How Your Law Firm Can Get the Most Our of Microsoft 365: Step Four
Posted on January 10, 2021 by Keith Vallely
The rush of law firms and law departments to embrace a full Microsoft 365 solution is only just getting started. The next obvious step is integrating Teams usage with true Legal Document Management solutions built right into the law firm’s Microsoft 365 Tenant. Why? The firm’s IT department is now seeing documents being stored in Teams (SharePoint), or the lawyers “Personal” [for Business] OneDrive’s (ostensibly SharePoint), or worse, back on the desktop since users are spending most of their time in Teams. Emails are still stored in Exchange, but now legal professionals want their emails, their chats, and their documents, each accessed in different Microsoft Applications, integrated into one dashboard-like experience. So what's the best way forward?
Sunburst: the SolarWinds Orion Vulnerability
Posted on December 15, 2020 by Mike Smith
From Braintrace Labs, here is a critical alert on the latest malware threat, now dubbed SUNBURST, which has compromised government and private industry network. SUBURST is difficult to detect but not altogether impossible. Several Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) have already been established that will help us know whether this attack has taken place on your network.
How Your Law Firm Can Get the Most Out of Microsoft 365: Step Three
Posted on December 14, 2020 by Keith Vallely
Microsoft 365 now makes it far easier for law firms to choose a single platform to resolve their most challenging tech issues, and lower infrastructure costs at the same time. Firms are finding it harder to justify the spend, and more difficult to maintain and support multiple tech solutions for interrelated tech functionality. Law Firms are now starting to realize that the cloud as an infrastructure solution, especially as provided by Microsoft is the future. Part three of this four part series discusses Teams, Microsoft's collaboration solution.
How Your Law Firm Can Get the Most out of Microsoft 365: Step Two
Posted on December 6, 2020 by Keith Vallely
Microsoft 365 now makes it far easier for law firms to choose a single platform to resolve their most challenging tech issues, and lower infrastructure costs at the same time. Firms are finding it harder to justify the spend, and more difficult to maintain and support multiple tech solutions for interrelated tech functionality. Law Firms are now starting to realize that the cloud as an infrastructure solution, especially as provided by Microsoft is the future. Part two of this four part series discusses Intune, Microsoft's virtual desktop solution.
How Your Law Firm Can Get the Most out of Microsoft 365: Step One
Posted on December 1, 2020 by Keith Vallely
Microsoft 365 now makes it far easier for law firms to choose a single platform to resolve their most challenging tech issues, and lower infrastructure costs at the same time. Firms are finding it harder to justify the spend, and more difficult to maintain and support multiple tech solutions for interrelated tech functionality. Law Firms are now starting to realize that the cloud as an infrastructure solution, especially as provided by Microsoft is the future. The question for most firms is no longer if they will utilize Microsoft 365, but how much of it will they utilize?
Cobalt Strike Attacks
Posted on November 20, 2020 by John Limb
In the past few weeks, we have seen a significant increase in malicious attacks by bad actors using Cobalt Strike. Cobalt Strike is a legitimate tool used to give penetration testers access to many different attack capabilities. The issue lies when this toolkit gets into the wrong hands. Predominantly we have been seeing Cobalt Strike deploy an agent named “Beacon” for post-exploitation. Deploying this successfully can lead to a Ryuk Ransomware attack.
Trickbot/Ryuk Healthcare Attacks
Posted on November 3, 2020 by John Limb
A new round of ransomware attacks targeting the healthcare industry is imposing a new strain on hospital networks already pushed to the breaking point by the COVID-19 pandemic. But security experts from Braintrace have recently developed a state-of-the-art network analysis tool called Dragonfly that can effectively fingerprint the virus families behind this latest round of attacks using encrypted payload analysis.
16 Ways to Protect Your Organization During COVID-19
Posted on October 23, 2020 by Nicole Denton
From the security team at Braintrace, here are 16 essential steps your team should be taking to protect your organization from all forms of cyberattacks, including BEC, ransomware and crippling viruses.
Dragonfly Takes Flight
Posted on September 21, 2020 by Joseph Lamport
What does it take to build a breakthrough technology product today? We recently had a chance to sit down with John Limb, the CTO at Braintrace, who is the primary driver behind the development of Dragonfly, a cutting-edge Network Traffic Analysis tool, which takes the fight against malware to the next level. Compared to all the other NTA’s on the market today, Dragonfly provides near-complete visibility, including visibility into encrypted communications, that makes it far easier for the security team to stay a few steps ahead of all the bad actors.
What the Tech Are We Doing Now?
Posted on August 5, 2020 by Carla Landry
Which technologies will take your firm to the next level? Carla Landry explains that it's important to find the technology that best complements your firm and practice group goals in order to provide the competitive momentum you need and the value-add clients demand.
Adapting Law Department Practice to the New Normal: a panel discussion of law department leaders
Posted on April 16, 2020
Keeping Your Remote Workforce Secure With Security-as-a-Service From Braintrace
Posted on April 3, 2020 by Greg Spicer
Five Essential Steps to Secure Videoconferencing and Prevent Corporate Espionage
Posted on March 31, 2020 by Frank Flores
A remote work environment may seem ideal for employees, but it can create a number of creative loopholes that hackers can exploit. Chief among areas of potential vulnerability is video conferencing, which has become an essential part of the toolset for employees working from but which hackers are now actively targeting! Here are give key steps employers should be taking to secure their videoconferencing systems.
Essential Cybersecurity Tips for Working at Home
Posted on March 22, 2020 by Braintrace
Due to COVID-19, many of us are forced to work at home. The Braintrace team came together to bring to you tips to stay secure while away from the office. We created this article for our IT professional clients to share with their colleagues. Follow these steps to create a secure home office.
Protecting Your Domain From Back Door Risk
Posted on February 20, 2020 by Greg Spicer
Every website domain has hundreds, if not thousands, of permutations. Most of these permutated domains are completely harmless, involving a simply typographical variation on the original domain name. However, every now and again a fraudster will create a domain based on one of these permutations with bad intentions, hoping to compromise the security of the original domain. It’s important to understand and take reasonable steps to mitigate this risk, so you can better protect your vital business domains.
Waiting for Stuxnet: 8 things a security engineer can do to stay ahead of emerging security threats
Posted on January 28, 2020 by Frank Flores
A list of 8 essential tips on how to enhance your law firm's cyber security from the Director of Security Operations for Braintrace. These are all critical practices that should be incorporated into your security routine in order to stay 3 or 5 steps ahead of the bad actors who are out there now, probing and waiting for the chance to compromise your law firm’s security.
Most Popular Tech Stories in 2019
Posted on January 7, 2020
In keeping with the time-honored tradition of publishing best of lists to celebrate the New Year, here is our list of the ten most popular stories that appeared in Law Technology Digest in 2019. What do you suppose it says about the pace of technological change last year that the top story provides 18 euphemisms for “I haven’t got a f*cking clue”?
Hitting the Sweet Spot for Law Firm Management with Zola Suite
Posted on December 5, 2019 by Joseph Lamport
In the first part of this series, I wrote about how the platform business model is one of the defining features of our current state of technological and economic development, evident in such business success stories as Uber and Airbnb. A platform business is one that creates value by facilitating exchanges, of either information, good or services, among otherwise independent groups and individuals via the platform it creates. I also explained how the platform business model is of growing importance in the legal market, not so much for connecting lawyers to clients but as a means of more effectively connecting the lawyers within a firm and thereby enabling a much more efficient and far more integrated work-flow.
The Law Practice Platform
Posted on November 12, 2019 by Joseph Lamport
In the past, law firms were held together primarily by their partnership agreements, which laid out the rules for how firm-wide decisions got made and how the spoils of collective labor would be divvied up. Law firms of the future – whether they are organized as partnerships, LLCs or some other alternative business structure – will most certainly be far more dependent on whatever practice platform they choose to adopt. It will be the practice platform, much more than the partnership agreement, that provides the insight, controls and coherence that holds the firm together.
Casetext Launches CARA Patent That Provides Users AI-Powered Patent Law Research
Posted on October 23, 2019 by Joseph Lamport
Casetext keeps leading the way by introducing powerful new applications of AI in the legal research market. This week they announced the roll out of CARA Patent, a new product that leverages the power of AI technology to transform patent law research.
Incident Response: What Every Law Firm Needs to Know
Posted on October 17, 2019 by Katherine Riley, CISA, CISM
One recent study estimated that a cyber-attack occurs every 39 seconds, which underscores the need of every business in America to be prepared for the possibility that their network security will eventually be tested if not breached. For law firms, the risk is even more severe. As of 2017, around 20% of all U.S. based law firms had been hacked. By early 2019, that percentage had risen to an alarming 25%.
And yet severe as the risk of security breach is, fewer than half of all law firms in the US have an adequate incident response plan in place, and less than a third of those firms with plans have undertaken any testing to ensure their preparedness in case of an attack. The lack of planning and testing only increases the dangers law firms face.
Nothing Compares With compareDocs
Posted on October 15, 2019 by Kerry Carroll
Document comparison is an absolutely essential technology for law firms today. It’s a critical productivity tool that most lawyers rely on every day and it plays a vital role in client service because it’s how your firm keeps clients fully informed about work-in-progress. How does your current solution stack up against compareDocs - the leading document comparision tool on the market?
Parsons Behle Lab: Ringing the Bell for Market Innovation
Posted on October 9, 2019 by Joseph Lamport
Parsons Behle Lab has embarked on an ambitious tech development effort, which represents a striking departure from the way most law firms have approached similar innovation and tech development initiatives. They are in the process of building a new type of law practice platform, which is open for other law firms and lawyers to use, and which enables participating firms to expand the services they offer to their own clients. It's a platform that seems laden with opportunity for all those who choose to get involved.
Streamlining the Process of E-Filing: making good on the promise of technology
Posted on September 23, 2019 by Joseph Lamport
One of the most frustrating tendencies of technology is to create new problems while trying to solve old ones. It's reminiscent of the drinker who drinks to forget he’s drinking in the Little Prince, with the problem and solution forever chasing each other in circular fashion.
Law Firms & Ecosystems
Posted on September 9, 2019 by Anders Spile
For decades, law firms have upheld strong boundaries between the firm and the society in which they operate. The law firm maintains itself as a sturdy fortress, within which hierarchy, culture and tradition go unchallenged. The career path remains clear; associates and junior lawyers execute repetitive work in an attempt to get to the promised land of the equity partner with the result being that billable hours are silently killing all innovative efforts happening lawyer-to-lawyer.
Interview with Greg Spicer
Posted on August 16, 2019 by Joseph Lamport
Editor’s Note: We recently had a chance to sit down with Greg Spicer, the CRO at Braintrace, to talk about the growing importance of information security management and the option for registration under ISO 27001 for law firms today. Braintrace is one of the top cybersecurity consulting firms in the country serving the legal, financial and government markets.
Most Recent Issue
Knocking on HR's door
With a hat tip to SHIFT*BASE for one of the posts, we've got a duo focused on AI and HR. In the first one Adi Gaskell turns to new research from the University of Florida suggesting that "AI tools might not be delivering the results hiring managers expect." The researchers conclude, "We need to be clear about the tasks we set for these human-AI teams. The AI might optimize for poorly defined goals if we don't specify the task clearly." That is true for any application of AI! Next up we've got Tony Case writing about the "avalanche of daily employee data" and the challenge of "how to transform all that so-called 'dead data' into actionable insights." There are some new terms here to me like "companion knowledge" and all manner of suggestions on the application of AI to HR-related work flows. Be sure to read more at:REAL KM: Miscommunication leads AI-based hiring tools astray
worklife: How AI is transforming HR's 'dead data' problem
Time for a change
I do PDFs too!
I hadn't considered that PDFs were an issue, as ChatGPT already supports them. But it seems that PDF support is new for Anthropic and their Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI. The restrictions are somewhat interesting. First you have to have a the paid professional subscription. And then the PDF can't be more than 32 MB (I assume MG is an error) or more than 100 pages. The PDF can't be encrypted or password protected, which makes sense. I wouldn't expect any system to be able to handle a protected PDF like that. Hat tip to Stephen Abram if you read more at ZD NET: Claude AI can now analyze PDFs - here's how to try it (and why you'll want to)
Jeffrey Brandt, Editor
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ILTA Strategic Partner Liaisons - NetDocuments