Secure, Collaborative, Remote Review
Many legal organizations have responded quickly to stay-at-home orders by leveraging technology that helps them work remotely. Unfortunately, hackers have taken notice, exploiting a vulnerable situation with cybersecurity attacks like phishing and malware, resulting in data breaches. Meanwhile, organizations continue to access and share more personal data in an effort to support coronavirus mitigation efforts, such as contact tracing. Security is more of a pressing issue now than ever before, especially in the legal world where protecting client information is sacrosanct.
While working from home is now the norm for many, companies face new challenges of trying to ensure that personal devices and network connections are secure. These organizations can help minimize risk by updating security training materials, policies, security measures for personal devices, and response plans in the case of a breach. Legal teams need to ensure their technology systems for workflows, such as ediscovery, securely enable productivity and collaboration.
The security and compliance program at Everlaw is holistic and one of the key drivers of our core philosophy. We have a proactive security program that addresses important elements, such as encryption, system availability, authentication, and access. Secure access is especially crucial for review teams working remotely.
Ensuring Secure Collaboration
The Everlaw platform supports both multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO). MFA and SSO provide additional layers of security, which reduce the chance of unauthorized access to an account. Not only do these features improve security, but SSO also enhances the user experience by allowing users to login via their organizations’ existing directory service, so they don’t need to worry about managing yet another password.
Better security ensures that users are able to focus more on their work and worry less about their data. A summary of other key security features include:
Location Whitelisting: With the increase of remote work, security concerns have become more top-of-mind for legal professionals. Everlaw gives organizations more control over who has access to projects by allowing project admins to restrict access based on a user’s IP address and country. This feature helps organizations better protect their data and, as a result, their clients.
Secure, In-platform Messaging: Working on disparate systems is inefficient, but it’s also a security risk. Everlaw offers in-platform project messaging that allows for direct sharing and communication between users, enabling users to bypass the typical process of downloading and sharing documents with colleagues via email and other forms of workplace communication. This saves tedious back-and-forth communications and eliminates the need to attach sensitive documents in less secure channels.
Flexible Sharing Options: Often, a review requires a third-party expert or co-counsel to access documents in order to complete a review project, offer an expert opinion, or manage project consultants. Everlaw users can organize, create, and share an appropriate subset of documents in a secure project, eliminating the risk of providing complete access to the entire document corpus.
Collaboration on Productions: Challenges and security vulnerabilities can occur when sharing productions via traditional methods (e.g., downloading productions to a hard drive and then shipping them to an opposing counsel, or sharing via FTP connections). For a full production, or any of its subcomponents (e.g., load file and privilege log), Everlaw users can create secure, shareable links or email invitations — a more auditable way to share a production. Additionally, users can set links to expire, and production access logs shine a light on the sharing and downloading activity for each production.
Granular Access Permissions: Everlaw takes a granular approach to project permissions and gives project admins precise control over user access. Furthermore, our document access management enables project admins to customize access to subsets of documents by user group. This level of customization is comprehensive across all areas of the platform, regardless of which features or functionality are in use. This helps legal professionals better organize their security settings and protect sensitive documents.
More than ever, prioritizing security can enable organizations to maintain business continuity and maintain the trust and confidence of their customers and partners. Everlaw enables review teams to be more productive, collaborative, and secure in their remote work environments.
For information about how Everlaw can improve collaboration in ediscovery, check out our tips on virtual collaboration.
