Net Q & A

Question of the Month: October 2000

Answer

One way to distinguishing your law firm from the competition is providing clients (and would-be clients) the option for secure e-mail communications.  This is particularly important when selling to high tech clients who are targets for corporate espionage.   

Sophisticated clients are reading about prosecutions like the Alibris case, reported on the U.S. Department of Justice web server.  Alibris was a bookseller that spied on thousands of Amazon.com e-mails.  Through automation of the snooping process, it was economically feasible for Alibris to gather and use book popularity and pricing information from thousands of Amazon.com e-mails.  It would never have been practical to gather and use this information through telephone wiretapping or any other snooping technique. 

Sophisticated clients, even those who may not ordinarily use encryption themselves, appreciate a law firm that gives them choices.  The program PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”) is deservedly popular among law firms for the purpose of giving clients the alternative for secure e-mail.  Have one person in your firm learn to use the program, and let clients know how to get your “public key,” needed to send you secure messages.   

Does giving clients choices make a difference?  As noted by Dr. Robert Jackson, the webmaster for Cooper, Sandler & West, URL at http://www.csandw.on.ca: 

Our law firm website has two feedback forms - one secure and one unsecure. Apart from security, they offer slightly different features. In 6 months, we have received 12 new uses (as opposed to a current client repeatedly using the form) of the secure form and 1 new use of the unsecure form. From the log files, we can see that all 13 visited the secure form while not all visited the unsecure form (the user of our unsecure form took advantage of a feature not available on the secure form). 

b. E-mail snooping is more cost effective when done in bulk, not just due to the sniffers that you mentioned, but the availability of powerful software like http://www.assentor.com that uses artificial intelligence features to go beyond key word searching and analyze e-mail once it has been captured.

A recent symposium at LLRX.com and the Security section of this web site both contain further information on practical aspects of e-mail security.

Jerry Lawson

This page last revised: October 1, 2000.