The risks of free file sharing software
You get a call from a client. You know the one…
“Hey, I didn’t receive the document you emailed, I need it ASAP, can you share it to me some other way?”
It’s important, and it’s urgent. Of course it is, everything for a client is important and urgent.
So, what do you do? You know that other law firms and practitioners share files with you with a simple link, and if it is that simple, it must be the best thing to do, right?
So off you go to the world wide web (That’s the Internet, Millennials) and you download DropBox, or Google Drive, or OneDrive or Box or one of the many file sharing applications you can use for free.
You drop in your email and you have an account. Easy. You upload the file and share the link. The clients happy, and so are you. You give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done, and then retrieve the last invoice from your IT provider questioning what exactly you pay them for.
And everything moves along just fine. You even recommend it to you fellow practitioners and colleagues suggesting that it is so much easier than using the client portal or praying to the gods that your email doesn’t end up in the client’s junk folder.
But eventually, your practice manager and support team are breathing down your neck, wondering why on earth they can’t find record of shared correspondence. Or that document you drafted and accessed from home late at night to finish.
They ask the same question for a range of matters, because for some reason, nobody except you seems to know where they are. And here lies the problem.
Those free file sharing apps create an account for YOU, as an individual, that the organisation can’t access. It is also contained within a third-party application, not bound by the security defined for enterprise wide applications. You have free reign to share whatever you like, with whomever you like, but how do you keep track of who has access to what, and when, and did you save that document back to the Matter? You can’t remember? Oh no!
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
As IT providers to the legal industry, we understand the challenges involved with sharing documents and information securely over digital mediums. There doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet solution to this either, with most firms struggling to reign in shadow IT which their teams keep resorting to. For our clients, we recommend a combination of using their client portal from their practice management system (Like LEAP, Lexis Affinity, Practice Evolve, FilePro etc) for recurring clients, referrers and parties, and SharePoint (Not email!) for the rest, particularly infrequent parties and parties to litigation matters who need to share large files.
SharePoint is organisation controlled and managed, has auditing and version control included, is backed up (Or it should be!), and accessible by the enterprise and it’s staff in your absence to ensure a file or document is never lost to a third party application ever again.
If you would like to know more about how SharePoint combined with your client portal can provide a robust enterprise wide document and file sharing solution, then please reach out to the consulting team at ServiceScaler who can assist you to deliver this within your firm.
enquiries@servicescaler.com | (02) 9146 6339 | www.servicescaler.com