Why legal is different
Most industries lose money when IT fails. Law firms can lose a matter.
A filing deadline that passes, a limitation period missed, a settlement that does not complete — these are not operational inconveniences, they carry professional and liability consequences. That changes what “acceptable downtime” means, and it is the reason a legal practice should not be running the same recovery objectives as a business where a lost afternoon is just a lost afternoon.
The settlement fraud problem
If a Brisbane law firm reads one section of this page, this is the one.
Payment redirection around settlement is the highest-loss attack against the profession, and it works because nothing about it looks wrong. The attacker compromises a mailbox — frequently the client’s or the other side’s rather than yours — reads a genuine conveyancing thread, waits for the moment settlement figures are exchanged, and sends revised account details from a real address in a real conversation.
The money moves because a competent person followed what appeared to be legitimate instructions.
Three controls address it, and none are exotic. Verify account details by voice against a number you obtained independently, never one from the email. Enforce MFA so mailbox compromise is harder. Alert on inbox rule creation, because a hidden forwarding rule is the tell that a mailbox is already compromised.
Documents organised around matters
Legal work is matter-centric and most generic file structures are not. A firm forced to file matter documents into a departmental folder tree ends up with material scattered, duplicated and hard to produce.
Whether that structure lives in your practice management system or in SharePoint depends on the platform, but the principle is the same: the structure should match how the firm thinks, and the permissions should follow the matter.
That also makes ethical walls implementable. If access is granted at matter level through groups, separating a conflicted matter is a configuration change that can be evidenced. If access is granted ad hoc file by file, it cannot.
Practice management platforms
LEAP, Actionstep and Smokeball are cloud-hosted, which means the IT work around them is identity, integration, document handling and the environment they run in rather than server administration.
That is a better division than it used to be. It does mean the security questions move to your Microsoft 365 tenant and your access control, which is where we focus.
Retention that stays produceable
Long retention is straightforward as a storage problem and awkward as a findability problem. Material kept for seven years in a structure nobody maintained, in formats that have moved on, with the person who filed it long gone, is technically retained and practically lost.
Deciding retention deliberately — by matter type, against your actual obligations — and keeping the structure intact is what makes production possible when it is eventually requested.