A law firm’s IT risk profile is not the same as a retailer’s. The information on your network is privileged, the regulatory exposure is real, and a breach is a professional problem before it is a technical one.
Most firms are supported by generalists who are competent but are not thinking about privilege, retention obligations or what happens to a matter file when a fee earner leaves.
Confidentiality is an access-control problem
Privilege assumes that only the people who should see a matter can see it. In practice, many firms run a shared drive where everyone can open everything, because permissions were never structured and restructuring them felt disruptive.
The fix is matter-level access, enforced by the system rather than by convention, with a record of who opened what.
Email is where the attacks land
Conveyancing and commercial practices are specifically targeted by business email compromise — attackers intercept or imitate correspondence and redirect payment instructions. It is one of the most damaging frauds in the South African legal sector.
The technical defences are well understood and frequently not implemented: multi-factor authentication without exceptions, impersonation protection tuned to your domain, correct SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, and out-of-band verification for any change to banking details.
Document management and retention
Firms are obliged to keep certain records for defined periods and are exposed by keeping everything else indefinitely. Both problems are solved by the same work: knowing what you hold, where it lives, and what the retention rule is for each category.
Practice and trust account systems
Most firms run a practice management or trust accounting package. We do not replace those — we support the environment around them: the server or cloud they run on, the backups, the access, the integration with email and document storage, and the vendor liaison when something breaks.
Continuity, because deadlines do not move
Court deadlines are indifferent to your file server. Continuity planning for a firm means backups that have actually been restored in a test, a documented path to working if the office is unavailable, and knowing in advance who does what when something fails.