Ascertus blog

Recently, I was commissioned by an organisation of significant size and in a high-risk industry to demonstrate to the Board the vulnerability of its employees to criminal hackers using non-technical means. Using Open Source Intelligence to gather information on a selection of the most senior individuals in the organisation, I was able to reveal how easily and legitimately, I was able to engage with them, physically access their office building; and if had I intended to do so, use the insight to hack into the business. It was an ‘eye-opener’ for the Board!

This is what malicious social engineers do – they leverage the ‘Perfect Storm’ – created by the organisation’s culture, the employees’ frame of mind and lack of security awareness and the ready availability of detailed personal information, to use social engineering and the “human factor” to gain business sensitive information for their own financial gains.

In a law firm, keeping paper records is a major expense, and a relentless cause of inefficiency and risk. Based on a survey of nearly 200 US law firms across size and geography, half of all lawyers still prefer to work with paper, so most firms continue to accept the precedent of files, folders, boxes, file rooms and offsite records storage.

With an eye towards budget predictability and managing risk, many in-house legal departments are looking to implement alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) with outside counsel as an element of legal spend management.

There was a time when any arrangement outside straight billable hours was unheard-of, today a greater number of law firms are now open to AFAs – in fact, they have no choice. The issue, therefore, has become one of structuring the best fee arrangements – one that both parties agree to, aligns with the goals and financial requirements of each, and is based upon accurate historical data to give the legal department confidence that the arrangement is intelligent and appropriate.

The benefits of privately hosted systems are many – ability to scale up or down, technical support, cost-effectiveness and business continuity.  I’ll steer clear of using the term ‘cloud based’ because it’s become a highly emotive and suspiciously regarded term by the legal market.  

However, there’s commercial merit in using a hosted systems supplier, not necessarily for production systems’ environments, but as a suitable, alternative solution for non-production environments, such as test, development, archive and training.  By selectively locating these ‘other’ server environments on to a hosted platform; and outsourcing the maintenance of business solutions (i.e. document management, CRM, practice management, etc.) to an external, securely administered platform of remote data centres (e.g. Microsoft Azure) – law firms can reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Recently, I met the head of an in-house legal department at an organisation who mentioned that they were in the process of renegotiating many of their contracts because they simply couldn’t find the documents in question! Surprising though it may sound, in reality it isn’t.