P2P

76 T he novel coronavirus pandemic continues to affect businesses in all sectors and industries around the world. With law firm operations profoundly disrupted, firms have been forced to discover new ways to operate their practices and serve clients with nearly all their attorney's and support staff working remotely. This massive shift to work-from-home left a vast data governance gap that law firms are quickly working to address. This paradigm shift to work-from-home did not offer most firms the time to implement an effective data governance plan for the new work-from-home model. This new operational model requires firms to review key areas of information security and take action to close the governance gap while continuing to serve their clients. Firms Cannot Govern Paper Scattered in Non-Firm Locations Law firm operations have always been paper-centric — this now presents logistical and information security challenges. Setting up and managing a system where attorneys and support staff working remotely can request and receive paper documents from the firm's records department is complicated and poses significant risk to data privacy. On top of this, having paper documents scattered in various, non-firm locations in an unsecure, remote environment is the stuff of an information security administrator's nightmare. Given the challenges and risks the traditional paper- based document retrieval process presents, firms should look to alternative options, such as scan-on-demand solutions, to mitigate the governance gap created with the physical movement of paper- based documents. Scan-on-demand, as the name implies, allows firms access to their documents in digital form in as little as a few hours via a secure, encrypted portal. A scan-on-demand solution eliminates the risk of paper-based documents being lost during the delivery or return process, reduces wait times for documents, eliminates unproductive time spent on searching multiple boxes for a specific set of documents and, in many cases, reduces overall cost of retrieval. B Y K Y L E R E E S E , M B A A N D N AT H A N C U R T I S , I G P Closing the Information Security & Governance Gaps in the New Operational Model

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