Additional risk mitigation during remote working

The largest migration of staff from office to home working has brought about many unintended consequences for business. The speed with which law firms have had to implement remote working will have left holes in on and offline security, unintended or not, which fraudsters will seek to exploit.  Lawyer Checker can help you review your own security measures and implement additional risk mitigation.

In this unprecedented state of national emergency it hasn’t taken criminal organisations long to see a window of opportunity.

Staff Migration to home working

The largest migration of staff from office to home working has brought about many unintended consequences for business. The speed with which law firms have had to implement remote working will have left holes in on and offline security, unintended or not, which fraudsters will seek to exploit. 

It is critical that your home workers are operating as safely and securely as possible and you are able to mitigate risk to your clients and your own business.

Risk practitioners often talk about implementing cultural and technical competencies to protect your employees, clients and business.

Cultural competencies embed an expectation around security within an organisation, ensuring staff know it is incumbent upon them to do what they can to protect the business.

This is especially important in these extenuating circumstances where with reduced supervision staff must act appropriately cautiously, adopting an assessed approach to risk. This might include

  • Consider not sending sensitive information via email, instead using secure portals
  • Not clicking on suspicious emails/attachments and reporting to IT 
  • Upgrading security procedures when updating things like bank details on case files 

Alongside these cultural competences, firms should also look to implement technical competences.  

Some of these have come to the fore in recent weeks with essentials like firewalls, secure network configurations, and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for security while remote working all being tested by the extent of remote working needed.

Embedding a culture of security awareness

Other things to consider more widely might be; do you have people within dedicated to delivering security awareness and supporting best practice e.g. Security Champions? Is risk, fraud, cyber crime etc a regular Agenda Items at Management/Board Meetings? Have you got accreditations which embed this in your culture and governance?

Critically, any change to your risk management policies as a result of these changing circumstances must be documented and evidenced to provide a full audit trail. 

The advice from us is to tread carefully and err on the side of caution. Criminals are banking on the uncertainty of the situation, combined with remote working, to intercept communications and misdirect funds. 



If you are concerned about the challenges posed by remote working book your Security Consultation with Lawyer Checker today.

The purpose of the consultation is to review how the mass migration from office to home working has affected your online security contingencies, including:

  • Network patches
  • Firewalls
  • User accounts
  • Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
  • Email impersonation
  • Funds transfer fraud
  • Staff culture

We can help you review your own risk assessments and consider how you might introduce additional risk mitigation in view of current circumstances.

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