Legal tech cybersecurity threats: types, evolution, examples

The crux of the issue: Higher risk, lower budget

However as most SMEs often caught in unpredictable cash flows or limited internal financial or cybersecurity resources, they end up using only keywords or 2FA when it comes to authenticating their users.

This trend is common to legal practices who may have proprietary software for their users, as well as for SaaS suppliers providing niche service applications to them (for eDiscovery, case management, etc.)

They do not have an overarching cybersecurity tool or policy, leaving them often open to exploits, malignant updates, plugins malware injections, etc.

2FA and MFA makes law tech organizations effectively compliant, in regulatory terms showing reasonable efforts to ensure their users cyber security.

However they operate in a field where other risks exist which are not covered by protocols such as keywords or MFA, which as we covered here can give a false sense of security. Many types of frauds or fraudulent behaviors can bypass password or MFA protocols.

A growing cost across the board, chiefly for high regulatory data This growing risk, common to all SMEs, is expounded specifically for legal practices and lawtech startups because theirs is a much higher onus, to protect even more sensitive data.

Legal practices and lawtech startups are disproportionately exposed to cybercrime as the data they must securize is possibly of the highest value out there.

Data breaches can directly compromise a high profile case, and cost catastrophic financial damage to legal practices.

Law as an industry is also, unsurprisingly, a highly litigative environment, and indirect consequences of the data breach can also run in the millions of $.

Also, legal tech is exposed to a much higher reputational/litigative cost should they be found in breach of data security themselves.

Finally, having less financial recourse than larger organizations, they are more likely to go bankrupt as a result of cybersecurity attacks, than larger organizations would. A telecom group suffering a data breach may litigate and carry on at the cost of a few millions.

For a legal practice, the direct and indirect liabilities, contrasted to their financial reserves, often means that the practice will go bankrupt, if not by direct litigation, by long term reputational decline.

Smart MFA in lawtech can be simply, to configure the AI cybersecurity monitoring so that an account with low risk estimate might have to authenticate for a medium value access or transaction.

A higher usage risk profile may require more MFA authentication triggers, for even lower transaction levels.

An extreme account risk profile may be configured to trigger immediate account freezing until manual review.

Smart MFA provides both more opportunities for a more nuanced cyber risk management, but it also provides on a normal day a higher cybersecurity as well as higher user UX.