Nearly nine in 10 Canadian lawyers plan to increase cybersecurity resources within their firms in order to keep sensitive data safe from breaches, which is a growing concern for the profession in 2019, show recent statistics.

Proving costly

The Robert Half Legal survey asked over 150 full-time lawyers in Canada if their law firm plans to “increase or decrease its budget on cybersecurity-related tools and services in the next 12 months.” Shy of nine out of ten, 87 per cent of those surveyed say they plan to either slightly or significantly increase these resources. Charles Volkert, senior district president at Robert Half Legal, said “Considering the high volume of personal and sensitive information they maintain, law firms and law departments recognize they are a particular target for cyberattacks. In the wrong hands, this valuable and confidential information could prove costly to any organization and cause irreparable damage to their brand and reputation, not to mention the fact that if a law firm loses a client’s confidential data to an attack, it could face serious legal and ethics violations as well.”

Budget increases

The report found that 34 per cent of lawyers plan to significantly increase their budget on cybersecurity-related tools and services, 53 per cent say the budget will somewhat increase, 11 per cent say it’ll neither increase nor decrease, zero per cent say it’ll decrease and two per cent say they don’t know.  In the 2017 survey, only 35 per cent of lawyers had answered that they were looking to increase cybersecurity budgets and measures, almost half as few as the new report.