Contributed by: Meaghan Moraes, Blog and Social Media Manager at Continuum

The legal world is centered on offering clients protection—and in the current technology environment, that extends to cybersecurity. With the proper security procedures, policies, training, and IT security in law firms, advanced cybersecurity is yet another way that lawyers can protect their clients today.

However, that’s much easier said than done, as firms and other organizations in the legal space have extremely desirable data, yet many are inadequately prepared for sophisticated breach attempts—making businesses in this vertical primary targets of cyber attacks.

In fact, according to a survey by law firm eWranglers, only 33% of responding firms had implemented data protection policies, and a similar 33% had implemented employee cybersecurity training. It’s clear that these types of small businesses need to seriously invest in cybersecurity in order to withstand the landscape for years to come. Oftentimes, this requires the help of a managed IT service provider (MSP) that can provide the tools, support, and security partnership that these legal firms otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

So, how can you seize that opportunity as an MSP to protect your legal clients with the enhanced cybersecurity that will safeguard their data? The following three steps will help you improve your clients’ security posture and mutual business growth.

1. Develop Policies and Procedures

Implementing clear and explicit cybersecurity policies for clients is an effective way to not only better protect their data, but to instill trust and forge a lasting partnership that they can turn to. The best way to execute these policies and procedures is through initial and consistent security awareness training. It’s important that your set of policies address these four things:

• The information you care about and why it needs to be protected
• How the information will be protected
• Who is charged with enforcing your policies and procedures
• To whom do the policies and procedures apply

Every policy you develop for your clients should have accompanying procedures that illustrate what actions must occur.

2. Establish Preventative Measures

Another key finding from the eWranglers survey was that, with only 25% with device encryption and a mere 17% with directory security, many law firms lack a fully developed prevention infrastructure. While many legal organizations have some aspects of cybersecurity-related compliance policies, they often don’t have real, comprehensive preventative measures dedicated to security.

Prevention can include employee background checks, implementing user accounts, asset controls, network security protocols, browser filters, and data encryption. But, in this volatile IT landscape, prevention only goes so far and planning for an undesired incident is crucial.

3. Have an Incident Response Plan

Helping your clients create an incident response plan brings pragmatism and order to a chaotic situation, and ultimately helps them recover faster. Essentially, the plan just takes some road mapping and internal and external collaboration.

Once you can ensure your legal clients are identifying circumstances, safeguarding against further damage, collecting external intelligence, collecting logs and data, and notifying necessary parties, they’ll be as prepared as possible for whatever is thrown their way.

Covering these three areas will allow you to offer your legal clients the advanced protection they now demand.