Blogs

This past week members discussed how best to move from paper to digital documents and more. I also have more news on the upcoming LegalSEC Summit and SharePoint || Office 365 Symposium. Hear from Tim Kenney of Handshake Software in advance of his session, “Stories of Innovation: Leveraging Office 365 Tools Today and Tomorrow.” Robin Sommer, co-developer of the network security monitor tool, Bro, describes his powerful tool in advance of his session “Bro: Network Defense Framework.”

Paperless, Please.

Anyone outside legal often asks why we still talk about paper. As the legal industry works toward a paperless environment, we first must focus on storing less paper. Steve Irons provides guidance in “A Paper-to-Digital Master Plan.” After implementing a plan, you may meet with some resistance. Bob Blacksberg and John GiIbert provide answers to the “Top 12 Objections to Scanning and Destroying Paper” in the November 2015 ILTA white paper.  In the next couple of weeks, you can attend a local event, “Remove Half the Paper from a Law Firm Without Scanning,” if you find yourself in Atlanta, Chicago or San Francisco or “Electronically Stored Information in Small Firms” in Halifax and Ottawa in Canada.

SharePoint || Office 365 Symposium – A Conversation with Tim Kenney of Handshake Software

Tim Kenney, Vice President of Client Success at Handshake Software will present a session and participate in two rounds of “Speed Dating” at the SharePoint || Office 365 Symposium on June 8^th and 9^th. When I spoke with Tim he told me his clients in the legal market have many questions about Office 365 in part because it contains so many modules. He hopes to answer attendees’ questions and clarify their understanding of SharePoint as one of many components of Office 365 in the speed dating and in his session, “Stories of Innovation: Leveraging Office 365 Tools Today and Tomorrow.”

“The legal vertical approach is a unique one,” Tim said. At the Symposium, he will address this uniqueness and explore how SharePoint and Office 365 can realistically work together in the legal environment. He has found that general readiness to move to Office 365 can depend on a firm’s size. Often smaller firms with less rooted investment in document management systems and other tools can move to the cloud environment of Office 365 with fewer impediments. Though Tim has countless SharePoint Innovation case studies to share, SharePoint/Office 365 use cases are still few as much of the legal market remains in the investigation stage.

Tim will tell the innovation story of a small firm in Panama that used Office 365 and SharePoint Online to build a strong portal, something they previously could not have developed due to extensive hardware and personnel costs. Tim believes “a cloud strategy allows them (smaller firms) to have a really cool competitive tool… they may be able to get into the game faster.” Though Tim has witnessed an easier path to adoption of Office 365 for smaller firms, he has guidance for larger firms. He wants to help all firms identify potential roadmaps for the application of SharePoint and Office 365. First larger firms must determine how Office 365 fits into their overall plans including governance and how these efforts impact their plans for SharePoint. With previously established governance over document management systems and other applications, Tim cautions IT teams to not get too far in front of the information governance team when considering leveraging Office 365. He says, there “has to be synchronized movement between IT and information governance to really take advantage of Office 365.” Likely we should heed Tim’s recommendation for synchronized work across teams for all projects.

I asked Tim to share a favorite use of SharePoint. He appreciates the unique approach some of Handshake’s clients have taken with SharePoint search. This powerful enterprise search provides access to information that could never have surfaced solely with a document management search and enables firms to utilize SharePoint as a comprehensive KM Solution. At this year’s Symposium, Tim hopes to help attendees learn more about Microsoft’s plans for Office 365. With SharePoint in use by 93 percent of firms with 350 or more attorneys (reported in ILTA’s 2015 Technology Survey), Tim explained it remains a viable portal, search and extranet option. And, as a part of Office 365, it provides enhanced collaboration and cloud capabilities. Along with Handshake’s recent announcement, Tim sees new capabilities with both the SharePoint model and the Office 365-fueled future.

LegalSEC Summit – A Conversation with Robin Sommer of the International Computer Science Institute

In the discussion groups Michael Severini recently posted, “If you don't have your schedule set for LegalSEC yet, consider attending the session on “Bro: The Network Defense Framework.” I recently saw a presentation about Bro and am impressed with how simple and flexible it is. I am looking forward to getting a better understanding of it at LegalSEC and I hope to see you all there!” I called the LegalSEC Summit speaker and co-developer of Bro, Robin Sommer, to learn more.

A senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, Robin leads the development of Bro, an open source network security monitor. With Bro placed at a central location on a network, it scrutinizes all network traffic. It uncovers a very detailed and specific track record of a network’s activity, including websites accessed, who sends emails and who accesses internal resources. Over time, Bro produces an archive of this activity. If a network becomes compromised, Robin explained, “you can track what exactly happened when that person got in... see how the person got in and if other systems were affected... You can start putting the pieces together and… get a higher level idea of what happened” which can inform improvements needed in a security system. Bro also allows for programmable tailoring to a specific network’s traffic and monitoring needs. After programming Bro to understand what’s expected in a network, this new policy allows Bro to precisely identify deviations. Robin clarified that ICSI stopped calling Bro an intrusion detection system because people often understand these as systems that skim for “very narrow indications of something being bad.” A specific character sequence might trigger an alert from an intrusion detection system. However, most attacks occur in small steps testing for vulnerabilities in a network. Because Bro tracks the network over time the program can identify and correlate such activity that often seems innocuous on its own. The ILTA community shares knowledge readily. I asked Robin if those using Bro share the flagged patterns of activity uncovered from monitoring. Robin said Bro, with funding from Mozilla, is just starting to build a community repository of scripts and programs to share security breach patterns. Once built, Bro users will use scripts from the repository to program their specific Bro network monitor to look for activity patterns similar to those in the repository.

Bro “grew up” as a system designed to handle the unique and demanding performance and architecture needs of the sciences such as massive data transfer with super computers. In the last five to six years the Bro team has expanded to deploy in new environments. Robin recognized a demand for a tool like Bro in the commercial industries. To accommodate this demand a start-up called Broala, founded by the core team behind Bro, developed a turn-key Bro appliance that’s already deployed by several large companies. “For me personally it is really exciting to see Bro gaining traction in these different environments. It is evidence that the approach works outside of a scientific setting.” I asked if he saw any unique applications of Bro in the legal industry beyond network security. He speculated that Bro may assist with forensic analysis as it archives with detailed and precise records the traffic on a network. It could prove or disprove a network breach. Robin looks forward to meeting people in the legal technology industry at the LegalSEC Summit as this industry differs from the organizations in the science and research fields.