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A Message from Workshare

Work Reinvented - The New Mobile Attorney

By Barrie Hadfield, Co-founder and CTO at Workshare

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The volume of documents being shared electronically is ever increasing, and in parallel so are the levels of awareness around document security. In particular, the risks associated with hidden ‘metadata’ – or data about data - within documents are becoming more and more recognized, whether that be track changes in Word or notes in a PowerPoint. This is particularly important in the legal sector as the documents attorneys share often contain high-value intellectual property, or highly sensitive information. The surge in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, which means more attorneys are working on a mobile device and outside the traditional confines of the office, also presents data security risks.

With the BYOD trend more users are sharing files via consumer file sharing applications that they use at home, for work, and this is a problem. It becomes IT’s problem when they lose control of what is shared. This has a direct impact on compliance and also prevents a visible audit trail - two of the basic tenets of any secure document sharing application. Having the right measures in place that allow attorneys to feel secure about what they’re sharing normally falls on the firm. Their role is to protect corporate IP, ensure compliance, and build coherent security policies, developed in line with users’ needs and behavior. In response, firms need to provision a sanctioned application that is as easy to use as consumer applications, but totally secure.

A case in point - we were approached by a large legal firm in Southern California whose IT department understood the appeal of consumer file sharing applications and was keen to provide their lawyers with an IT-sanctioned alternative. They selected Workshare Professional 8 because it not only supported their users working on mobile devices securely, but it also gave its attorneys access to Workshare’s patented ‘Deltaview’ technology, allowing them to compare versions of documents on laptops, mobiles and tablets.

Workshare Professional 8 includes secure file transfer functionality, supporting attorneys as they share documents via email, web mail, tablets and mobile. Workshare provides end-to-end encryption, with data protection during transfer or “in-flight” and “at rest,” when it is held in its secure online environment. As we identified earlier, a significant risk for legal firms is the inadvertent sharing of sensitive data –Professional 8 also addresses this with its Interactive Protect feature.

The Interactive Protect feature identifies and strips metadata from files by analyzing documents as soon as they are attached to an email. It then gives the user a detailed list of the hidden metadata associated with that document and gives a series of options detailing how best to deal with it, for example cleaning the track changes, or removing the notes inside the document. By the time the email has been completed, all the analysis and cleaning has been done. This means that when users hit send, the clean version is ready to be sent with minimal interruption to the workflow. What’s more, users can decide to share the file as a PDF or PDF/A, or via secure link. In doing so users invite the recipient to a single version of the document, protected by a range of permissions, such as prevent printing, forwarding, downloading and time expiration.

Work is becoming something that you do, as opposed to somewhere you show up. Workshare is building the tools to enable this new way of working, and we’re doing so in a highly responsible way. Our applications empower lawyers to engage in this new collaborative, mobile work environment – in fact, we often speak in terms of “reinventing” work – without the risks associated with BYOD, data/metadata leakage and so on. Getting that balance right – which we think we have done and which we will continue to do – will have a tremendously positive impact on the way people work.

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