Category: Business of Law

COVID-19 Pandemic is Rocking our Legal Profession

Lawyers need to Adapt

COVID-19 has abruptly brought our world to a screeching halt. We can all agree that the post-pandemic world will be different, and the legal practice will not be an exception.   As we continue to be apart and try to overcome the global pandemic, it’s easy to become despondent about what the future waves of the virus will wage upon us as we absorb the sobering fact that a majority of will catch the virus and thousands of people will die.

Lawyers – like everyone else dealing with the pandemic – cannot delude themselves into thinking this is a short-term problem.  The global pandemic will have a profound and lasting effect on the world and the practice. Rather than think about the grim statistics, we need to focus on the purpose of our practice and how to perform the work we have been trained to do.  We must stay safe, healthy, keep in touch with loved ones and – most importantly – look at the situation as an opportunity to modernize how we deliver services.

For several years I have been talking about using technology in the practice and adapting to the tsunami of changes tech is bringing to our society. We have ignored and resisted the technological changes that are changing the way we practice.

It is no longer enough to use e-filing, email, video conferencing, video-based court hearings, and e-signatures. We must move to the cloud, learn to work easily from home, adapt to video-based mediations, and get comfortable with remote teaching, and then we have to move further down the road of advancing the practice. There has to be a more serious approach and greater thought given to how we will be practicing law in the future.

This will require a complete change in paradigm of the practice.

  • The portion of society that solos and small firms service – the middle class – will be devastated by the pandemic. Already the stock market crash has taken about 25% of the retirement portfolio, over 4,000,000 people will be applying for unemployment, supply chains are being stretched to the limit, and a global recession is not far away.   So, who will be able to afford legal services?
    • We will have to work harder to get justice for the people most affected by the collapse of the economy.
    • More businesses will be going bankrupt.
    • More retail space will become vacant.
  • Embracing technology beyond Zoom and video conferencing and moving into collaborative technology.
  • Remote working, online courts, eLibraries, digital signatures, case management and knowledge management are now mandatory.
  • Increased use of electronically stored information (ESI).
  • Accepting artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, predictive analytics which have already disrupted the legal market.

And through this tsunami of effects, where will lawyers stand? Will we be sitting on the beach catching some rays as the tsunami overcomes us?  Will we be like the lobster who gets washed up onto a rock and refuses to move the several inches to the ocean to survive?

If we are the leaders that we profess to be, then let’s lead.  Let’s find some answers. Let’s propose new systems for helping solve legal problems and serving the community.  Or we can all become Uber drivers (at least until drivers are still needed)

There are lots of directions we can take individually and creative, innovative steps the bar can take, but whatever we do, we need to move now!  I don’t have all the answers, but I refuse to be drowned by the tsunami that has hit us.  We need to start be the leaders of society which lawyers have been recognized to be.

 

COVID-19 is affecting the Practice

This is an unsettling and chaotic period of no longer business-as-usual for every industry, and the legal practice is no exception.  While we are all trying to stay safe and relatively production, a tsunami of change is overwhelming us.

The Future is Now

Clio, one of the largest law firm management systems, published a survey of law firms to assess the impact of the Pandemic on the practice.

Generally, the report confirms what we have been experiencing first hand – that the practice has been significantly affected by social restrictions and we are seeing reduced client demands.  This is notwithstanding the ongoing need for legal services.  Here are some of the findings:

  • Law firms have seen a drastic deceleration in new matter creation. Since the start of 2020, the number of new legal matters being opened each week has decreased by more than 30% compared to a baseline average of weekly matters opened during the first five weeks of 2020. When compared to the brief increase at the end of February, the number of new weekly matters dropped a total of 40%.
  • 77% of law firms agree that their day-to-day operations have been significantly impacted by the pandemic.
  • Lawyers expressed widespread concern over the future success of their businesses and their ability to make ends meet. Much of this concern is likely due to the majority of firms having seen a drastic decrease in the number of people reaching out for legal services.
  • Legal professionals take the novel coronavirus outbreak seriously. Only 11% of legal professionals agree that social restrictions are an overreaction to the virus.  Additionally, 75% of legal professionals report higher levels of stress and anxiety.
  • 50% of legal professionals are more concerned for their financial future than for their personal health.
  • Lawyers are still essential but will need to adapt to client needs. Overall, public perception of lawyers remains significantly positive for lawyers among the general population.  77% see lawyers as an essential service.  However, many consumers also perceive barriers in terms of cost and the accessibility of legal services.
  • 38% of consumers agree that a remote hearing would negatively impact their case outcome.

The pandemic has exacerbated the issues that lawyers have been facing over the past two decades.  We can no longer play the ostrich and stick our heads in the sand.  We need to become proactive in adapting to the changes we are facing.   We must – in order to survive – re-imagine how we meet clients wherever they are located to deliver services that are professional and affordable.   Technology will only advance our goal of servicing our clients.

For a summary of the report go to: https://www.clio.com/resources/legal-trends/covid-impact/

For a full copy of the report go to: https://www.clio.com/resources/legal-trends/

 

Lawyers are lagging behind in e-Discovery Training

Many lawyers have just not taken the time to get training in e-discovery.

The rules have changed.  It’s no longer about “documents” in the sense of paper.  It’s about getting information in a digital format, which is why the rules now refer to ESI – which refers to Electronically Stored Information.

What is e-discovery?   It has been defined as “the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, processing, searching, reviewing and producing Electronically Stored Information (“ESI”) that may be relevant” in a legal proceeding.  [See, Maura Grossman and Gordan V. Cormack, The Grossman-Cormack Glossary of Technology-Assisted Review, Federal Courts Law Review, 2013 Feds. Cts. L. Rev. 7 (Jan. 2013).]

So, the new battlefield in litigation is over getting ESI of your client ready for trial and getting the ESI from the other party.

Bigger firms and large businesses have developed their e-discovery systems, but small firms and solo lawyers simply have lagged behind in training.   And most law schools are still not educating students on the many uses of technology.

Today there is a vast disconnect between the legal profession’s grasp of legal issues and its understanding of technology. The fact-finding process requires lawyers to focus on uncovering or disclosing electronic messages, Internet usage, word processing revisions, meta data, and other ESI.  Whether requesting or responding to a request for electronic discovery, litigants must be familiar with their own and their opposing party’s computer system. This requires a working knowledge of the many issues associated with e-discovery.

And as we start using more and more technology in our lives (think smartphone as just one example), it will become more important for lawyers to become intimately familiar with technology and how to use it – not just in litigation, but in their practices and in advising clients.    Data security and integrity controls are important for law firms, and we cannot advise clients on these issues until we learn to adopt those concepts in our own buisnesses.

 

AI and the Practice of Law

Technology is advancing at a rate that is increasing exponentially.   Other industries are moving faster to adopt tech into their business than the legal industry.   What was once fanciful is becoming real.  Self-driving cars are just one thing that comes to mind, but robotics is invading every industry.   And technology is being developed to take over legal tasks.

AI in the Legal Profession

Alternative Legal Service Providers (“ALSPs”) are popping up everywhere.   Large accounting firms are using tech to perform traditional legal services  23% of large law firms surveyed in a recent report by Thomson Reuters said that they had lost expected client business to one of the Big Four accounting firms.

This move to tech is best characterized by the increased use of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”).   Although difficult to define, AI is simply the ability of a computer program or a machine to think and learn and mimics human cognition.  It makes computers “smart” by working on their own without being encoded with commands.[1]    Best example is when IBM’s Watson beating a world chess champion in 1997 and won in Jeopardy in 2011.

With all of this in mind, the ABA Science and Technology Section submitted a report to the ABA House of Delegates earlier this year tried to address some of the questions presented by the use of artificial intelligence in the legal practice and the ethical issues presented by the use of AI in law firms.  Some of these uses include the use of predictive coding (“TAR”) in e-discovery, due diligence reviews, legal research and document review.  The Report stated:  “But while AI offers cutting-edge advantages and benefits, it also raises questions implicating professional ethics.”

The ABA adopted the following resolution after considering the Report:

“RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges courts and lawyers to address the emerging ethical and legal issues related to the usage of artificial intelligence (“AI”) in the practice of law including: (1) bias, explainability, and transparency of automated decisions made by AI; (2) ethical and beneficial usage of AI; and (3) controls and oversight of AI and the vendors that provide AI.”

The resolution is nothing more than a recognition of the issues confronting the organized bar going forward in the increasingly complex world where technology creates new issues that law needs to confront.   The legal profession must adapt to the changes that tech is bringing to the world.  Lawyers will face more issues as tech invades every aspect of our lives.

 

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[1] John McCarthy came up with the name “artificial intelligence” in 1955.  https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#/search

The Future of Law – Part 4: Our Robot Colleagues

Call it the rise of the robots.  The legal profession continues to be transformed by the use of artificial intelligence in new and innovative ways. New developments in the past five years alone stagger the mind as what would have sounded like science fiction not along ago continues to become reality, making the lives of lawyers easier but also forcing them to change how they do business if they want to survive and succeed.

Rewind to 2013, and you find Jay Leib and Dan Roth—who launched Discovery Cracker way back in 2000 to streamline discovery and make it electronic and searchable—birthing their then-new creation, NexLP.  For the past five years this company has used AI to analyze previously unstructured data and identify trends, using predictive coding to gauge, for example, the likely results of pending litigation based on past results.

Another entrepreneurial duo, Adam Nguyen and Ned Gannon, set into motion the Diligence Accelerator program from eBrevia to help lawyers handle the pressure from in-house counsel and other clients to cut costs. This AI-fueled software similarly extracts information from data as clients upload documents, search for information and download per their preferences. The program doesn’t just recognize words but notices common legal phrases and stores those in its “memory bank” for future use.

In 2015, Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, created an independent subsidiary called NextLaw Labs, which earned the firm distinction from The Financial Times as the most forward-thinking law firm of the year. The subsidiary’s advisory group picks through potentially disruptive ideas to find those most likely to succeed, among which has been Ross Intelligence, which uses IBM’s Watson cognitive computing to make reams of legal research instantly searchable via a request in plain English.

Another innovative law firm, Riverview Law in the United Kingdom, launched a virtual assistant called “Kim,” an acronym for knowledge, intelligence and meaning, which will use AI technology developed by the University of Liverpool and a U.S.-based data collection and management program called Clixlex, since renamed Kim Technologies.

And the U.K.-based Ravn Systems has used cognitive computing to build its Applied Cognitive Engine program, which also extracts information from data at high speed, pushing out the boundaries of what lawyers and law firms can accomplish in a short stretch of time. The company’s Contract Robot can do so with title deeds and other types of documents.

AI continues to blossom, and while many firms do not yet use it, the robots are clearly on the march. “You start with a number of documents and ask questions like what are the termination clauses,” Peter Wallqvist, CEO and co-founder of Ravn Systems, explained to the ABA Journal. “For example, there’s a telecommunications company that would tell us about documents they had to review. They told us how they had to go through 1,000 documents, which would take three people six months to complete. We can do that in a matter of days.”

As the Journal concluded, “That is the future. Maybe it’s not so scary after all.”

 

Future of the Law – Part 3: Meet LISA, the future of Law.

The term “Legal Intelligence Support Assistant” might sound like a fancy-pants way of referring to your paralegal, law library or perhaps secretary. When you shrink that term to the acronym LISA, you might be tempted to ask about LISA’s professional background or whether she’s a nice woman.

But this LISA is no woman, let alone a human.  “She” is an artificial intelligence solution who provides “expertise” in the automation of legal documents, reducing or replacing the need for human lawyers in representing either party to an agreement.    The National Law Journal sounded impressed with LISA, placing the technological innovation on its inaugural list of Legal AI Leaders, which highlighted 49 entrepreneurs and companies who the magazine believes represented the best available online AI tools and services.

Launched in April 2017, Robot Lawyer LISA has been used by students, academics, businesses of all varieties and sizes, general counsel and other legal users. The U.K.-based company and co-founder/CEO Chrissie Lightfoot have become part of the conversation about the future of legal services provision, particularly in the area of quality online legal advice and documents.

“I’ve always been driven to innovate and push the boundaries to make improvements related to new products and/or services with the focus on the customer or client at the center of everything,” Lightfoot told the online publication Womanthology. “No doubt this passion has been fueled by my interest in the future as I constantly question, “What’s next?”, “What’s possible?”, and “How are we going to get there?”

Based on the premise that 90 percent of the public cannot afford legal services, LISA brings together human and machine intelligence to enable to lay parties to put together a legally binding contract, making quality legal insight, guidance, support and advice both faster, more transparent, more affordable and more accessible—24/7/365 and around the world.    The LISA system first offered a non-disclosure/confidentiality agreement, and the company subsequently released a group of three property-related artificial intelligence tools: a commercial lease, a residential lease, and a lodger agreement. These have come in handy for everyone from professional service firms, to business associations, to property-related businesses as the letting or renting of property online continues to grow, Lightfoot says.

The AI system asks users a number of questions supported by information, know-how and experience from human lawyers who helped to create LISA. Users read and respond, and those answers lead the parties to a middle ground as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, while helping them navigate the nuances involved both legally and commercially, she says.

For example, a landlord might initiate a lease document using the LISA tool, and then the tenant can change the initial draft to make the lease 18 months instead of three years—or anything else two laypeople traditionally would negotiate, albeit traditionally with the help of two human lawyers. Instead, they get support, knowledge and intelligence from the system.

Ultimately, Lightfoot does not think AI will mean robots take over every task an attorney might handle. “AI and robots will continue to replace human jobs whilst augmenting others,” she told Womanthology. “If you do nothing, then you ought to be worried. However, as these human roles and skill-sets will variably shift, it is up to each and every one of us to reinvent ourselves and apply the skills that the machines cannot do, yet.”

 

Future of the Practice – Part 1: Why So Much Non-Billable Time?

Clio’s “Legal Trends Report” tries to suss out what lawyers are doing, exactly

What happens to the nearly six hours per day that lawyers spend on non-billable tasks? Why can’t attorneys dedicate more of their time to billable work? How do they spend their time, anyway? The 2017 “Legal Trends Report” from Clio attempts to answer these questions and others that legal professionals are—or at least should be—asking themselves.

The report, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 legal professionals, finds that lawyers only spend 29 percent of an 8-hour work day, or about 2.3 hours, on billable tasks—and when factoring in realization and collection rates, firms reap only 1.6 hours of billable time.

Nearly half of their time, 48 percent, goes into office administration, billing, technology and collections. One-third of their non-billable time goes toward business development, which means they’re constantly making sure they develop new clients, and 41 percent would spend even more time on business development if they could, the Clio report says.

More than half of law firms (54 percent) actively advertise their services to earn new clients, yet the overwhelming majority can neither calculate their return on investment in advertising (91 percent), nor know how much it costs them to acquire a new client (94 percent).

How can law firms improve their client acquisition? Clio also surveyed more than 2,000 consumers to find out what they want in a lawyer, and what influences their decisions on which firm to hire for a given case or matter.

Personal referrals from friends and family were by far the most frequently used search method (62 percent), while referrals from other lawyers (31 percent), online searches (37 percent) and directory listings (28 percent) were also relatively common. Advertising has a much lower influence, whether television (13 percent), online (13 percent), radio (7 percent) or billboards (6 percent).

Communication and pricing were top of mind for consumers in deciding which attorney or firm to hire. Responding to phone or e-mail right away (67 percent) and free initial consultations (64 percent) were the most sought-after qualities, Clio found.

Fixed fees (47 percent), accepting credit cards (28 percent) and being willing to exchange text messages (27 percent) were other common desires. Although online search was common, the snazziness of the firm’s website influenced only 19 percent of respondents.

The “Legal Trends Report” also contained figures on average billable hour rates. The average law firm rate is $240 overall, $260 for lawyers and $149 for non-lawyers. The average Chicago firm charges $312 per hour, third-highest among the 10 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, behind only New York and Los Angeles.

Yet the survey data shows that many firms don’t have set targets for how much they plan to earn in a given year, nor case by case. Slightly more than half (54 percent) could estimate their annual billings, half can bill a case based on a set budget, and less than half (40 percent) of firms that track time have hourly billing budgets.

Clearly, many of these respondents need to get a better handle on what they need to make, how they plan to do it, and then how to rejigger their time to be able to bill for a higher percentage of their time … or their own personal trends won’t be headed in the right direction.

Michigan Bar Considers Ethics Resolution for Online Matching Services

Potential legal clients are increasingly turning to online matching services to find attorneys. In some cases, these services charge a fee based on a percentage of the attorney’s costs for their legal help, and the money is paid to and controlled by the third party.

A Michigan state bar committee is considering a resolution asserting that such fees constitute an impermissible sharing of fees with a non-lawyer, violating numerous ethical rules in the state codified in the Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct. Attorneys in other states, many of which have similar rules, would do well to be aware of the issues raised.

The Michigan ethical rules in question include provisions that prohibit a lawyer from participating in for-profit lawyer referral services, sharing fees with a non-lawyer or giving anything of value to recommend a lawyer’s services—aside from reasonable advertising fees, charges for a nonprofit lawyer referral service, or sale of a law practice.

Connecting to clients through such online matching services also would “subvert” compliance with another ethical rule that requires legal fees and expenses paid in advance be deposited into a client trust account until the fee is earned and expenses incurred, the resolution notes. It adds that this also “impedes” compliance with the requirement that unearned prepaid fees and unexpected advances on costs be refunded.

To whatever extent such an online service provider identifies itself as providing legal services, attorneys that partner with the online service assist in the unauthorized practice of law, the resolution states. Finally, to the extent the matching service provides administrative “back office” services usually done through a law firm, “this does not comport with the professional obligations of the lawyer.”

“The assessment requires a careful review of the business model to determine whether it constitutes a for-profit referral service and if compliance with the terms for participation requires a Michigan lawyer to violate the Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct,” the resolution reads. “Legal matching services are not new, but innovation in technology has spearheaded private entrepreneurial online matching services beyond the usual bar association non-profit lawyer referral services.”

The resolution considers two scenarios. In one case, a national website includes “legal services” in its business name, markets to consumers, brands participating lawyers with the business name, offers services for a fixed fee, asks the consumer to choose an attorney based on a review of profiles, and requires the consumer to pay a deposit into the website portal. The site markets to lawyers that it matches them with clients who already have paid, takes care of all administrative services, and deducts a percentage as a “marketing fee.”

The second scenario has the word “legal” in its name, targets businesses needing legal services, tasks them to fill out an attorney request form, provides a free half-hour consultations followed by a pricing proposal from the attorney, then asks the business client to pay through the website. The third party then collects and holds all fees and keeps about 7.5 percent of each. Lawyers must provide at least a 17.5 percent discount off their standard rates, and the service touts discounts of 60 percent to 75 percent because it offers administrative services normally handled by a law firm.

“Numerous ethical concerns are presented by both business models,” the proposed Michigan bar resolution concludes. “Although these online matching services do not call themselves lawyer referral services, the functional characteristics of a referral service are embedded in both business models.”

 

 

5 Technology Trends That Will Impact Business, Practice of Law

How will emerging technology trends like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, data verification, “frictionless” technology designs and the skills and capabilities required for the “Internet of thinking” reshape the landscape for small businesses – and the practice of law?

A report from Accenture titled “Accenture Technology Vision 2018” lays out these trends and delves into how they will disrupt the business landscape generally over the next few years, and a Forbes magazine interview of Michael Biltz, managing director of Accenture Technology Vision and a co-author of the report, provided a nice summary of his insights.

The impact of artificial intelligence on businesses and their customers is one such potentially disruptive trend.  Biltz told Forbes contributor Steve Olenski, who conducted the Q-and-A, that AI systems will need to be “taught” societal norms like fairness and transparency, as well as the ability to learn from mistakes, a responsibility that needs to be shared by tech experts, marketers and others in business leadership.

The Accenture report and Forbes Q-and-A also discuss virtual and augmented reality, and how they remove distance among people, information and experiences, providing businesses the ability to tap expertise from anywhere in the world in any skill area.  The report mentions that BMW provides people the ability to get “inside” one of its cars through augmented reality, for example.

Businesses that have become more data-driven need to lock down the accuracy of that data and ensure that it doesn’t become manipulated and biased in a way that distorts insights and decision-making. Accenture’s report discusses how AI helps to detect fraud as well as inadvertent errors in areas like duplicate expenses and corporate policy violations.

 

Businesses also need to strike “frictionless” technology-based partnerships to continue growing, which means they need to replace their legacy systems and redesign themselves with new digital ecosystems based around “microservices architectures,” Accenture says. This is an approach using a “suite of tools like application programming interfaces (APIs), containers and cloud to break applications into simple, discrete services,” the report says.

Lastly, the Accenture report and Forbes Q-and-A note that businesses will need to add crucial skills and capabilities to their workforce to bring these changes about, which the report refers to as “the Internet of thinking.”  This leads to intelligent solutions like “improving traffic flows in smart cities, telemedicine that continuously analyzes a patient’s condition, and disaster analysis that prevents oil field catastrophes before they start,” the report says.

Moving forward in these five areas will require a fundamental shift in leadership approach and capabilities, Biltz told Forbes.  New leadership will need to ensure that companies not only have the right technology but are using it in the right way to embed the company, product or service in their customers’ lives. “It’s less about using technology to sell a product and more about using a suite of technologies that enables a company to partner with consumers on a daily basis to help them achieve their personal goals,” Biltz said.  “That could be about saving for college or feeding a family on a budget.”

The practice of law has always been the last industry to adapt to changes in business practices and technology.   Recently, law schools are only now beginning to understand the importance of technology to the practice and are finally training lawyers in tech skills that can translate to the changing tech climate.   Lawyers will have to get out of their comfort zone with technology and adapt their practices to the evolving business landscape.

 

Attorneys Should Do Homework About Cloud Security

Storing info in the Cloud can be dangerous.

Attorneys who do their due diligence need not be overly concerned about the security of storing their firm and client information in the online “cloud,” the network of servers that operate as a single entity, to which users connect through their computer, tablet, phone or other device.

That due diligence includes research into the various providers, asking questions about their business practices, choosing one with a track record, and potentially negotiating for certain standards and practices, such as those promulgated by the National Institute for Standards and Technology, a federal government agency.

Larger cloud providers are less likely to negotiate such details, but they are more likely to publish what they do provide, and they might be more reliable overall. Lawyers and firms should ask smaller companies detailed questions about security certificates, risk management programs and adherence to industry standards.

Although attorneys and firms who do not yet have a dedicated cloud provider are storing most of their information on a local server in their utility room or closet, even they are often using the cloud through Gmail, Yahoo or other web-based e-mail service.

Still others are using free services (at least, their basic versions are free) like Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon Cloud Drive. Free services don’t typically provide the same level of security, though, so be sure to encrypt files.

Firms and attorneys might want to consider upgrading to a paid version of Dropbox, which provides 1 terabyte of storage for $100 per year, or a legal-specific service like NetDocuments, some of which only provide certain discrete functions—Clio and RocketMatter handle practice management and time-and-billing, for example—if you don’t want to dive in all the way.

Storage with cloud providers is relatively inexpensive compared with other line items in a law firm budget, and they are probably more sophisticated than all but the largest law firms in terms of keeping data secure, which is important as hackers continue to become more sophisticated.

But even larger firms might want to consider outsourcing, given the large number of staff and thus greater exposure to passwords being compromised, their sheer size, and the value of the data they hold being that much larger. Attorneys and law firms have become targets not so much for their own information as that of their clients, especially in industries like financial services or healthcare.

If your firm experiences a client data breach, whether on your servers or a cloud provider’s, you are legally obligated to notify clients promptly, although that doesn’t necessarily protect you from negligence or breach of confidentiality claims if your data is not properly encrypted.

The Rules of Professional Conduct do not differentiate between theft of electronic vs. paper files, and state bar ethics opinions have begun to delineate what constitutes a reasonable standard of care in choosing a provider, based on terms of services and policies and procedures.

While some states following the relatively permissive American Bar Association rules that say lawyers “shall not knowingly release” client data, Illinois continues to use an older version of the model rules that simply states: “Lawyers shall protect against disclosures of client confidentiality.”

The Illinois State Bar Association has issued an ethics opinion (ISBA Professional Conduct Advisory Opinion No. 16-06) affirming that it is ethical to store client information in the cloud so long as specific steps are taken.

Among those are the stipulation in Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1 mandating that attorneys stay abreast of modern security standards–and be conscious of whether their cloud provider uses them.

Another point of reference should be Illinois Rule 1.6(e), which says attorneys must undertake “reasonable efforts to prevent the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of, or unauthorized access to” confidential information.

Bottom line: As long as attorneys or firms act reasonably or competently to protect client data, they are not likely to be found to have acted unethically if a hacker steals confidential information.

Which means: DO YOUR HOMEWORK!