Protect Your Data in a Remote Work Environment – ILTA Educational Webinar

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Working remotely became a neccessity almost overnight. But were firm architectures ready? Two common entry points to system hacks, social engineering and network vulnerabilities, threaten the security of remote working. In this session, Mobile Helix CEO and Chief Architect, Seth Hallem, will describe these vulnerabilities and propose practical and actionable ways to address these weaknesses using safe browsing, network proxies, authentication, authorization, and DLP. These mitigations apply to both desktop and mobile devices.

This is an ILTA Educational Webinar. It is free to members as well as to non-members as part of ILTA’s COVID-19 content. Non-members may register for a free login-in.

REGISTER FOR JUNE 10th

Outline:

I. Social engineering: Phishing, “Water Hole,” SIM card swaps

   Mitigations including:

    A. Safe browsing

    B. No SMS

    C. Web filtering via proxying

    D. Data Loss Prevention (DLP): printing, recipient checking, metadata filtering

II. Network vulnerabilities

    Mitigations including:

    A. Layered security

    B. Filter – proxy

    C. Authenticate the source – certificates, IP fencing, DoS defense

    D. Authenticate the user – AD credentials, complex passwords, SSO

    E. Authorize – manage email attachments

III. Example of a secure architecture

We welcome you and your questions on June 10th.

Write to us at: contact@mobilehelix dot com.

-Maureen

Paperless Legal Pre-bill Approvals with the LINK App

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Before we all moved to working from home, were your attorneys and paralegals approving pre-bills by marking up paper? And now? Are you scanning reams of paper? Printing and FedEx-ing?

In late 2018 we were contacted by the head of Knowledge Management of an AmLaw 100 law firm. They had a specific goal: to make approval of pre-bills paperless and easy to do on an iPad. They have a practice which has high monthly transactions. Some partners were approving several thousand pre-bills per month on paper. This was difficult enough when a partner was in the office. It was untenable if the partner had to travel. This firm had heard about our LINK app’s built-in annotation and integration with DMS. They wanted to know if we could help.

Marking up pre-bills is easy to do with LINK. Here is a common workflow:

  1. Accounting uploads the pre-bills to a folder in DMS.
  2. Attorney goes to that folder in DMS from the LINK app.
  3. Attorney annotates the pre-bills using LINK’s in-app annotation.
  4. Attorney saves the marked-up pre-bill to DMS from the LINK app.
  5. Accounting retrieves the marked-up pre-bills.

That’s all there is to it. In LINK you can mark-up a pre-bill with a pencil or a finger. Add a stamp or note. You can even capture your signature then place it on documents.

This law firm started approving pre-bills with LINK in 2019. Their partners are very pleased with the improved process. There is no going back to paper for them.

There are variations to the workflow. Instead of DMS the firm may upload the pre-bills to network file shares or OneDrive. Or, the pre-bills may be emailed to the attorney, marked up in LINK, and then emailed back. LINK can be used on a phone instead of a tablet.

You may watch a video showing two workflows, one using DMS and one using email, below.

in legal we are seeing that this pandemic presents an opportunity for certain productivity improvements. Not only in the case of Zoom, but usage of DocuSign has rocketed. “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

We would be happy to discuss your pre-bill workflow and how LINK could apply to it.

-Maureen

contact@mobilehelix.com +1 347-508-0967

LINK App: Paperless Legal Pre-bill Approval Workflows 8:54 from LINK App by Mobile Helix on Vimeo.

Okta Sees a COVID-19 “Zoom Boom”

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If you have an office job, you likely now WFH (work from home). The odds are that you have found yourself on at least a handful of video teleconference calls in the past four weeks. There is no question that video conference services have been the backbone of the information workforce during this month of “stay-at-home”. Teachers, students, courtrooms, and television shows are going live from homes all over America.

In the process of doing research, I happened to find this April 8th post by Hector Aguilar, Okta’s President of Technology, How COVID-19 Is Changing the Way We Work: Zoom Boom + MFA is the Way. Okta is a leader in identity management and Multi-Factor Authentication. Therefore, Okta has a unique and vast window into the usage of cloud services.

We all know anecdotally that Zoom usage has been rocketing. This is the first data that I have seen comparing Zoom to other video conference services.

Percentage Increase in Unique Daily Users of Zoom, Cisco WebEx, and Ring Central from 2/24/2020 to 3/27/2020
Source: Okta

From February 28 to March 27, Cisco’s WebEx and Ring Central’s unique daily users were up about 50%, but Zoom’s were up 200%.

Zoom’s adoption has been nothing short of incredible. From yoga teachers to grandparents, people are thrilled with its ease of use. I have used quite few of the video conferencing services. Out company tried Zoom over two years ago and never looked back. Both the ease of use and the pricing were  a world apart from the other services.

Zoom has had a challenge-laden couple of weeks as the onslaught of users and attention by security analysts have exposed vulnerabilities. Some, such as “Zoom-bombing,” where intruders disrupt a session, can be managed with existing policies. Others are more serious. Zoom is reporting fixes weekly. They report that they have removed the use of the Facebook SDK in their iOS app, which was sending user data to Facebook.

School districts have banned usage of Zoom. There are three class-action law suits against Zoom.

Zoom announced yesterday that they have formed a CISO Council and an Advisory Board to look at ways to address Zoom’s security and privacy issues, with CISOs from VMware, HSBC, NTT Data, Netflix, and more participating. In what would appear to be a major coup for Zoom, Alex Stamos, former CSO at Facebook, now at Stanford, tweeted on April 8th that he will join Zoom as an outside advisor.

I’m optimistic that they will resolve most of these issues. Zoom has a lot to gain by doing so.

-Maureen

April 9, 2020

We Want to Help – Special LINK Offer

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If our LINK app can help you to provide business continuity to your attorneys and staff in this unprecedented time, we want to get LINK in your hands.

We are extending this special offer:

  • Our free LINK app trial duration is now 90-days
    • Applies to trials which begin before August 31, 2020
  • You may add unlimited users
  • This will be a full production deployment including all of LINK’s security measures

LINK is best-suited for firms or departments of 30 users and up.

LINK’s server software is deployed on VMs on-prem, behind your firewall.

With LINK it’s easy and secure to work from tablets and smartphones. LINK is an encrypted, containerized mobile app, integrated with iManage, NetDocuments, email, Office 365, and the firm intranet. Lawyers and legal staff can review, annotate, compare, edit, and email documents with LINK.

We are happy to:

  • Tell you more about LINK
  • Show you a demo via Zoom
  • Describe the trial further

If I can help you, please email me at: maureen at mobilehelix dot com.

–Maureen, President & COO

Learn about what you can with LINK in this 2.5 minute video.

Statement on COVID-19 Business Continuity from Mobile Helix

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At Mobile Helix, all of our employees have been working from home for several years. We are fully up and running and supporting our customers. Employees may exercise the flexibility which they may need to balance new work and home circumstances.

We have encouraged our LINK app customers to add as many users as needed. We are fortunate to have wonderful, loyal customers. We are happy to help them respond quickly to enable their attorneys and staff to work from home.

-Maureen Blando maureen at mobilehelix dotcom

A Decade in Legal Tech – 5 Surprises – UPDATE

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Travel back in time to 2010. What was appended to your hand back then? A BlackBerry?  Perhaps the least anticipated change in legal is the decline in usage – to nearly zero – of the BlackBerry smartphone. I was rarely separated from my CrackBerry. It changed everything. Always connected. 

Here’s my take on five changes in legal tech in the last decade.  One caveat, I work mainly with documents, email, mobility, and security. Therefore, I see just a sliver of legal tech. You surely have seen others.

BlackBerry and iPhone 11 Smart Phones

1. BlackBerry ⬇️…iPhone #1

In 2011, 40% of attorneys responding to the ABA Tech Survey used BlackBerries. 

UPDATE:

The ABA 2019 Technology Survey shows the iOS usage has reached a record high of 79.2%. Android has slipped to 18.4%.

Image from iPhoneJD.com

Here are the ABA 2018 Technology Survey data on smartphone usage by lawyers:

  • iOS – 68%
  • Android – 25%
  • BlackBerry – 2%
  • Windows – 1%
  • None – 5%

Continue reading →

ILTACON ended one week ago, are you caught up yet? 🙃

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LOL. I am by no means caught up. I’ve got to-do lists and piles of sorted business cards. Plenty of follow-up yet to go. How about you?

If you were there, wasn’t ILTACON fantastic this year?

A View from a Booth

ILTACON 2019 was the first year of Joy. Not only do I mean the first year of ILTA’s vibrant new CEO, Joy Heath Rush, but the first year that ILTA felt truly back on-track.

ILTACON 2019 broke all attendance records, at over 3,500 legal techies comprised of over 1,800 members and 1,700 business partners. Over 800 members were first-timers, which is fantastic. I can imagine that some of the booth locations were poor at the Dolphin. We were fortunate to have good traffic and terrific interest in our LINK app.

Continue reading →