Information Is the New Oil:
Protect Your Investment
by Odette van Ommen and James Edwards of IntApp
Today, a growing number of pundits and organizations have proclaimed that "information is the new oil." And
like any new commodity, many are investing heavily in discovering new and better ways to extract, distill and benefit from it. Law firms have understood the power that comes from harnessing information for some time. As knowledge workers providing clients with the benefits of their expertise and experience, lawyers have an innate understanding of the value of collaboration and knowledge management. Access to information is critical to this process. However, given the scope and nature of the information firms manage, a variety of confidentiality and security drivers increasingly push against tendencies to enable broad internal sharing.
Information Security: Drilling Deeper Information security scares have been making headlines in both
mainstream and legal media publications. Most recently, worries
about internal leaks and external hacking attacks targeting law firms have raised concerns across the industry. These hacking concerns are very real — government agencies have issued warnings, and a professional standards body reported data that suggested at least 75 firms were hacked in 2011.
Law Firms: An Information Spindletop Law firms are at the center of the storm because they store some
of their clients' most sensitive business information and are viewed by criminal elements as a less defended path to that data. With information proliferating, particularly as new modes of data transfer and storage (like tablets and cloud services) gain adoption, firms must take care to understand and respond to evolving security trends and response strategies.
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