms, when it comes to sending secure files to clients and colleagues.  That leaves a lot of law firms feeling a little insecure.  But, there’s a simple strategy for managing encryption in law firms, that’s entirely based on the volume of files you need to encrypt. If you don’t send out a lot of documents that need to be encrypted , you can use the built-in tools in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat to encrypt those documents.  Apply passwords, and then call the recipient with the password -- don’t email it along with the document. If you do send out a lot of documents that need to be encrypted , use an email encryption system that will allow you to manually encrypt certain emails and their contents, or to automate t...