Seemingly every industry in the world is being digitized, that’s no secret. Even the more traditional lines of work in the legal world are finally making a huge push to the internet and the cloud on devices that are getting smaller and smaller. Starting this year, we will see the legal industry and cloud computing evolve together like never before, which will result in a host of shiny, new cloud applications tailored specifically to lawyers.

However, digital trends change in an instant, and there could be devices in the marketplace next year that we couldn’t even have thought of today that completely changes the legal or cloud computing landscape. What we can do is look at the bigger picture, and see where the legal industry is moving and how cloud computing can help it get there.

Law on the Phone

The safest guess is that lawyers will rely much more heavily on their phones and other mobile devices for their day-to-day operations as time goes on. This is where most businesses in the developed world are heading.

In 2017, the American Bar Association Legal Technology Survey Report revealed that 94 percent of lawyers “regularly or occasionally us(e) a mobile device for law-related tasks at home.”

So lawyers are already using their mobile devices, the next logical step is that they will be using them for increasingly important tasks. How does the cloud fit in this equation? Well, mobile devices still carry security risks. They get malware and spam the same way desktop computers do. Cloud providers are going to have to step up their mobile protection game if they want to keep up with the legal industry’s demands in the near future.

Take for instance TOSS C3’s MobileEnterprise™ that is a BYOD compliant MDM solution. Law firms will need the same protections on their smartphones, including encryption and ransomware protection, that they (hopefully) have on their work computers.

Proactive, never Reactive

Most spam and malware people get is just annoying and slows down their computer. A simple anti-virus can quarantine these bad actors and get the user on their way. However, for many professionals, and especially lawyers, cybercrime is a really dangerous adversary and they can’t afford to be breached for even a second.

With the surge in ransomware attacks and dangerous viruses, cyber defense needs to be a preventative measure, not a reactionary one. The moment a law firm is attacked with ransomware, they’ve already lost money and data, anything they do afterwards just helps them not totally bankrupt the business.

A cloud provider that can proactively stop cyber threats through education and expertise is hard to find. You need to find a provider that is proven in the legal industry with exceptional engineers that can also help draft policies to show your employees how to use their work computers and applications safely.

Gone will be the days of getting rid of a virus after it’s infected your computer, now you can’t even risk getting one in the first place.

For more information on the cloud and how it can help protect your law firm from cybercriminals, check out the TOSS C3 website and call us anytime at 1-888-884-8677!