A standard of communication for most lawyers is through email. On the other hand, lawyers need to make best efforts to prevent exposure of client confidential communications. At times these two are in conflict.
Email is not something that would rank high as a means of secure communication. There are many horrifying stories of government bodies such as the NSA by their own admittance intercepting and reviewing client, solicitor email. The painfully obvious the cyber-criminals, who are ever vigilant at procuring useful information that can be turned into financial gain. One other is in-house sabotage for example the leaking of private emails for political or financial gain.
The ramifications of a legal breach can be catastrophic, loss of client trust, litigation, jeopardize a case; the list goes on and on.
But don’t abandon your email. There’s easy ways to make your attorney-client emails more secure.
One is the use of a vault type email system, where once the encrypted email and its attachments are sent, they are stored by the server of the sending organization within an encrypted storage space.
The recipient receives an email with a link which is clicked on to retrieve the stored email at the sender’s organization.
Using either a one-time password or oAuth2 (Live ID, SAML) username and password, the recipient is authenticated and can then access the encrypted email and download attachments via the organization’s portal.
A simple to use tool, which allows both you and your client the peace of mind to know their private documents are secure.
Stay vigilant.