Tips & Info

A healthy law firm culture makes a law firm the best version of itself. The strength and quality of that culture helps it adapt to change and continue operating during periods of uncertainty—a pandemic, for example.

Healthy law firm culture is a big deal, not only for surviving turbulent times but because it can get law firm staff to buy into the firm’s mission and weave together a stabilizing sense of community.

But everyone has a different idea about what culture is, what constitutes good culture, and how to create culture that has staying power. What’s the answer?

Spoiler alert: It’s not free pizza lunches and casual Fridays.

Those perks were compelling back when fax machines were state of the art, but a 21st century law firm sets the bar much higher. Building a healthy culture in the present tense requires a more holistic perspective on people and purpose; they are secrets hiding in plain sight.

Here’s how to find them.

What is law firm culture?

Before we begin the search for a healthy culture, it’s important to know what the destination looks like. Law firm culture is a dynamic process that changes over time, and what was ideal 10 years ago—before remote work and artificial intelligence swept through the door—may not stand up today.

Douglas Richmond, J.D., Senior Vice President at Lockton Companies, LLC, defines it this way:

“…the system of beliefs that members share about the goals and
values that are important to them and about the behavior that is
appropriate to attain those goals and live those values.”

How does that definition manifest among law firms in the real world?

For insight, here’s a sample of the culture among three top law firms recognized for their superior culture, according to career intelligence platform, Vault.

Granted, these are all Biglaw firms that approach culture with Biglaw resources. What these top firms know about the importance of office culture, however, is no different from what law firms of every size know, and is backed up by research:

An organization’s culture significantly impacts an employee’s happiness.

As it turns out, what makes legal professionals who work at law firms happy isn’t much different from workers in any industry: non-judgmental colleagues, supportive leaders, good communication, shared values, and professional development.

Looks good on paper, but how do you create a great culture if you don’t already have one?

We’ll let you in on a little secret. Seven of them, actually.

How to Build a Better Company Culture

There is no Big Bang for healthy law firm office culture. Great culture comes from a measured set of practices and principles exercised over time. They are less “secrets” than diligence that helps cultures stand out for the right reasons:

1. Gather Feedback

Start with your colleagues. Use casual conversation or anonymous surveys to find out what they have to say about the current culture; note what they say works and what needs to change. This helps build your roadmap for action.

2. Develop Core Values

Define the cultural direction you want to take and focus on core values and boundaries. Then create a list of ideas that enable team members to become champions for this culture. Use these questions to get started:

• Decide how you want clients to perceive your firm.
• Establish what constitutes the ideal employee experience.
• Determine which behaviors within the culture are and are not acceptable.

3. Set an Example

Senior leaders should model the culture they want to establish. The rest of the firm’s staff members will look to them for guidance.

4. Create Emotional Infrastructure

It’s important to create strong emotional ties among your law firm’s team members. It is also important to create a positive bond between team members and the law firm itself. Offer opportunities for employees to strengthen these connections.

5. Cultivate Trust

It’s not enough to teach your firm’s staff members how to do their jobs. A healthy law firm culture should work toward trusting staff members to make decisions. Give them opportunities to take the right actions and build their decision-making experience.

6. Build Resilience

The work of legal professionals is inherently stressful. One way to keep stress from becoming overwhelming is to offer a framework for resilience. This can include providing resources, relationships, and emotional support that help staff members recover from stressful events such as conflict, failure, or changes in responsibility.

You may also want to coach team members on ways to keep up with the demanding pace of the law firm environment. These two resources offer excellent insights to manage workloads and constant waves of information:

• Conquer Your Caseload: 6 Time Management Tips for Legal Support Professionals
• Mastering the Deluge: How Legal Professionals Can Overcome Information Overload

7. Embrace Flexibility

The legal profession historically has resisted change. Unfortunately, clinging to a “this is how we’ve always done it” mindset fosters rigidity and stifles innovation: an invitation to catastrophe.

To create a healthy office culture in the 21st century, law firms must become flexible.

Firms of any size can improve flexibility by being open to hybrid or remote work arrangements, compressed workweeks, and flexible start and end times.

Why are these work models so important for building a healthy culture (and company)?

Because organizations that offer some form of remote work enjoy a 25% lower employee turnover rate compared to those that do not.

Flexibility does more than just reduce turnover; it also lowers burnout, helps employees support their families, enhances productivity, and boosts morale.

Remote Work is Still a Fave

After the COVID-19 public health emergency ended in in 2023

“…only 7% of associates/support staff
have returned full time to their offices.”

—Law.com: How Hybrid Work Forever Transformed the Legal Profession (survey conducted July 21st-August 14th, 2023

What Separates Firms from Their Culture Goal?

The barriers law firms face in building a healthy office culture are not unlike the barriers most organizations face. Let’s look at four of the common barriers that stand between a law firm and its culture goals, and how to overcome them.

• Iffy Leadership

When the firm’s senior leaders and middle managers don’t adhere to their brand values, it won’t be long before lawyers and non-lawyers do the same.
Inconsistency cultivates distrust and cynicism among the firm’s staff, especially if their leaders appear to be exempt from the rules.

For example, no cell phones in the office means no cell phones for everyone. If legal assistants need to be at their desks filling court documents by 8:30 a.m., the rainmakers should be at their desks as well.

Keeping the same standards for all employees will cultivate a healthy culture that builds trust, promotes equality, and reinforces brand values.

• Sideways energy

Sideways energy refers to energy that is unfocused, misdirected, and otherwise wasted. It may manifest as employee drama, siloing, or gaps in trust, and is notorious for draining productivity.

Sideways energy can quickly turn good culture bad.

You may not be able to eradicate sideways energy completely, but you can clip its wings by implementing organizational systems that ensure the right people are hired, developed, and supported in ways that align with brand values.

• Failure to Collaborate

Even in the best collaborative environments, silos may pop up like cliquey little mushrooms. Silos persist because lawyers and non-lawyers tend to place their primary focus on their group or departmental tasks, with only a few senior leaders seeing the big picture.

As silos become more entrenched, trust diminishes. Communication, collaboration, and partnership soon follow suit.

But siloing may not be so much a problem to solve as a situation to manage.

To mitigate the impact of silos, implement intentional meetings and management processes that address company culture proactively. This will help staff members cultivate a broader perspective about the firm for themselves, and improve the understanding they have about how their roles and functions contribute to the overall mission.

If You Build It, They Will Come

You now have seven powerful tools to build the kind of workplace that inspires you, welcomes you, and sends you home at the end of the day feeling like it brought out the best.

The results you want may not happen overnight, but building this foundation now means your firm will be better prepared for long-term success once all the elements come together.

As you plan your culture, consider whether your litigation support service provider aligns with the vision you have. Can they be a strategic partner that will help you create positive change from the inside?

If that doesn’t sound like your current provider, it’s time to think about finding one that does. Schedule a call or book a demo now to speak with a Rapid Legal account manager, and find out how we can help make your law firm the best version of itself through innovation and superior performance.

Do you ever feel like there’s just not enough time in the day? Between managing complex cases, supporting busy attorneys, and battling a never-ending inbox, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

But what if you could reclaim those lost minutes and master the art of effective time management?

In this article, we’ll explore the top time thieves that plague legal teams, along with practical tips on how to prioritize tasks effectively, leverage technology to your advantage, and finally conquer that ever-growing caseload.

Set Yourself Up for Success

For legal support professionals, complex casework is just the beginning; drafting legal correspondence, maintaining client relationships, and handling attorney requests can make your day-to-day workload feel impossible to tackle.

But before you can develop better time management habits, you need to identify what’s stealing your time.

Maybe you’re guilty of prioritizing less important tasks over the more complex ones, a classic sign of procrastination. Or are you losing valuable minutes searching for specific legal documents in a disorganized system?

Recognizing these ‘time thieves’ is your first step towards effective time management. Without this, the idea of ‘effective time management’ becomes somewhat of a paradox.

If you find yourself rapidly shifting between tasks – responding to emails, drafting a legal memo, fielding client calls – you might want to find new ways to delegate some of those or adhere to a strict task list. If you’re a habitual procrastinator, consider tackling the most challenging tasks first. If the endless search for a client’s documents is slowing you down, perhaps it’s time to adopt a more efficient filing system.

So, the first step: know what works for you (or more importantly, what doesn’t) and use that understanding to create an effective strategy moving forward.

1. Start Tomorrow, Today: Compile a Next-Day Action List

One useful strategy to stay a step ahead is to create your task list for the next day at the close of your current day. Start prepping your casework and administrative tasks the night prior so you can dive straight into work from the moment you get to your desk.

To further improve your action list, break it down into tasks instead of projects. Converting your project list into a task list sets both daily and weekly goals, maintaining consistent productivity and efficiency.

Instead of writing down projects such as ‘Work on Greene v. Daniels Case‘ – which can be intimidating to look at – dissect it into discrete tasks like ‘Phone call with Mrs. Greene regarding Declaration Draft‘.

This approach transforms your vague projects into tangible and easily digestible goals.

Clearly defining tasks not only keeps you on track but also lessens the mental burden of deciding what needs to be done.

2. Embrace the Power of Modern Technology

In today’s fast-paced law office, knowing how to effectively use technology is not just an add-on skill, but rather a must-have that’s rapidly transforming the legal scene.

The good news is, there’s an endless amount of legal technology solutions and other software to make the legal industry’s fast-paced environment much more manageable. While most legal support pros are familiar with practice management systems like Clio, or document management systems like iManage, there are so many more productivity tools available today.

For the paralegal or support professional buried in busywork, AI-powered tools like CaptureNow and CaseText can handle everything from contract analysis and document review to basic secretarial duties. You may also consider exploring virtual legal assistant services to support you in case management, demand writing, collections and more.

But what’s more important for the legal community are the new and modern solutions specifically tailored for the busy legal professional.

For example, Rapid Legal’s portal, powered by LegalConnect®, the industry-leading litigation support service management platform, is used by thousands of legal professionals to have their litigation support services – eFiling, physical court filing, process serving, and more – fulfilled for their law firms and clients.

Whether it’s syncing invoicing data directly from Rapid Legal to your financial system, accessing documents from your document management or practice management system, leveraging our eFiling APIs to further streamline your firm’s electronic filing process, and more, modern law firms are now seeking Rapid Legal’s full technology capabilities and partnerships to achieve organizational efficiencies, reduce costs, and free firm resources for higher value work.

By embracing these innovative technologies, legal support professionals can reclaim precious time, focusing on what truly matters – supporting their teams, increasing billable hours, and achieving the best outcomes for clients.

3. Prioritize Your Tasks by Urgency & Importance

Effectively and strategically prioritizing your tasks is crucial for optimizing your productivity.

To help break down and organize your workload, consider using the Eisenhower Matrix. This reliable time management tool can help you sort tasks into four categories: urgent-important, important-not urgent, urgent-not important, and not urgent-not important.

Tasks that are both urgent and important, like a missing document needed for filing or responding to court orders on a deadline, demand your immediate attention. These are the duties that, if neglected, could lead to serious repercussions. Reduce the number of tasks in this quadrant whenever possible.

Similarly, important but not urgent tasks are those that align with your long-term objectives, like preventative tasks or legal research. Although they don’t need immediate attention, they shouldn’t be put on the back burner either. Plan ahead and schedule these tasks so they don’t slip through the cracks.

Tasks that are urgent but not important are some of the most common time thieves for legal support pros. Responding to low-priority emails, non-essential administrative tasks, answering minor client questions can all be considered urgent but not important tasks, ideal for strategic delegation.

Finally, tasks that are neither urgent nor important only serve to distract you and waste valuable time. If these tasks don’t align with the company’s mission, declutter your day and empower yourself to say “no.”

If used correctly, the Eisenhower Matrix is a powerful tool for managing legal tasks and your time, but it will take some effort to get started. Once you do, though, this method will surely help you maintain focus, reduce stress, and enhance your overall productivity.

4. Identify & Remove These Common Time Wasters

You’re not a legal support professional if you don’t find yourself grappling with time wasters such as redundant meetings, excessive email checks, and the lure of social media. All of these can really hamper your productivity, especially when they all hit you at once. Sometimes these time wasters are unavoidable, but there are a few tricks to minimize their disruption.

Before you RSVP to another meeting, assess the meeting’s purpose. Could the subject matter be shared via an email or a quick phone call? If so, don’t hesitate to suggest that alternative – the entire firm is better off when the right decision is made. Be confident you know what that decision is!

Constant interruptions in a busy law firm can derail your momentum. Between supporting attorneys, talkative coworkers, and multiple meetings, staying focused can be challenging.

The key to combating the “Interruption Impasse” lies in establishing clear boundaries. Communicate your availability to colleagues and consider utilizing “Do Not Disturb” functions on your phone or workspace. Don’t hesitate to schedule yourself some focus hours, minimize interruptions and make the most of your time.

5. Clear Your Desk, Clear Your Mind

You may think that a desk crowded with papers and sticky notes isn’t a big deal. But did you know that keeping your workspace physically tidy can also significantly improve your mental clarity?

Multiple studies* confirm the link between a clean, organized physical space and a clear, focused mental state. Just like a messy desk can cause stress and discomfort, a neat and tidy one can encourage concentration and efficiency.

Think of your desk as a reflection of your workload. If it’s cluttered, it can make it seem like your tasks are just as disorganized and chaotic. However, when your workplace is clean and clear, you are better equipped to handle your responsibilities in an orderly, systematic fashion.

This is also one of the easiest ways to start boosting your time management right away. Simply use the last 30 minutes this Friday to tidy and reorganize your desk for next week; before you leave each day, give it a quick once over so you can start every morning with a clean slate.

6. Busy Doesn’t Mean Productive: The Importance of Taking Breaks

Just as a neat desk can clear your mind, regular breaks can help you recharge. No one can operate at 100% efficiency at all times; our brains simply aren’t wired to stay focused for extended periods without rest.

You might be under the impression that continuous work equals increased productivity, but that’s a common misbelief. Whether you notice it or not, you might start to get mentally fatigued after your tenth straight client email, or the second hour of in-depth discovery. On the contrary, modern research underscores the significance of taking breaks for sustaining mental quickness and productivity. **

Neglecting to take time out can lead to mental fatigue, reduced productivity, and extended task completion times. It can even increase your risk of making a mistake and jeopardizing legal documents that need to be completed with steadfast accuracy.

Be it a five-minute break every hour, a healthy lunch break, or a 10-minute destress period, these moments are crucial for your mental health, brain function and overall productivity.

Final Thoughts: Time Management Tips for Legal Support Professionals

In the legal world, improving and optimizing your time management skills is an opportunity to achieve your tasks with speed, confidence, and impeccable execution.

Start by decluttering your physical space and addressing time wasters like social media and excessive emails. Harness modern legal solutions like Clio, AI services and Rapid Legal. Prioritize your task list with precision and give yourself some mental breaks to refresh and recover.

Remember, getting work done fast doesn’t mean you’re getting it done right, and being busy doesn’t mean you’re being productive!

It’s all about finding the right balance and time management strategy for you and your professional style.

After you put these tips to work, if you feel like you’re beginning to move ahead while your litigation support provider is falling behind, contact Rapid Legal for service and support that moves as quickly and efficiently as you. It’s time for you to work with a vendor that respects your time with unmatched performance and a satisfaction guarantee. Schedule a call today to speak to an account manager or book a demo.

Etiquette is the “it” factor every professional needs for career mobility. Strong networking etiquette can position you as someone likeable and charming who should be taken seriously, while its absence may leave you seeming thoughtless and awkward. So, before you plunge into that next legal mixer, be sure your networking etiquette is finely honed.

This article shares techniques you can use to deliver your messaging with polish and confidence to a roomful of unfamiliar faces. Put them to work now to present yourself as the top-tier legal professional you are, whether you’re looking for a new job or simply working to refine your personal brand at the office.

Golden Rule #1: Nonverbal Etiquette

In any networking setting you’ll want to choose your words carefully. Be just as meticulous about engineering your body language. Body language can amplify or mute the signals you want to project, so as a networking skill it’s non-negotiable.

Following are four key nonverbal gestures and cues you can use to sharpen your performance while networking:

• Eye contact: Whether speaking or listening, maintain eye contact. It tells the person speaking that you’re interested in what they have to say. Allowing your eyes to shift to the sides of the speaker, up, or down sends a negative message. Above all, never roll your eyes.
• Posture: Your parents were right: Stand up straight. You can show that you’re confident and serious by maintaining an erect posture. If you’re sitting down, don’t slouch.
• Stillness: Pacing, tapping, swiveling, and fidgeting can make you seem nervous. These actions undermine your professional presence and may actually distract the person with whom you are engaging.
• Sounds: It’s rude to interrupt another person who is speaking. This is a global truth. It seems elementary but it can happen almost unconsciously so listen actively and modulate how and when you respond and be aware of the sounds you create.

3 Body Language Hacks to Influence People

Body language plays an outsized role in reinforcing your message, so use your physical presence as an adjunct to clarify meaning. Here are three nonverbal communication techniques that connote professionalism and can positively impact your networking efforts.

Golden Rule #2: Verbal Etiquette

Once the conversation at a networking event begins to flow it’s almost inevitable, you’ll have an opening to join the dialogue. When it’s your turn to speak the first thing you’ll want to do is adjust the volume of your voice. Loud voices can be associated with anger and make you seem aggressive.

On the other hand, a voice that is too soft can make you seem unconfident. Modulate your tone for emphasis and adjust to the noise level in the room. This advice from Tony Robbins can help you understand how to optimize your tone of voice, so listeners focus on your words.

While you are speaking

Take note of the other person’s body language. Is the individual pulling away or putting their hands in their pockets? Are they crossing their arms? These can be tell-tale signs of boredom.

If the person to whom you are speaking displays these signals or seems uncomfortable, respect their space and don’t force the conversation.

Don’t interrupt

In any conversation this golden rule is sacrosanct: Don’t interrupt whoever is speaking. If you find yourself being interrupted by someone else, however, this may be happening for a couple of reasons:

• You don’t get to the point: When you begin to ramble, listeners tune out. Strive to be concise and clear.
• You don’t project confidence: Keep your shoulders back, head up, maintain eye contact, and speak from the diaphragm. People don’t interrupt someone they believe is important.

If you are interrupted try not to shut down, become defensive, or go silent. You can display good etiquette by allowing the person who interrupted you to finish their thought before you respond.

Golden Rule #3: Don’t Skip the Small Talk

While it’s true that Americans like directness, it is also true that in a business setting there must be a balance between light conversation and deep dialogue. That’s the role of small talk.

Small talk acts as a social lubricant that helps professionals’ transition smoothly from casual chatter to more meaningful discussion. In a networking environment, skipping small talk entirely can derail that transition and make it more difficult to establish a connection.

Small talk done right displays good etiquette, so wrap it in these strategies for best results at a networking event:

• Ask an open-ended question. You may get a greater payoff by focusing more on what to ask than what to say.
• Respond to an open-ended question: If someone asks about your job, don’t just tell them, “I work in estate planning,” tell them a bit about what you actually do on a daily basis.
• Read the situation: Keep the conversation going if the other person is interested. If that interest breaks off, thank the person for their time and move on—even if you didn’t have the opportunity to get to your key message.

If you’re naturally comfortable speaking with peers and colleagues but tend to freeze up when you interact with executives, here’s good advice for making small talk with big wigs.

Golden Rule #4: Nail the Follow Up

The end of a networking event isn’t the end of your networking tasks. If you’ve managed to connect with even one individual at a mixer, then the proper etiquette is to follow up.

Not everyone feels comfortable with this part of the process but with a few simple actions you can follow up like a pro and feel good about it.

Timing is everything

Ideally, follow up on LinkedIn or email within 24-48 hours. You don’t want to appear pushy, but you also don’t want to be forgotten. Refresh the person’s memory by referencing your conversation and let them know you’re interested in further discussion.

Conversely, if someone reaches out to you for follow up, wait no longer than 24 hours to reply. This will help maintain the other person’s enthusiasm to make a connection and keep you from missing an opportunity.

What to say

Personalize your message with some specific detail from your conversation. During your conversation perhaps a professional insight was shared or an offer to connect with another person was made. If you discovered a common interest, feel free to refer back to it.

On the other hand, if you are the one who promised to share information or make an introduction, follow through on that commitment. This will build trust with others and reinforce the value they see in you as a connection.

If you’re new to networking and not sure how to craft an email with the right tone and messaging, here are 8 email templates designed specifically to help you with this task.

Golden Rule #5: It’s Not a Sprint

Networking is about playing the long game. Don’t expect to hit a home run the moment you walk in to your first networking event. Instead, work at building your professional network gradually. Use your sense of networking etiquette to burnish your personal brand as capable, reliable, and able to navigate the legal industry at every level.

While you’re out networking, make sure your professional toolkit is packed with the industry’s “go to” resources.

That’s where Rapid Legal’s best-in-class litigation support services can help. Get the superior performance of the leading online platform for the services you use most: electronic court document filing, physical filing, service of process, expert review, document retrieval, and more.

Don’t forget that Rapid Legal’s Satisfaction Guarantee delivers peace of mind with every order you place: Service is done right, or it’s free.

Contact an account executive to find out more. Schedule a call or book a demo now!

Can’t Happen Here?

The irony wasn’t lost on anyone when law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe—with its powerhouse cybercrime counsel division—transformed from defender into defendant after a March 2023 cyberattack. The firm’s client data was the target of this exploit which netted the thieves a trove of personally identifiable information:

The loss of this information led 460,000 individuals to file a very expensive civil suit against the firm.

Orrick’s misfortune is a wakeup call for every law firm that thinks cyberattacks are what happens to someone else.

To keep your law firm safe from cyberattacks, it’s time to build your cybersecurity savvy. Let’s begin by looking at the popular methods cybercriminals are now using to access sensitive data and some of the cybersecurity measures law firms can take to prevent them.

Every Breath You Take

Every login you make, every fee you stake—they’ll be watching you.

That’s the modus operandi for hackers who try to fool you into entering login information into a bogus website when using a web portal.

Think about it: each time you click in a login box and enter your credentials, you potentially open yourself, and your firm, to a cyberattack.

Here are two ways that can happen.

Plenty of Phish in the Sea

Who passes up $300,000 of free money from a Nigerian prince?

Phishing is one of the original cybercrimes that now seems almost quaint. But make no mistake, currently more than 90% of cyberattacks begin with phishing.

And they’ve come a long way since the 1990s when AOL accounts were hammered by the Nigerian prince scam.

Cybercriminals have updated the look and feel of phishing emails, which is one reason they continue to be effective. Instead of the clunky language and absurd offers that festooned earlier iterations, today’s generative AI-based phishing may look more like a casual message from someone you know.

That’s because today’s cybercriminals can scrape your personal information from social media, allowing them to hit you with messaging that seems far more authentic.

The result is an email that looks like a harmless note from a friend. Perhaps something like this:

“Hey Christine, it was great seeing you at our kids’ soccer game last week. I got some great photos. Click here to download them.”

The examples we’ve just looked at—bogus websites, hijacked WiFi, and phishing emails fall under the technology-based attack category.

But hackers have also developed attacks that are human behavior-based. You may hear about these less, but they are just as devastating.

Law offices are vulnerable to either method, so let’s examine the countermoves designed to protect against them.

Technology-Based Cybersecurity

Today’s hackers have a diversified portfolio of attack. They use everything from video game controllers to “Internet of Things” devices to access information. In the business world these cyberattacks are known to frequently occur.

• Ransomware encrypts files for payment.
• Malware infiltrates systems.
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks flood networks.
• Credential stuffing uses stolen credentials for unauthorized access.
• Phishing deceives users via emails.

Vigilance should be combined with cybersecurity measures to reduce the likelihood that one of these attacks will be successful.

The table below spotlights several highly effective measures.

Who’s to blame?

Cybercrime is pervasive across platforms. It’s difficult to place culpability on any one contributor but statistics illustrate how human behavior, technology, and financial incentive all give oxygen to cyberattacks:

86%

Percentage of web application developers who do not view
application security as a top priority when writing code.

1

The number of unencrypted USB drives needed to
negate a law firm’s total spend on cybersecurity.

59.4 million

Number of people in the U.S. who have fallen victim
to vishing (voice phishing) in one year.

$10 Trillion

2023 projected impact of cybercrime, exceeding the GDP
of every nation except the U.S. and China.

Human Hacking (Social Engineering Attacks)

Hackers aren’t just tech geeks. They understand how emotions affect behavior. Strong emotions such as fear, anger, and greed will shut down your logic center and affect how you make decisions.

Cybercriminals count on this, so they use social engineering attacks to leverage your emotion to their advantage.

To protect yourself, be careful about the action you take in response to things such as a notification about winning a raffle, a delayed order, an urgent call from a “court employee”, or even a tech support call.

Tech support, really?

Yes, here’s an example of how a social engineering attack can be dressed up as a tech support call.

The Setup

A phisher masquerading as a tech support operator sends an email (remember, 75% of targeted cyberattacks begin with an email). The phisher sees that you responded to the email then (a.) calls you to advise that you’ve been “hacked” and (b.) says he will help you disarm the virus and clean your computer.

The Execution

Tech Support: This is Dave at [your company’s tech support]. I see that you’ve been hacked. I’m calling to make sure you shut down the intrusion and clean up your system. Are you ready?

You: Sure, yes, thank you for calling, Dave.

Tech Support: No Problem. This will be easy. Step 1: Go to this [bogus] website and download the .exe file.

You: OK, done. I see my user name and a box to enter my login credentials.

Tech Support: Good job! Go ahead and enter them.

You: The dialogue box is asking if I know the publisher?

Tech Support: It’s a confirmation prompt. Just click “Yes.”

You: OK, I just entered my credentials.

Tech Support: OK, now just click on the .exe file and it’ll take care of the rest.

You: Do I need to do anything else?

Tech Support: If the cleanup returns an error you’ll need to respond. If you don’t get a report at the end of the cleanup then everything’s fine and you’re good to go.

You: OK, great. Thank you so much, Dave!

Why this works:

Dopamine affects your decision making. When you feel trust or positive emotions toward someone your brain releases dopamine. Who better to trust than tech support?

Social engineering is the most successful means to a data breach. Now that you better understand how social engineering attacks work, here are effective cybersecurity measures you can use against them.

Rapid Legal Has Your Back

Think your law firm’s cybersecurity team is hard to please?

Show them the industry-leading protections Rapid Legal uses to keep user data safe. Even the most discerning IT professionals are sure to give them a thumbs up:

• Run on a highly secure, SOCS-2 certified infrastructure that adheres to the rigorous AICPA Trust Services Security, Availability, Confidentiality, and Privacy Criteria.
• Encrypt all web traffic with 2048-bit RSA TLS/SSL.
• Encrypt sensitive data—such as passwords—when stored in databases.
• Use advanced webpage code that prevents injecting malicious scripts by attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).
• Ensure that all payment-related information is passed directly to the payment processor and never stored on local servers or databases.
• Use advanced anomaly detection on servers to notify of unusual activity that may be signs of hackers.
• Employ layers of physical protection of servers and data using firewalls, private subnets, and server routing rules.

Get the Industry’s Best

Law firms have a 27% probability of being hit by a cyberattack, which can place legal professionals on the front lines of data breach attempts.

To make sure hackers stay out of your firm’s files and enjoy peace of mind on every eFiling and litigation support service you order, contact a Rapid Legal account manager to schedule a call or book a demo today.

Find out how Rapid Legal industry-leading protections guard your law firm’s confidential data while delivering unrivaled value and performance.