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Five Ways You May Be Contributing to a Data Breach

By Charlie Magliato
September 29, 2011

While attorneys understand the importance of client confidentiality, many are less concerned about data security. This can be a serious oversight, since law firms are becoming increasingly vulnerable to security breaches. As other industries such as healthcare, financial services and the government start to recognize the dangers of security breaches and deploy more stringent security measures, the hacker community has begun to eye the legal industry as low-hanging fruit. Since law firms have been slow to adopt the newest security technology and practices, they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to attacks.

With a security breach, law firms not only hurt their relationships with clients; they may be at risk of noncompliance with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), as well as data privacy laws. Such noncompliance can lead to large fines, a public announcement of the breach and damage to the law firm's reputation and business-development efforts. These costs, both quantifiable and non-quantifiable, can be enormous. Compared to the potential consequences of a data breach, the costs of actually implementing policies and technology to protect confidential client and personally identifiable data is trivial.

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