Several high-profile and global law firms have been under the radar of cyber-security data breaches. For instance, the Mossack Fonseca firm experienced the Panama Papers leak in 2016, exposing sensitive financial information of numerous clients. DLA Piper was hit by a ransomware attack in 2017, disrupting operations across multiple offices. In 2020, Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks faced a ransomware attack that led to the exposure of confidential information of high-profile clients, including celebrities. There have been operational and financial repercussions to law firms due to the pervasive threat of data breaches, and cyber-attacks. A U.S. law firm specializing in serving marquee financial institutions faced a cyber-breach that exposed the personal data of more than 325,000 people.
Big law firms like Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, a U.S. law firm specializing in serving marquee financial institutions faced a cyber-breach in 2023 that exposed the personal data of more than 600,000 people. For over two weeks, the attacker accessed a portion of their network, including file sharing and storage containing information related to their clients. It is evident that the legal sector has been under a continuing threat of loss of client sensitive information and personal data.
The repercussions of a data breach at a law-firm can be long-lasting and can severely impact the viability of the organization. First and foremost, failure to protect client information can impact the reputation of the organization and lead to loss of business. It bears the risk of losing current and prospective clients leading to financial losses.
Second, there are several financial losses that an organization has to undertake for the purposes of investigation of the breach, remediation and cyber-security upgrades. This is exemplified in case of a global law-firm, like DLA Piper which faced a cyber-breach due to which their employees worldwide could not use their official telecommunication systems while some were unable to access basic documents for their work. To remediate the attack, the firm’s IT department worked more than 15,000 hours of paid overtime. Given the gravity and impact of the breach, the firm had to delete and redevelop its entire Windows environment.
Third, any exposure of personal data invites regulatory consequences, which can lead to fines, sanctions and lawsuits. Any firm situated in a country with data privacy legislation needs to ensure that the personal data of their clients is protected.
Fourth, any attack or data breach requires a proper investigation, and audit into the operations of the organization, and this consequently results in disruption of normal business operations. This reduces the productivity of employees, causes unsatisfactory client services, and increases the costs of the business.
How does data anonymization assist in avoiding the aforementioned repercussions for your law firm?
The demand for data anonymization is due to the rise in the data economy. There is an exponential growth of data in the legal sector, and this big data can be a game changer for law-firms. The utilization of volumes of data can be beneficial to the law-firms by analysing trends, patterns and correlations between these data sets.
A good case for analyzing how global law firms utilise big data is Allen & Overy (A&O), due to the firm’s global status. It has worked on analytics, artificial intelligence, and ‘big data’ integrated solutions for its operations and customers. For example, in one M&A deal, A&O pioneered the use of data analytics to run through about 1300 contracts and completed the whole due diligence in a shorter span and at a lower cost to the client.
By using big-data, law firms can predict the outcomes of a trial, understand the legal precedents, and can prepare case strategies with a better success rate. This data allows law firms to approach situations with a data-backed analysis which improves their rate of success, and efficiency assisting them in courts, as well as in negotiations.
One of the pressing issues of the intersection of big data and the legal sector is data privacy and cyber breaches. The priority of law firms analysing big data is to ensure proper privacy compliance. Due to increased public scrutiny of data privacy regulations, law firms must adopt a strategy for privacy compliance. To protect client sensitive information, it is necessary to adopt data anonymization.
It is pivotal to grasp the process of data anonymization and how it can benefit your organization. This process of data anonymization involves altering or removing personally identifiable information (‘PII’) from a piece of data to preserve the personal data of individuals and comply with privacy regulations.
The anonymization process comprises masking and replacing personal data such as credit card details, resident and office addresses, visa or passport details, or social security numbers. Towards this end, values are replaced or removed, by using cryptographic techniques, or adding random noise, to protect the data.
The essence of data anonymization is to protect these sensitive documents and encrypt them in a reversible or non-reversible manner so one can limit the ability of a user to view, share, edit, comment and download sensitive data with unauthorized access. Any process will ensure that only verified users can access private data based on internal security policies that verify user access continuously. This is like a digital camouflage that assists in protecting the privacy of an individual, while still allowing access to this data to the organization for research and analysis.
Let’s show you with an example of how data anonymization works. For this purpose, we will use a tool called Nymiz, an AI based data anonymization and redaction platform designed especially for legal firms.
Nymiz’s platform provides various workflows, both reversible and irreversible, including anonymization and pseudonymization. It also offers substitution methods like tokenization and synthetic data replacement to anonymize or redact data, tailored to the specific use case and the final goals of your organization.
Why use AN AI based Data Anonymization platform vs Traditional Techniques?
Organizations in the past have followed traditional anonymization techniques. The issues with these techniques are multi-fold.
- Operational Delays from Manual Anonymization Processes:
The time-intensive nature of manual data anonymization processes can cause significant delays in legal operations and client service.
- Manual Data Anonymization Drains Resources:
Extensive hours devoted to manually anonymizing data detract from valuable time that could be better utilized for core legal activities.
- Information Bottlenecks Due to Unshakeable Data:
Difficulty in data sharing leads to the accumulation of isolated information pools, obstructing effective knowledge distribution and management within the firm.
The current world is heavily dominated by technology and law firms do face the risk of cyber threats because of which important client data becomes at risk. The implications of data leaks go beyond 1 year incurring short-term costs; they can be calamitous to a firm’s reputation and its clientele.
Due to the rising amounts of data produced in the legal industry, data privacy strategies are fast becoming crucial. There are different techniques of anonymizing data including pseudonymization and tokenization which help the firms achieve privacy of the personal data used in developing insights. Apart from adhering to strict privacy laws, these methods allow firms to examine the patterns and develop better services that seize their clients’ trust without compromising the latter’s privacy. When it comes to data management, law firms should develop strong data protection mechanisms, which helps to work through the issues of the data economy and protect the interests of their clients.
Therefore, the legal sector must address the issue of increasing volumes of data coupled with the responsibility to safeguard the clients’ details. Due to increased development of cyber threats law firms have to implement data anonymization measures that will help them minimise risks and conform to privacy laws.
Data privacy is not a luxury, but a necessity for the sustainability and credibility of legal business organizations. At this point, tools like Nymiz become crucial since they offer innovative solutions in data anonymization, empowering law firms to effectively protect sensitive information while maximizing the utility of their data assets.
About the Author
Oscar Villanueva, CEO, Nymiz, completed his Industrial Organization Engineer from UPC, MBA from UB. He also holds Executive Development Program certificate from IESE and a Disruptive Innovation Program certificate from MIT. Entrepreneur and co-founder of three startups, as well as a mentor and investor in startups. He has over 12 years of experience in technology and innovation working with REPSOL and PETRONOR. He is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of NYMIZ Software Company. Along with his co-founder, Oscar decided to launch Nymiz in 2020 to protect the privacy of peoples’ and companys’ sensitive data using AI.
Oscar can be reached online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/oscar-villanueva-canizares/ and at our company website https://www.nymiz.com/
Source: www.cyberdefensemagazine.com