Electronic Evidence Workbook 2022– offered up for free by Craig Ball.
As employee burnout and stress rise, benefits brokers beg employers to offer actionable solutions
Ransomware Survey: IT Needs To Better Communicate Threats To C-Suite
Hackers Have Been Sending Malware-Filled USB Sticks to U.S. Companies Disguised as Presents – Just say no to plugging in unknown USB sticks. This shouldn’t be this difficult.
Law firms are an attractive target because of the data, but also because it might be easier to breach a firm than it would be to hack the clients they represent. As the rest of the article goes on to describe, there are still too many firms without cybersecurity training, proper policies, or incident response plans. That is not going to keep things secure.
On top of that, as I’ve written before, the whole culture in firms is a problem. Anytime you have a large group of people in charge, (partners), who are often not to be questioned, social engineering gets a whole lot easier, and the likelihood that even some policy that exists might get ignored is pretty high.
What I am also interested in though, is whether any other staff positions were given the same consideration. If the lawyer can work from anywhere, and the impetus is to attract the best lawyers that they can, there’s no reason the same thing can’t be said about many of the other (granted not all), of the staff positions, right? If the lawyers aren’t coming to the office, why do paralegals, assistants, IT, Accounting, etc. need to?
Does Quinn Emanuel value those folks, and want the top talent at those positions too?
We’ve seen the memes. The ones about the law firm offering a lunch hour yoga class to overworked, stressed, associates who haven’t had time to even take a lunch break in months. Or the “reward” for months of 70-80 hour work weeks is free pizza. It just makes people angry because it’s a token that does nothing to actually recognize the work involved, or correct the problems that created this mess to start with.
Workplace stress, anxiety, and other mental health issues are not just something a little mindfulness can fix. Workers are waking up to the fact that it’s the company culture that is contributing to this. Offering a way for employees to help “fix” themselves might seem like a nice thing, and in many ways it is, but doing it while not making any effort to recognize the contributions managers and corporate culture make to the problem, along with a commitment to make changes, is the very definition of “too little”.
Autonomy is understanding what needs to be done and having the freedom to decide the best way to get it all done. Managers can still contribute, they still set the priorities, they assist with roadblocks, and they are the ones who communicate what needs to be done, but when they start to go much further than that, employees feel that loss of autonomy, and they don’t like it.
Over the last couple of years, managers have been forced to sit back and let employees have autonomy. Much like my own experience, you can’t possibly expect employees who were successful and productive with that autonomy to just give it back for no reason.
I tuned into a webinar yesterday put on by ACEDS, and then saw today that Jared Coseglia, from TRU Staffing Partners, had posted an article with many of the same points he mentioned on the webinar. If you’re in the eDiscovery space or want to get into the eDiscovery space, this is worth a read: