A law firm’s technical assets hold a lot of personal client and proprietary data and it is a legal requirement that firms dispose of data permanently before the asset is sold on.
Data protection is a worrying and emotional issue for most law firms as they have to remove the risk to the bottom line or the company’s reputation if private or customer data leaks through an IT system. There are many examples to learn from – one was the publishing house Which? in June 2001, which suffered a fault in its software, making credit card details available over the internet. Although this issue is well documented, some firms are still overlooking the protection of data at the end of a technical asset’s lifecycle.
