Email Protection for Legal

Email Security for Law Firms

Ensuring the protection of client data is one of the most important responsibilities of a law firm, or indeed any organization in the legal sector. It’s vital, both legally and ethically, that when a client or customer entrusts you with their sensitive information, you keep it secure and protected.

But in the digital world, this is much easier said than done. Many of the digital technologies we rely on for instant communication and collaboration with colleagues and customers are inherently insecure, with a number of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors looking to gain access to sensitive data. This is especially true when it comes to email.

With email encryption, you can set rules to guarantee that only your intended recipients can view email content and attachments and that email data cannot be accessed by third-parties while in transit. With Trustifi’s sophisticated email encryption, you can set up automated data loss protection (DLP) policies that give end users the controls they need to protect client data and secure email access.

Key Challenges Facing Law Firms

In the legal sector, trust between your company and your clients is critical. When representing a client, you have an ethical and legal duty to ensure client data is secure. Clients need to know that when they trust you with confidential information, that information will remain confidential. Email encryption can help you maintain that trust in four ways.

1. Preventing Email Data Leaks

The first and possibly most important use case for encrypting email is stopping the leak of important data. It’s often thought that when you send an email, it travels in a straight line from your network directly to the recipient’s inbox. But this is not the case—instead emails are like pinballs, bouncing from mail server to mail server and passing through proxy servers before hitting the recipient’s inbox.

At any point in this journey, anyone could intercept the email and read the information within, including links and attachments. This is a critical point for lawyers, who often have to exchange sensitive emails with clients. These emails might contain financial information, contracts, medical histories, and information related to criminal proceedings—all of which is like gold to dust to cybercriminals.

In addition, when you send an email, you have no way of knowing that the person who opened that email is the person you thought they were, or if they even received it in the first place.

Encryption ensures that emails are protected “end-to-end,” i.e. from the point of sending to the point of receiving. All email content and attachments are protected, and only the intended recipient is able to open encrypted emails. Encryption vastly improves the security of email data.

2. Protection Against Human Error

The second major risk from emails is not technical—but human. Lawyers often end up with an inbox bursting at the seams, with hundreds of emails coming in every week and more contacts in their directory than anyone could reasonably keep on top of.

Unfortunately, this can often lead to simple human error. It’s easy for emails to be accidentally sent to the wrong person or to select the wrong attachment. Even mistakes as simple as replying to an email chain instead of an individual email can cause sensitive client information to become public—with no malicious intent whatsoever.

Human error can also cause more serious damage. Security professionals insist that you should never share personal information over email channels—but we’re all human, and in the midst of a busy day or important case, corners can be cut and information can be sent via unsafe channels, which can have hugely damaging consequences.

3. Protecting Your Company’s Reputation

In June 2017, employees of DLA Piper, one of the largest, most highly regarded law firms in the world, woke up to find all of their email networks, computers, and their global telephone network completely offline.

DLA Piper had been hit with a devastating ransomware attack known as EternalBlue, which spreads in 20 minutes and was able to effectively encrypt all of DLA Piper’s data. Hundreds of thousands of devices used by the more than 4,000 employees at the firm had been affected, and the organization was effectively taken offline, worldwide.

Lawyers were unable to access files and sensitive corporate and client data was at risk of being destroyed or leaked. Lawyers were unable to access files and sensitive corporate and client data was at risk of being destroyed or leaked. Worse, the attack badly damaged DLA Piper’s reputation as one of the world’s most trusted, secure law firms.

Encryption helps to prevent cybercriminals from being able to leak or get access to your data—helping to ensure your brand maintains a strong reputation for data security. Trustifi also provides inbound email protection, mitigating against email threats like ransomware and phishing—an important step to secure sensitive client data.

4. Ensuring Legal Compliance

When managing digital data, a number of legal standards must be met. Besides typical data protection regulations like NDA’s, geographic-specific regulations may apply, such as GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, and a host of other state-specific use cases.

In addition, industry-specific regulations exist, such as HIPAA for law firms dealing with healthcare-related legal issues and TILA-RESPA for real estate law.

These regulations may not specifically call for the use of email encryption, but implementing encryption demonstrates that your organization is taking all steps needed to secure client data.

How Can Trustifi Help Secure Law Firms?

Cloud-Based, End-to-End Encryption

Different methods of executing email encryption exist, but Trustifi’s service provides secure, cloud-based end-to-end encryption for email.

With end-to-end email encryption, messages are secured at every stage of delivery and cannot be accessed by anyone other than the intended recipient. The crucial difference with end-to-end encryption is that the email remains encrypted even after it has been delivered. This means if the recipient is hacked or their mailbox is compromised, the email content is still safe and protected.

Data Loss Prevention

Human error is a major problem when it comes to email. It’s easy to send sensitive data, private documents, and even credit card information to colleagues over email without a thought for the security implications—especially during a busy day or with an approaching deadline.

To mitigate this, Trustifi’s email encryption solution offers data-loss prevention (DLP). DLP enforces encryption automatically when certain keywords are detected in email messages and attachments, such as financial information, anything related to healthcare, and any other rules that are configured by administrators.

Ensure Legal Compliance

Email encryption is an important way to meet compliance regulations governing the usage and sending of private personal data. Trustifi’s email encryption solution supports full compliance with legal regulations and helps you do the same.

It’s one thing to be compliant, but equally important is proving you have acted in a compliant way. Trustifi’s encryption service provides:
– Proof of encryption with time-stamped delivery.
– Reporting of when encrypted emails were sent and when they were opened.
– A way to preconfigure email settings so that sensitive data is automatically encrypted.

Accuracy and Deliverability

In law firms, emails can often be extremely time sensitive, and delays between sending and receiving important information can have serious consequences. Because of this, it’s crucial that encrypted emails are not only delivered to the correct recipient but delivered in a timely way.

It’s important to send emails securely, but if the recipient never receives them or if they are blocked from being delivered, the service is ineffective. Trustifi’s service ensures email deliverability and timeliness for both your users and your recipients.

Policy Enforcement

Trustifi’s encryption solution provides a range of policies and controls to help you meet legal compliance, such as rules governing private email data that should be automatically encrypted and blocking the sending of emails containing sensitive information.

In addition, your system administrators get detailed reports on the use of encrypted emails across the organization, which can be used to prove compliance with encryption restrictions. Administrators can set policies governing the sharing of encrypted email and giving users the ability to recall emails if needed.

With Trustifi, you can “whitelabel” the encryption service, meaning you can customize encrypted emails with your own logos and company information.

End-User Email Controls

When dealing with complex and time sensitive cases, the last thing your users need is to be fiddling around with an elaborate encryption process and jumping through hoops to access encrypted emails that have been sent to them.

Trustifi simplifies encrypting emails from within the email client. Trustifi also makes it easy for recipients to open and reply to encrypted emails without having to create an account with the encryption provider or use a third-party website.

Controls within the Trustifi system give you power over email messages and data, such as the ability for end users to see when emails have been opened, set expiration dates for emails and attachments, and recall emails at any time.

Ease of Deployment and Management

Trustifi’s encryption solution is easy for administrators to deploy and manage. With simple roll out, minimal configuration needs, and no day-to-day management, Trustifi is an administrator’s dream come true.

Trustifi is a cloud-based solution that works well with cloud email networks like Office 365, Google Workspace, and Exchange. Cloud-based solutions are far easier to deploy and make it much quicker to onboard your users with features like Microsoft’s Active Directory sync.

Key Features of Our Law Firms Solution

Key Features of Our Law Firms Solution

Trustifi provides a complete, all-in-one email security platform to protect law firms against advanced email threats. Trustifi blocks data loss, ensures compliance with data regulations, and protects against phishing attacks, ransomware, business email compromise, and more.

Protect Your Clients and Ensure Compliance

Trustifi ensures that your client’s personal data is fully protected, with granular data loss protection policies that ensure any personal, financial, or sensitive information included in or attached to an email is automatically encrypted. Administrators can set granular policies to govern encrypted data, with full control and visibility for end users over who can access encrypted email messages. Trustifi’s 1-Click Compliance™ ensures full compliance with HIPAA/HITECH, PII, GDPR, FSA, FINRA, LGPD, CCPA, and more with just the click of a button.

All-in-One Email Protection

Trustifi provides total protection for email. Inbound email is scanned for malicious content in real-time by powerful AI engines, protecting organizations from spam, malware, viruses, phishing, business email compromise, and ransomware. Protection extends to the email inbox, with real-time threat scanning of links and attachments even after email delivery. Outbound messages are protected with secure AES 256-bit NSA-grade encryption, ensuring sensitive data and attachments are always kept protected from malicious threat actors.

Easy-to-Use Encryption and End User Control

Trustifi’s encryption process is totally seamless and incredibly easy to use. Users can send encrypted email with the click of a button, with full visibility over who has opened email messages, and extra controls, including the ability to unsend email and revoke access to malicious email messages. Unlike other encryption platforms, when you receive an encrypted email with Trustifi, you don’t need to create a new account or log into a cumbersome secure web portal. You can see the message straight from your inbox with secure two-factor authentication.