Educated Attorney: Finally…A Successful Law Firm Wifi Policy

From working with many law firms, it has occurred to me that law firms often choose convenience over security especially when it comes to office Wifi access. You probably have a wifi access point in your office with a password on it, and you probably think that that’s good enough. I’ll tell you right now that your already doing much better than the firms who have an access point with no password. Letting anyone from the building or the street access their office network, and in some cases their firm data which is the worst possible thing you can do. Anyone with a little technology training can extract firm data from an unsecured wifi access point, it’s a fact, but back to your firm’s secured wifi. While it’s the normal approach to wireless within a law firm environment it is not the most secure.

What I’m about to tell you I don’t expect you to go out and setup. This is technical, I except you to ask your I.T. person if this is your setup and if not, have them set it up or find someone else experienced in law firm data security to set it up. The problem with a single wifi access point starts when you have guests or clients come to the office. Chances are, the wifi network lives on the same network as the firm. If a guest arrives and is given the firm wifi password, they then have access to your firm network documents if they know where to look. Keep in mind that most securities put into place by most normal I.T. providers are based on the idea that most people are dumb. Most office networks are under-secured but have no problems because no one with the skills has ever tried to hack them. Here lies the issue, if you provide the proper security, the possibility of being hacked is diminished altogether. So at this point, the guest unknowingly has access to your network, which is bad and needs to change. Here’s how we set it up.

The perfect law firm wifi solution consists of  2 access points, one for staff on the office network, and one for guests off of the office network (the other way to do this is to have 1 access point off of the network if there are no office laptops). In this way, staff can utilize office wifi and connect via office laptops and mobile devices while guests have the ability to get simple internet access which they probably would need for a presentation or something along those lines. Both wifi access points have to be secured with a password as well. This creates a dual wifi solution for an age old security problem.

I know this was technical, if you have any questions on this setup, give us a call (732)444-8044.