Ride the Lightning

2018 Corporate Counsel Breach Statistics – Prepare to Groan

September 17, 2018

Here's the news in a nutshell: Data breaches of in-house legal departments have doubled in the last year. Assuming that elicited a groan, the source is the 2018 survey by the Association for Corporate Counsel, which reported one-third of in-house counsel offices experienced a data breach in 2017, up from 15 percent in 2016.

A related recent ABA Journal article quoted Sterling Miller, general counsel of Marketo Inc., an online marketing technology company: "The possibility that your outside law firm could be breached and your sensitive data stolen is a huge nightmare for in-house lawyers. Outside counsel need to start taking this very seriously. If a breach happens, that law firm is probably no longer working for you and the malpractice claim could be very large."

It doesn't really matter whether you are in-house or outside counsel – the odds are that you need to up your security game.

That ABA article analyzed the ABA TechReport 2017 and found that "only 26 percent of responding firms had an incident response plan in place to address a security breach, and only two-thirds with 500 lawyers or more had such a plan in place. These plans were not a priority with smaller firms, as 31 percent of firms with 10 to 49 lawyers, 14 percent of firms with two to nine lawyers, and 10 percent of solo practices had such plans."

The high profile cybersecurity firm Mandiant, a division of FireEye, estimates that 80 of the top 100 law firms (by revenue) have been hacked since 2011. Our private conversations with large firm lawyers seem to bear out that estimation.

It appears that lawyers everywhere have some serious cybersecurity shoring up to do.

Hat tip to Dave Ries

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