Peer to Peer Magazine

8 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | WINTER 2017 BEST PRACTICES Keeping Your Firm Out of Cybersecurity Headlines If law firms still had doubts about the need to pay more attention to cybersecurity, the last 12 months should have dispelled them completely. by David Levine Keeping Your Firm Out of Cybersecurity Headlines Ransomware, for example, was no stranger to law firms and in some cases had crippling impacts on productivity and profitability and/or resulted in litigation. Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the 2016 Panama Papers scandal, cut its global offices from 45 to six, and firm cofounder Jurgen Mossack acknowledged that the data breach had damaged the firm's credibility and boom line. And in December 2016, the FBI and the U.S. Aorney for the Southern District of New York charged three Chinese traders with securities fraud, saying the traders had targeted multiple mergers and acquisitions law firms, broken into the systems of at least two of them and traded on stolen non public information to make millions. "This case of cyber meets securities fraud should serve as a wake-up call for law firms around the world," said U.S. aorney Preet Bharara in a statement released about the final incident. "You are and will be targets of cyber hacking, because you have information valuable to would-be criminals." At Ricoh we see that the legal industry is taking cybersecurity seriously as our customers increasingly ask extensive and detailed questions about our own security measures. Corporate clients are starting to audit their law firms' cybersecurity stances and pull their business if the firms fails to meet standards. For the first time some of our law firm customers are citing cybersecurity as their biggest competitive differentiator. In short, firms are realizing that good cybersecurity is not only critical to reducing business risk but also an important way to build competitive advantage. New Attacks and New Rules in 2017 Ransomware aacks — specifically, massive aacks such as WannaCry and Petya — dominated the headlines in the first half of 2017, and major law firms were not immune. But while ransomware made the most headlines, other types of cybercrime continued apace. In a recent survey of 200 U.S. law firms by LOGICFORCE, 66 percent reported that they had experienced a breach of some type, with varying levels of compromise. The Ponemon Institute's 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study polled over 400 companies around the world, and all of them said they had experienced

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