Articles

Excerpt: Several years ago, a Canadian attorney and good friend of ours, invested $10,000 in bitcoin.
Clearly, he is a lot smarter than us. We can’t even imagine the extent of his profit – several days
before we started to write this article, bitcoin hit an all-time high of $4,991.66 on September 2,
2017. It is down slightly as we write, but our friend certainly hit a jackpot.

We become aware of bitcoin wallets a few years ago, as husbands (mostly) began to hide assets
from their soon-to- be ex-wives in those wallets. And then came a barrage of ransomware
attacks. Law firm after law firm was paying the ransom ($300-$500 in the early days and $1500-
$3000 today). The cybercriminals usually want the ransom in bitcoin. To our amazement, there
are now bitcoin ATMs available in local gas stations and laundromats complete with posted
instructions on creating a bitcoin wallet for the Bitcoin novice.

In July, there were reports of a Citrix UK study which found that a third of UK companies were
stockpiling digital currency, mostly in bitcoins, to pay the ransom (an average of approximately
$176,000) if they became victims of a ransomware attack.

At the 2017 ILTACON conference, artificial intelligence wasn’t quite kicked to the curb, but the
buzz around blockchain became very loud indeed. In the last several months, it has become
increasingly clear that blockchain is a transformative technology that is going to make
substantial changes in the practice of law.

Read the entire article here.

Excerpt: With so many recent disasters and perhaps more ahead, the ABA Law Practice Division advises you to do some planning NOW.

Have a Disaster Recovery Plan which you review annually. Define who is responsible for what. It should be electronic and in the cloud as well as in paper. Several trusted members of the firm should also keep a paper copy at home.

Communications are always the #1 problem. An emergency contact list should be in paper and in the cloud where it can be accessed via a computer or a phone.

In case of flooding or mass destruction, it is best to have a backup in the cloud. Test your backup regularly to make sure it is working. There are many reputable cloud providers – examples include Mozy, Carbonite, Backblaze, CrashPlan SMB and Acronis.

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Excerpt: We’re quickly approaching 2018 and a week doesn’t go by without another variant of malware causing havoc across the globe. First it was the WannaCry ransomware worm, which infected more than 230,000 computer systems in over 150 countries demanding ransom payments in exchange for the decryption of files. More recently, a new variant using code from the Petya ransomware (named “notpetya”) struck first in Ukraine followed by other European countries and disabled critical utility services such as the radiation monitoring system at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, as well the affecting the countries’ banks and metro systems.

What caught the attention of lawyers was that an apparent infection in one of DLA Piper’s European offices brought the law firm’s normal operations to a halt. As we write, the extent of the damage is still unclear.

The times have changed since Cryptolocker first ran wild in 2013, but the results are still as devastating. The costs of ransoms have significantly gone up from a few hundred dollars to the $1,000+ plus range now for the decryption key to unlock the affected files – and more than half of those who pay up do not receive the decryption key. So much for honor among thieves!

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Excerpt: Many commentators have predicted that 2017 will be the year of Amazon’s Alexa. Alexa is one of several virtual voice assistants that are working their way into our everyday lives. The Amazon Echo and the smaller Echo Dot had a great sales year in 2016 and finished off the holiday season as the best selling items on Amazon. Estimates by Forrester indicate that 6 million Amazon Echo devices were sold by the end of 2016. That’s a lot of hardware.

Alexa is just one of the virtual assistants available for lawyers today. There’s also Google Home/Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana and Samsung’s Bixby on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Siri was the first on the market but has rapidly lost ground to Alexa and Google Assistant, the two big players in the virtual assistant offerings. Google has the advantage for research since it has access to the power of Google search. Alexa is a better integration device, especially with the addition of “skills” that allow it to connect to other services and apps. Bixby is the newest player in the virtual assistant space and promises to have some unique features that don’t exist in the others. One such feature is the ability to take a picture of something in a foreign language (e.g. road sign, business advertisement, etc.) and Bixby will translate it for you.

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Excerpt: Does your firm accept and process credit cards? If not, you probably should. Clients are more apt to pay their retainers or your invoices if they can use a credit card instead of writing you a check. The way you process credit cards is about to change in a big way (for all businesses), but let’s start at the beginning.

Merchant Account
The first step in processing credit cards is getting a merchant account. A merchant account is essentially
a contract with a “processor” that takes your transactions and processes them with the credit card
companies (e.g. MasterCard, VISA, American Express, Discover, etc.). When you work with a processor,
you will pay a variety of fees (e.g. discount percentage, transaction fee, etc.) for each one of your credit
card transactions. Typically, the discount percentage will go down as you gather more and more
information to validate the transactions. As an example, the discount rate will be lower if you have the
cardholder’s complete address (including zip code) and CVV (card verification value) versus only having
the billing zip code. Companies such as LawPay, Sage Payment Solutions, Square and Authorize.net are
credit card processors.

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Excerpt: Not always. There was a recent case in which confidential data was not, to put it mildly, well handled. The corporate defendant, a mortgage servicer, was accused of violating a consumer’s privacy rights based on the manner in which it handled collection calls. The defendant protected its customer data with layers of network security consistent with best practices and ISO guidelines. During discovery, the plaintiff’s experts received the calling data and copies of the customer service call recordings.

Both experts had unrelated full-time day jobs. Their expert witness work was a side business run out of their homes. Neither expert had a technical degree, and neither had taken a course in data security for over a decade. Both experts stored the sensitive case data in their homes. There were no locks on the doors to their home offices, so anyone in the houses had access to the drives. Neither expert was familiar with the basic ISO standards relating to data security. Neither had a written data security plan for their home network, and no outside company had ever performed vulnerability or penetration testing on their networks. One expert had no automatic intrusion detection software on his network. Both routinely produced data with sensitive PII (personally identifiable information) in unencrypted form.

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Excerpt: Back in 2015, we wrote an article entitled “How Will Watson’s Children Impact the Future of Law Practice?” What a lot has happened in two years! The children of Watson and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies continue to spawn at an ever-accelerating rate.

Only recently has genuine real-world usage of AI in law firms begun to flourish. Amid the initial hype, about 5% of what was ballyhooed as AI, in our judgment, was not. Even today, there is an astonishing amount of hype – everyone wants to say they’ve boarded the AI train. As we write, an article from InfoWorld was just published entitled, “Artificially Inflated: It’s Time to call BS on AI.” While great ‘clickbait’, we think the title overstates the case. The peaks and troughs of AI are well documented, and as we are now at a peak, the hype factor gets greater, while the reality (often very good) is lost in the noise of the hype.

As large firms, which certainly need to be at the forefront of innovation, begin to invest considerable sums in AI, the landscape is changing. Large law firms simply cannot afford – for monetary and brand reasons – to be left behind. Clients will begin to see the efficiencies of AI and its extraordinary possibilities wherever AI may be found. AI will be a honeypot to clients seeking those efficiencies and possibilities.

A brief note: An article of this length cannot adequately address all the players in the legal AI market and what they can do. We call out a few names simply because we’ve run into these companies through colleagues or our reading.

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Excerpt: The FBI says that ransomware nets cybercriminals $1 billion a year. No wonder so many people want a piece of that pie.

Computerworld recently reported that hackers spreading ransomware are getting greedier. In 2016, the average ransom demand to provide the decryption key for encrypted data rose to $1,077, up from $294 the year before, according to a report from security firm Symantec. Symantec also reported a 36% increase in ransomware in 2016 from the prior year. We are aware of small law firms in Virginia that paid $1200 and $3000 to get their data back – the damage being furthered by the length of time it took to restore the data.

Helping to fuel the ransomware boom is the digital black market, where hackers can sell ransomware kits for as little as $10 and as much as $1,800, making it easier for other cybercriminals who can't code to get a piece of the action.

Read the entire article here.

Excerpt: Let’s dive right in. If lawyers understand their technology . . .

Lawyers can save money

Serious money can be saved if you don’t listen to a vendor peddling snake oil at a conference or an IT consultant whose prime concern may not be your wallet/purse. When you learn about technology, you at least know the right questions to ask. You may not know enough to make the decisions and you may still need guidance, but you may know enough to be a “BS filter.” And once you smell that bull, you’ll know you’re talking to the wrong person. That is very useful in and of itself.

Read the entire article here.

Excerpt: Remember the good old days of ransomware? You would get an e-mail saying that you owed the IRS money and could pay it via a helpfully included link. Lots of people did this because it was only a couple of hundred dollars. And who wants to duke it out with the IRS? The same dull-witted people fell for the e-mail claiming that someone at your home had downloaded music or movies illegally (much more likely true than the first scenario) and you needed to pay a fine so no one would come after you (or your spouse/child) for a much greater sum. Again, the price was relatively small and many people paid.

The likelihood that a lawyer would fall for these primitive versions of ransomware was small. Fast forward to the days of Cryptolocker which began in 2013. This ransomware Trojan attacked computers running Microsoft Windows, propagating itself by getting a user to click on an attachment or a link contained in an e-mail. Click on the link or attachment and “Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner” the malware invisibly downloaded and began to encrypt your files. The malware encrypted files stored locally on the computer system as well as on any mapped network drives, such as those files on your server, connected flash drives and other external USB drives.

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