Hacking is the bane of many a business, law firms included.
But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the large banks are now demanding that their law firms do more to protect sensitive information to ensure that they don’t become back doors for hackers.
Once given special status as trusted third parties, lawyers, particularly those who get access to sensitive bank information, now are more likely to get full background checks. The number of compliance checklists for law-firm technology systems and security procedures has ballooned. And law firms big and small increasingly are getting on-site audits to check who has access to documents and office servers.
A spate of cyberattacks has sharpened financial institutions’ focus on security when dealing with outside law firms, said Varun Mehta, a vice president at Clutch Group LLC, a legal and compliance consulting firm that works with global banks. “Every bank has changed from a year ago,” he said.
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley , Bank of America Corp. and UBS AG subjected outside lawyers to greater scrutiny even before financial institutions were victims of cyberattacks this summer, people familiar with the matter said.
