In some ways, we have more privacy today than we ever did before. A considerable number of children in the United States have their own bedrooms. In cities with little or no public transportation, people commute from home to work and back again in their own cars, not interacting with anyone, a situation the song “Synchronicity Part II” by The Police described as being “packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes.” In the loneliness of a bedroom community where you have to drive to get to your children’s school bus stop or extracurricular activities, it is easy to understand why people are so dissatisfied with family life. At the same time, it is easy to feel like you do not have enough privacy. With the ubiquity of social media accounts, everyone is a public figure.
Furthermore, smartphones are everywhere, so you are always at risk of being caught on camera at your worst moments, and everything you say and do can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion. In this dystopia, people often turn to family law attorneys as some of the few people in whom they can confide about their financial problems and their fears about their relationships with their children, so lawyers have a difficult but important task in protecting clients’ privacy and confidentiality.
What Does Confidentiality Mean for Lawyers and Their Clients?
The attorney-client privilege means that everything a client says to his or her lawyer about matters related to the client’s legal case is confidential, and the lawyer must not share it with anyone outside the case’s “circle of confidentiality.” This includes other attorneys, paralegals, and other employees within the law firm who are working with you on the case. In family law, attorney-client privilege begins with the first consultation between the lawyer and the prospective client, even if the client does not pay for the consultation and does not end up hiring the lawyer. Some clients try to sabotage their spouses’ position in divorce cases by having consultations with multiple lawyers because it would create a conflict of interest if the spouse hired any of those lawyers.
How to Talk About Your Work Without Breaching Client Confidentiality
Lawyers must keep information shared with them by their clients confidential, but they must also build a professional reputation for themselves. You can only do this by telling other people what you do. Every law firm needs a website with a blog and, ideally, with client testimonials. You also make a better impression at professional networking events if you give specific information about your work instead of just trying to talk yourself up with generic superlatives. These are some ways that you can discuss your work in professionally appropriate contexts without jeopardizing client confidentiality:
- Ask clients to provide testimonials on your website about cases you have already resolved. Edit the testimonials to remove as many identifying details as possible while still keeping the essence of the message.
- Base your blog posts on news reports about your cases that have already been resolved. What is public knowledge in the media is not protected by attorney-client privilege.
- Do not post about your own pending cases on your blog or discuss them with anyone outside your circle of confidentiality.
- Focus your marketing content on the laws that guide your practice, not on the specifics of cases.
Even the Smallest Law Firms Need Cybersecurity
Your efforts to stay quiet about your pending cases will be for nothing if cyber criminals steal confidential information from your law firm’s computer networks. Not only do you risk confidential information about your cases becoming public in the event of a data breach, but you also risk leaving your law firm’s employees and current and former clients vulnerable to financial crime if their bank account numbers, credit card numbers, addresses, birthdates, and Social Security numbers fall into the hands of scammers. If this happens, your law firm could face lawsuits from people who suffered financial harm because their identifying information got stolen during a breach of your law firm’s computer network.
Therefore, no law firm is too small to implement a cybersecurity strategy. At a minimum, you should hire a cybersecurity firm to conduct an audit of your law firm’s cybersecurity practices and look for vulnerabilities. The cybersecurity firm can suggest ways to strengthen your law firm’s cybersecurity. Some of these solutions are inexpensive, like subscribing to cloud-based data storage or requiring two-factor authentication to log into the law firm’s computers.
Published on:
