Magazine of Normative & Developmental Law

NOWADAYS, lawyers would often carry with them laptops to courts, coffee shops, meetings, conferences and speaking engagements.  Eventually, from briefcases to portfolios, laptops have emerged as one of the most efficient, reliable, trendy and secure equipment that a lawyer could have in his possession.

The use of laptops in today’s legal practice is not only convenient but is also necessarily complementary to the fast-paced nature of a busy lawyer’s life.  A life in this technology-laden time.

A prudent lawyer should be aware that there are different security risks that are associated with the increasing use and dependence of lawyers to their laptops.  Using a laptop carries with it important security measures that lawyers should bear in mind considering the confidential status of information acquired by them in their everyday dealings.

Security threats may be of external or internal character.  External security threats are those physically foreign to the laptop or the owner.  Internal security threats are those threats existing within the laptop’s system.

The usual external security threat is laptop theft.  Be extra careful when going out in public carrying or displaying a laptop.   Many laptop thefts happen inside coffee shops, malls and parking lots.  Of course, one should also be wary of laptop robbery.

Viruses, security or firewall breaches, hard disk failure, and corrupted files are the usual internal security threats.  This can be countered by having an updated anti-virus, choosing websites to surf, regularly cleaning your hard disk drives and having back-ups of permanent files saved in a separate storage media.

According to Privacy & Security Law Blog, “Using a laptop that is under-protected to connect to the Internet via crowded public Wi-Fi hotspots in hotel lobbies, coffee shops and airport terminals exposes the laptop to a variety of risks that have the potential of being more damaging than the theft of the laptop itself.“

Some tips:

1. When leaving your laptop inside your car parked in an unsecured parking space, cover your laptop so that it will not be visible or obvious to any passerby;
2. If you are to travel to another country, make sure that you have previously understood their policy on bringing in of laptops in their jurisdiction;
3. If you are using your laptop inside a coffee shop or public place and you suddenly felt the urge of going to the comfort room, ask first a nearby friend, colleague or the security guard or bartender to watch over your things;
4. Make good use of passwords for your laptop profiles;
   
5. Use anti-virus such as Avira, Avast or McAfee that updates regularly;
6. Use a cleaner such as Piriform’s CC Cleaner;
7. Make clearing of cookies a habit so to prevent cookie theft particularly on unencrypted wifi networks (Thanks, Mr. Edwin Togño for the input).
8. You may want to buy a separate portable storage media such as My Book or other external hard disk drives;
9. Use tracking softwares like Adeona or other similar laptop tracking softwares such as Kaseya or LoJack.
   
10. Do not connect to untrusted public wi-fi servers; and
    
11. Check your firewall exceptions.

The above tips are just some of the many ways a lawyer can protect his dear laptop from harm of external and internal threats.  One would not want his or her confidential files to be thrown open in public or fall to untrusted hands especially if that would mean breach of privacy, that attorney-client confidence and some serious ethical issues.

Be groovy.  Keep your laptops safe! ##

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