Are law firms really slow to adopt new technology?

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A recent article on the BBC website asks, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, whether technology can bring lawyers into the 21st Century.  The media often portray lawyers as clinging on to time-honoured practices, increasing the time taken to pursue cases – as well as the charges to their clients.

But is this accurate? Whilst it is true that a number of smaller law firms in the UK are reluctant to embrace technology, many leading firms have made substantial investments in IT, and are increasingly using technology to reduce costs and improve client service. The arrival of fixed fee charging has made a difference, no doubt partially driven by the Alternative Business Structures legislation a few years ago that has seen high-profile corporate new entrants into the legal sector.

Safe4 works with a number of law firms, and is seeing heavy usage by a number of them across a range of business sectors: virtual data rooms for corporate mergers and acquisitions, residential and commercial property, dispute resolution, employment law, family law, sport and leisure, and inheritance planning to name but a few. Safe4 have invested heavily in ensuring adherence to Solicitors Regulation Authority guidance, thus reducing risk for their customers.

For more detail on how using Safe4 can save law firms money, enhance client service and improve compliance, please contact us. We will be very happy to assist you.

Problems originated by email continue – often with costly and damaging consequences

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The ransomware attack on Lincolnshire County Council last week has now been resolved, but once again the dangers that may lurk within email messages have been highlighted. When members of any organisation are accustomed to using email to transfer information that is critical or necessary for the business, the likelihood of inadvertently opening messages that contain harmful malware is increased. A county council will recover from the damage caused by such a problem; a small or medium sized business may not.

One of the sectors that is potentially exposed to such risks is the legal profession. It is estimated that more than 70% of UK law firms regularly communicate confidential client information in open email systems.

Safe4 offers a secure and reliable service for the transfer of confidential information to anyone with access to the Internet. Flexible configuration options mean that it can be applied to a variety of business requirements. Contact us for more information on how we can help your organisation to reduce costs, improve compliance and enhance customer service.

The need to maintain and protect the digital legacy is highlighted by action against Apple

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In October 2015 Safe4 launched the Digital Inheritance Vault at the Society of Will Writers annual Conference in Redditch, UK. Since then, the will writing community have been adopting the service in increasing numbers to offer it to their clients. One of the key benefits that the Vault provides is the ability to keep a record of all passwords and PINs in a completely secure place, visible only to the end client. This not only covers online accounts with banks, building societies, credit card providers, insurers and the like, but also social media accounts and physical devices such as computers, smartphones and tablets. The will-writer cannot gain access to this private information, but it can be released to the executor of the estate after the client’s death.

A recent case in Canada has demonstrated just how valuable such a service can be, as highlighted in the media this week. Whilst in this instance Apple have eventually agreed to open the iPad for the family, it took months of argument and aggravation at a time when the family was grieving. The contents of the iPad will almost certainly have no monetary value, but will contain cherished memories that can be enormously important to the family.

The Safe4 Digital Inheritance Vault makes provision for the recording of such information, and keeps it completely private. For more information on how the service works, please click here, or contact us. We will be delighted to assist you.

Email scam causes loss of £45,000 as conveyancing emails are hacked

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The use of email to carry confidential client information is still a significant cause of computer crime in the UK, with more than 70% of law firms persisting with the use of this high-risk means of carrying confidential information.

The latest instance has seen a tragic case involving newly-wed first time buyers lose their life savings, following the interception of emails by hackers who falsified bank details. Please click here for more information.

Using the Safe4 secure document delivery and storage service will radically reduce the risk of fraudulent interception of confidential information. The Safe4 service is SRA compliant, and never uses email to carry documents; by using UK-based ISO 27001 accredited data centres, performing full encryption of all uploaded information, and contracting with customers under English Law, Safe4 offers a fast and effective service that enhances regulatory compliance and offers levels of security that email cannot match. Even “secure” email services are often clumsy and inefficient, and do not offer the comprehensive audit trails and reporting facilities of Safe4.

For more information on how Safe4 can make your client communications fast, efficient and secure, please contact us. We will be delighted to assist you.

Safe4 version 4.3 is released

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In recent months the development team at Safe4 have been actively engaged with enhancements to the service that will improve the user’s experience, and help us to meet the many requirements for new capabilities that are constantly arising. The release of version 4.3 marks an important step towards a number of significant developments that will be announced in the near future.

In order to support improvements in the look-and-feel of Safe4 on mobile devices, the Files and Folders page of the system has been recreated, using different icons that are more suitable for the high-resolution screens on most of today’s mobile devices. This has presented an opportunity to restructure the page to offer significantly improved performance in all user interfaces. While the changes have not yet added any major functional enhancements, they have permitted some useability improvements such as remembering the sort sequence of columns in the files pane and making file history updates more personal to the user.

In the coming weeks using Safe4 on mobile devices will be greatly improved, so that the service will be easier to access for users who are on the move. Other new facilities will become available at regular intervals as we move into 2016.

As ever, if you would like any more information on these changes or any other aspect of the Safe4 service, please get in touch with us.

Re-emphasising the value of audit trails

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Proving that information has been accessed after it has been delivered can be a challenge. That is the main purpose of the detailed File History within Safe4, and it is proving to be of increasing value to customers and their clients.

Whether the activity in question is a complex corporate merger or acquisition, a personal inheritance plan, or updates to an insurance policy, it is often essential to know that the information in question has been received and opened. Sending printed documents in the post cannot provide this feedback, nor can sending documents as email attachments. The read-receipt provided by email systems does not confirm that the attachment has been opened, or even that it has not been deleted altogether.

Another benefit of the Safe4 audit trail is that it provides evidence that a confidential document has NOT been accessed by anyone other than an authorised person. This is especially valuable when deeply confidential information is being assembled in a private inheritance plan – it is impossible to prove that paper records have not been seen by someone they shouldn’t have, for example. The Safe4 Digital Inheritance Vault gives a level of security and confidentiality that can be difficult to achieve using other methods of managing information.

For more information on how using Safe4 can enhance the security of your private information, please get in touch with us. We will be delighted to assist.

“Secure” email services suffer outages – Safe4 records another month of 100% availability

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Safe4 has for over 5 years offered a document delivery and storage service that is highly secure, flexible, and exceptional value for money. Still, however, a number of organisations believe that “secure” email is a viable alternative for getting confidential documents safely to clients and other external parties.

Recent events suggest that some providers of so-called secure email services are not as reliable as they would wish us to think.  Click here for some examples of this.

October 2015 saw another month of 100% availability for Safe4, independently verified. October was also a record month for new user registrations for Safe4.

We all use email services every day for a wide range of communication activities, but for getting confidential information to recipients outside your own domain it carries high risks. When the “send” button is pressed we simply hope for the best, and have no way of knowing whether the transmission will be intercepted en route through one of the many servers it may be handled by, or indeed how it will be managed after arrival.

For more information on how Safe4 can help your organisations to avoid the risks of using email to carry confidential information, please contact us. We will be delighted to assist.

EU nullifies Safe Harbour agreement with US: where is your data stored?

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Back in 2010, when we launched the company, we decided that all of the information held within Safe4 would be stored in UK-only data centres accredited to the ISO 27001 security standard. That decision has been vindicated on many occasions since, and has been given further weight by a recent ruling at the European Court of Justice. The inescapable verdict: if your data contains confidential or sensitive material, relying on US data privacy laws could put you at risk.

The EU has now been joined by Israel in recognising the flaws in the EU / US Safe Harbour agreement; Israel is now recommending that data containing personal information should not be transferred to the United States – click here to read more.

It is now widely acknowledged that the weakness of data privacy laws in the US can expose many types of organisation to unacceptable and unnecessary risk. In spite of this many businesses in the UK still use data services managed by some of the IT giants who are located in the US. Safe4 stores all of the data it holds within the UK, and does not use any US-located resources for any part of the management of the system.

For more information on how Safe4 can assist your business to maintain your own and your clients’ information in complete privacy, please contact us. We will be very pleased to help.

Google Docs crashes – Safe4 has another month of 100% availability

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The last month has seen outages from Dropbox and Amazon Web Services, and this morning there is a report of what seems like a distatrous failure of Google Docs. Take a look at this.

During September, Safe4 achieved another month of 100% availability, together with a further surge in user numbers. Response times were again around 500 milliseconds, which means fast access as well as total availability and security.

For more information on how Safe4 can help your business, please contact us.

Safe4 to present at Society of Will Writers conference

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Safe4 will be opening the Society of Will Writers annual conference in Redditch on Monday 5 October, with a presentation focussing on the Digital Legacy, and how it can be captured and preserved for future generations. The conference will also mark the official launch of the Safe4 Digital Inheritance Vault, designed to enable will writers to help their clients to ensure that their inheritance plans are set up in such a way that probate becomes faster and more efficient, and that a wide range of other information is captured and made available to future generations.

Since inception in 2010, Safe4 has become established as one of the most secure sites on the internet. Using Safe4 to manage personal information will give the clients of the Society’s members a unique facility to hold confidential documents and other records of their lives. The service will thus allow the preservation of the Digital Legacy as well as giving the executors of the estate access to all of the information they will need for probate.

Using Safe4’s UK-based data centres accredited to the ISO 27001 security standard provides an ideal basis for handling such personal and sensitive information in a way that gives confidence to the will writer, the executor, and most importantly – the client.

Ben Martin

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Ben Martin is one of the founding directors of Safe4 Information Management