Email Encryption for Legal Compliance

While law firms aren’t required to encrypt email, the type of files contained in email (e.g., financial data or healthcare information) must be encrypted. To avoid compliance violations and data eavesdropping, legal professionals should proactively encrypt email messages. By default, email is not encrypted, so it’s an insecure way to communicate over the web. Attorneys rely heavily on email as a critical component in client communications, so adding encryption to your cybersecurity infrastructure helps mitigate potential data loss and breaches. 

Encryption blocks anyone from eavesdropping on your network as well. Insider threats pose a significant risk to the reputation of law firms that possess valuable data. Any malware unknowingly running on the network would not be able to eavesdrop on email communications. Only the intended recipient can read encrypted messages, and legal employees have their outgoing messages encrypted too. A good encryption strategy hardens the security of email communication without interfering with legal messages between lawyers and clients. 

TitanHQ uses sophisticated encryption and artificial intelligence to safeguard email communications in the legal sector. We protect your data, ensure compliance with government regulations, and make communications convenient for busy employees. Our email solutions also block malicious web content and incoming phishing emails. 

When a recipient receives the message, it sits on an email server in the recipient’s inbox. At this point, the message is data at rest. Should an attacker deploy malware to the network, this data could be vulnerable to eavesdropping and theft. Just like data in transit, encrypted data at rest doesn’t stop an attacker from stealing data, but it makes it unreadable to a third party. 

Protecting client data is the core benefit of email encryption, but the strategy also keeps attorneys compliant with government regulations. HIPAA, PSI DSS, and GDPR define hefty fines for violations of client data privacy. Attorneys are required to take proper steps to ensure that third parties cannot gain access to client data. Having an email encryption solution is one such method to prevent threats from stealing email data. 

Compliance regulations don’t specify what organizations need to do to encrypt email. Most regulations tell attorneys to take “reasonable steps” to protect their client data. Adding an encryption component to cybersecurity infrastructure involves taking “reasonable steps” to protect email communications that contain client information. 

Email encryption isn’t a complete cybersecurity solution. You still need to have other data protection strategies in place, like intrusion detection, access controls, identity management, security awareness training, and security protocols. For most law firms, creating a strategy and deploying security infrastructure requires a professional who is familiar with the cybersecurity landscape. 

Here are the Next Steps: 

• Train your team. Most email solutions offer a manual option that allows employees to instruct the email server to encrypt a message or parts of the message. The default configuration might be to encrypt outgoing email. Ensure that all staff are aware of how to utilize encryption features. 
• Test encryption features. To ensure the service is working properly and you understand the product, send a few messages to a trusted colleague to verify that configurations meet standards. 
• Create templates to educate clients. Some encryption services require special instructions for recipients to access components of an email. You should have a template that explains to recipients how to read messages. 
• Monitor email communications. Monitoring data and access requests is also a part of compliance. You, or IT administrators, should ensure that email communication is monitored and audit trails are created for every access request. Some administrators only log access request failures, but compliant systems require an audit trail for both access request successes and failures, so that any changes to data can be traced back to the user. 

You want a solution that does not interfere with email communication and does not slow down file and data transfers. Products like EncryptTitan work seamlessly, without interfering with staff communications, while providing a user-friendly interface to manage sensitive data with encryption tools. 

Reduce Additional Risks with Phishing and Spam Filters 

Although email encryption is one cybersecurity solution, it’s not a fully comprehensive way to completely protect your client data. Your law firm still needs additional methods to block threat actors, malicious programs, malware, ransomware, and unauthorized access to data. Phishing email filters are a secondary method that blocks malware before it can reach the network environment. 

Spam filters are also beneficial for blocking malware from reaching intended recipients. All these features work to protect your email communications and stop threats from stealing client data. Because you are working with the umbrella of TitanHQ products, your IT administrators can easily integrate email encryption using EncryptTitan with other email-based cybersecurity tools and solutions. 

TitanHQ has dedicated customer service personnel committed to helping businesses integrate their solutions, ensuring that you can deploy email encryption with minimal overhead for your staff members. Using our encryption service, you stay compliant with government regulations and ensure the reliable and secure delivery of your client communications. 

Sign up for a free demo to see the TitanHQ cybersecurity solutions in action.