Law firms are prime candidates for cyber attacks because of the highly sensitive data they store and share, as well as their large percentage of high-value financial transactions.
Three in four law firms have been the victim of a cyber attack, whereas only 39% of UK businesses overall have experienced an attack in the last 12 months.
Damage from cyber attacks hit law firms in multiple ways. First is financial, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority found that, in a sample of 23 firms, £4 million in client funds had been stolen — £400,000 of which had to be repaid by the firm directly, not by insurers. Additionally, any operational disruption from a cyber attack results in a loss of billable hours, increasing the financial hit law firms can face.
But a successful cyber attack doesn’t just cause financial damage and operational disruption; it also causes significant reputational damage. How can clients trust a practice that cannot trust its own security investments to protect client information? Reputational damage can lead to loss of business — and it’s especially embarrassing for firms that also provide advice to clients on dealing with cybersecurity incidents.
The goal is to develop a strong security posture built around proactive protection of the firm’s data, finances, and reputation. But law firms face significant hurdles to achieving this goal.
The Biggest Cybersecurity Challenges for Law Firms
Law firms face three key challenges when wanting to establish robust defences:
1. Lack of Resources
Security competes with other IT priorities that help practices offer a superior service to their clients, to operate more efficiently, and to grow the book of business – things like process transformation, digitalisation, and service innovation. Delivering 24×7 security coverage in-house requires a budget of several hundreds of thousands of pounds per year, so it’s understandable that law firms focus IT resources on revenue generating areas, instead.
2. Dissatisfaction with Existing Tools
£140 billion is spent on cybersecurity annually, yet the number of attacks continues to increase, meaning there is clearly an effectiveness issue in the way cybersecurity tools are utilised. Many IT teams in the legal sector in fact have too many tools, leading to endless false alerts and needless complexity. Security staff are too often spending their time and wasting their expertise chasing down red herrings. This prevents them from optimising their current tools to be more effective and building a more robust, proactive security posture.
3. Compliance and Cyber Insurance
Compliance is a continually shifting topic, and the legislation varies between nations and jurisdictions. It’s a nigh-on full-time job just to stay on top of existing rules, let alone enforce them within your practice, yet 25% of firms are unable to dedicate a single member of staff to compliance. Compliance is not just about legislation. As cyber attacks increase, so too do insurance premiums. Insurers are setting the bar for attaining cyber insurance ever higher, requiring evidence of robust regulatory compliance, as well as proof of attack detection, prevention and remediation capabilities.
How to Overcome Cybersecurity Challenges for Law Firms
Getting your cybersecurity in order, then, is about more than just the attacks themselves. And, in fact, is perhaps best seen as a business enabler, due to the cost savings made and ability to meet regulatory demands, if implemented correctly.
What is the ‘correct’ implementation? Invest in more advanced cybersecurity tools, and bring expensive full-time specialist staff in-house? In short, no. There is another way. One that requires no further investment in tools – just more effective outcomes.
Cybersecurity that Assures Your Reputation
The Arctic Wolf® approach is designed to enable you to meet the challenges outlined above head-on, utilising our Security Operations Cloud, which plugs into your existing security tools, and is fully aligned to your firm’s way of working. Even better, all solutions are human-centric, delivered via our Concierge Security® team. We tailor the security outcomes to your specific objectives, whether that is meeting compliance standards, hardening your overall security posture, or reducing insurance premiums.
- Arctic Wolf Concierge Security supplements your team with two named Concierge Security experts, giving your environment full coverage, without the need for you to train or hire.
- The Arctic Wolf® Platform collects security telemetry from your existing tools to ensure they are used effectively. Any security event of interest is validated by one of our team, who only alert you to legitimate threats. We then provide unlimited remote incident response and guide you through remediation. You’re never alone with Arctic Wolf.
- The Arctic Wolf® Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solution provides 24×7 monitoring of your networks, endpoints, and cloud environments to help you detect, respond, and recover from modern cyber attacks. It gives you a proactive always-on compliance posture, with potential breaches highlighted before they occur, retained logs, managed investigations, and guided remediation.
- We want to end cyber risk for good, and that’s what our Managed Risk service, led by our Concierge Security team does for your unique environment. In essence, it’s about defining your attack surfaces, contextualising them with policies and other information, and then providing tailored advice on how to reduce risk. It’s another unique way Arctic Wolf brings more value to your firm and truly has your back.
- Because mitigating risk isn’t all about technology and processes — it’s about people too — our Managed Security Awareness enables your people to recognise and neutralise potential social engineering threats.
- If you are moving core services to the public cloud or SaaS services, our Cloud Detection & Response and Cloud Security Posture Management solutions bring complete visibility of risks, vulnerabilities, and threat response when making that migration.
Brought together, Arctic Wolf’s industry-leading, fully managed security operations solutions give your firm’s environment the robust 24×7 monitoring, detection, and response that cyber insurers and your clients want to see. The comprehensive nature of our subscription-based cloud service is why Arctic Wolf was identified as the most widely adopted and fastest growing vendor of choice in the most recent International Legal Technology Association Technology Survey.
Arctic Wolf helps law firms build a data-focused, modern, and proactive security posture. One in which your IT team is given the time back to progress the practice’s capabilities further, while cybersecurity is taken care of by a team of seasoned experts, and your firm’s reputation is assured.
That personal support is something that Sheridans, a UK law firm, really values. “With so many security products extolling the benefits of automation, we find the more effective solution is to have the right people to bolster our line of defence,” says James Barraclough, IT Analyst at Sheridans. “Someone to help us solve the problem in the moment, not create more alerts to add to our workload.”
Experience how Arctic Wolf can help set your firm up for success. Contact a member of our pack today and book your FREE demo.
