by Special to the RBJ
BridgeTower Media Newswires
-- The COVID-19 pandemic has so accelerated law firms’ adoptions of new technologies that they have jumped ahead several years, says Christopher Rodi, partner at Woods Oviatt Gilman LLP.
“It has really forced us to move five years forward in six months’ time,” Rodi says.
Like many other law firms, Woods Oviatt invested in its back-end computer infrastructure to allow its entire legal and administrative team to be able to work remotely, while having the security in place necessary to protect clients, Rodi says.
Woods Oviatt is having its workforce work fully on remote desktops so they are “always working securely behind our firewall no matter where on the earth they are,” Rodi says.
Having law firms use a graphic interface to connect their home computer to their work computer over a network connection is a preferred method of ensuring document management and document protection “from a hacker perspective and also for document management and client information security,” Rodi says.
Alan Winchester, a member of Harris Beach PLLC and leader of the firm’s cybersecurity protection and response practice group, says that his law firm is using Citrix’s remote desktop product so employees can access their work computers without having to send files to their home computers.
Winchester says this product allows employees to essentially have “a really long extension cord running to the office.”
It also allows the law firm to monitor the network and make sure all the usage is “copacetic,” Winchester says.
“Almost all of the information we handle is confidential,” Joseph Fousek, chief information officer at Bond Schoeneck & King, says. “Just the fact we’re representing a company is confidential information. If you’re using your home computer to work on work documents, who knows if you have appropriate protection in place?
“What if you're done working on those documents and store them on your home computer and then your child goes on the same home computer and does all sorts of social media that exposes that data potentially to hackers? That home computer really isn’t as well protected as your business computer. It really causes a lot of problems for businesses and really creates some fantastic opportunities for the bad guys,” he adds.
There are other advantages to having employees essentially use their work computers remotely besides security.
During litigation, Winchester notes that attorneys have to keep a log of confidential protected information and how that information was accessed. If that information was being accessed on attorneys’ home computers, the log would “get very big and busy” when presented to the other side of a case, he says.
Winchester says that the number of cybersecurity breaches has skyrocketed so much so that the insurance industry is starting to tighten its underwriting standards for cybersecurity insurance.
The single most important security protection is to have some sort of multifactor authentication, Winchester says. If multifactor authentication is enabled for logging into work computers, “the number of breaches would just plummet,” he says.
The best methodology for multifactor authentication is requiring users to enter a number on their phones, rather than just swiping on the screen of their phone to authenticate they are logging onto their work computers, Winchester says.
A multifactor authentication prompt that only requires an employee to swipe left on their phone to authenticate a login could let a hacker into an employer’s system if an employee authenticates the login when not paying attention to the notice among all of the other notices on their phones, Winchester says.
Another change in law firm technology is the rise of videoconferencing as the default option for communication.
Rodi, who is a transactional attorney, says that people never used to do formal closings of deals in a room. But the default form of communication used to be a conference call, not videoconferencing. As a result of the pandemic, however, videoconferencing has become the default way of meeting, Rodi says.
Videoconferencing is advantageous because he has clients all over the world that he has never met in person, so he gets that face-to-face interaction.
Winchester says the benefit of videoconferencing is that you can show opposing counsel the section of a document you are discussing with them on the shared screen and collaborate in real time.
“The ability to work more collaboratively is awesome,” Winchester says. “Contrary to the popular belief, lawyers are often just trying to figure out what the other side is saying and make it work.”
Winchester also says that he hopes virtual court appearances over videoconferencing will remain the norm for short court appearances like pretrial conferences and status hearings. It will save time and lower litigation costs for clients who won’t have to pay for their counsel to drive to court appearances and sit in a courtroom waiting for their cases to be called, he says.
Fousek notes that the telephone market changed in just over a year from lawyers just making phone calls to videoconferencing regularly.
“People really embraced the face-to-face conversation rather than just having the voice calls,” Fousek says. “They realized how you can pick up on visual cues. It really helps form the business connections. Just about every law firm leader I know is getting rid of their traditional phone switch that powers their offices and replacing it with a cloud-based unified communication service system.”
Fousek also notes that 75 percent of Bond Schoeneck’s conference rooms used to just be connected for telephones. As the law firm’s workforce returns to the law firm’s offices, all the conference rooms have needed to be equipped with TVs and outfitted with the capability to tie in people’s cameras, Fousek says.
The firm has 11 different offices, and Bond Schoeneck’s employees are using videoconferencing technology “to collaborate with people in our own offices,” Fousek says. “People all of a sudden got more comfortable with not having everyone in the same room and working with people who are in a different setting or in another office in the country. It just blossomed in terms of collaboration.”
The shift to remote work has required Bond Schoeneck to upgrade its phone system, Fousek says. The traditional phone system had poor capability to connect phone calls to people working remotely. The firm is in the process of moving to a unified communication system that will let employees use their business phone from their laptop or as an app on their smartphone or tablet, he says.
Additionally, Bond Schoeneck now is keeping its audiovisual team busier than ever because they need to set up cameras for mediations and court appearances, Fousek says. The team switches the cameras so that the presiding judge or mediator can see the appropriate person who is speaking. The team also controls the sound and can mute the correct people.
“We created a whole tranche of work for law firms that didn’t exist before to produce all of that on a Zoom meeting from multiple conference rooms,” Fousek says.
Amaris Elliott-Engel is a Rochester-based freelance writer.
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