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TECH SUPPORT Securing your BlackBerry Proper measures for locking down lawyers' portable devices can keep clients' information safe — and the firm's name out of the papers — if one gets lost or stolen. BY GERRY BLACKWELL L ast year, three lawyers at Lerners LLP, a London, Ont. fi rm, left their Black- Berrys on the back seats of cabs. All were returned safely, but what could have happened isn't pretty. Losing a $400 hand-held com- puter containing all your personal information is bad enough. But the real concern is that lawyers' hand- helds carry confi dential client in- formation in the form of e-mails, attachments, and the like. "You can imagine how sensitive some of the e-mails can be and how detrimen- tal to a case it could be if they land- ed in the wrong hands," says Frank Post, Lerners' executive director of information services. Worst case? The other side in a litiga- tion acquires information from a lost or otherwise compromised hand-held and uses it to win the case. The reason they have the information emerges. Your cli- ent sues for malpractice. At Lerners, which has a strong health law group, another serious concern is private patient information being com- promised. By law, such breaches must be disclosed and may result in public censure from a provincial privacy com- missioner. "Loss of reputation is the key risk," says Post. "You really don't want to be known on the street as the fi rm that wasn't careful enough with the client's data." Which is why Lerners has been on a mobile-data security campaign for over 100 lawyers, of whom 75 carry the popular BlackBerrys. There is no reason to think Lerners' lawyers are unusually careless. It's just that misplacing a four-ounce, wallet- size device is easy to do. With so many in use, a certain number will inevitably go missing. To put the Lerners loss rate in context, consider the fi ndings of Accenture, the technology consult- ing fi rm. It reported in 2004 that, to that point in time, 85,000 cell- phones had been left in Chicago cabs. One city: 85,000 phones! Theft is another risk. Juniper Re- the last year, establishing new policies, enforcing existing ones more rigorous- ly, and generally encouraging lawyers to think about best practices. The fi rm has had no security breaches involving BlackBerrys, laptops, or USB keys, the tiny devices that plug into a computer's USB drive and can hold gi- gabytes of data. "But there have been several incidents where there could have been [problems] if we didn't have ad- equate measures in place," says Post. For a couple years now, mobile data security has been on the agenda in in- formation technology departments ev- erywhere. For law fi rms, it should be at the top of the list, because so many law- yers carry hand-helds and use them to store sensitive information. Lerners has search Ltd. estimates that, by 2011, the annual rate of theft for hand- helds will reach four per cent. That means hundreds of thousands of phones and PDAs containing sensitive information will be sto- len every year. So what can be done to protect the vital data? If yours is a Black- Berry shop, follow Lerners' lead. It uses a combination of unlocking passwords, data encryption, and remote deletion of data from lost or stolen devices. "At this point," Post says, "I'm very, very confi - dent that we're not at risk of losing con- fi dentiality of client data." Under the new policy, all lawyers who carry a BlackBerry must use an unlock- ing password. When they turn on the device, a message pops up asking them to input the password. Until they do, they have no access to data or func- tions. If they don't use the device for 10 minutes, it shuts down, and they need to enter the unlocking password again. www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com FEBRU AR Y 2008 23 STEPHANE DENIS