IT for law firms
that take privilege seriously.

The Law Society of BC does not tell firms which software to buy. What it expects is diligence and competence. Lawyers are expected to understand the technology they use in practice well enough to protect client information, and when a firm moves data into the cloud, responsibility for that data does not move with it. It stays with the lawyers.

In practical terms, the due-diligence questions look like this. Do you know where your client data is physically stored, and in which country? Have you read the vendor agreement, and does it let you retrieve your data if the relationship ends or the vendor fails? Can you access and produce your records, including trust records, whenever the Law Society asks? And what happens if the provider is breached, sold, or served with a demand by a foreign authority?

Most firms of 5 to 50 lawyers have nobody whose job is to answer those questions. That is the gap we fill. We document where every system stores its data, keep the vendor agreements that matter on file, and set your environment up so records can be produced on demand rather than reconstructed in a panic. One honest caveat: guidance changes. Confirm the Law Society's current cloud computing and practice resources directly instead of relying on any vendor's summary, including ours.

Trust accounting records: keep them, back them up, produce them.

Trust records are the records that end careers when they go missing. The obligations are simple to state and easy to get wrong. Records must be retained for years after a matter closes. They must survive hardware failure, theft, fire, and ransomware. And you must be able to produce them for a compliance audit or an investigation without weeks of archaeology. A trust ledger that exists only inside one PCLaw database on an aging server in a supply closet does not meet that bar.

What good looks like: image-based backups of the systems that hold your books, restore tests that actually run on a calendar, retention configured to outlast the required record-keeping period, and at least one copy stored away from the office so a single bad night cannot take the originals and the backups together. We build that and hand you the restore-test evidence in writing, which is also exactly what your insurer wants to see. The mechanics are on our backup and disaster recovery page.

Privilege and confidentiality drive the security design.

Solicitor-client privilege is not a marketing angle, it is the design constraint. Every technical decision follows from it: encryption at rest and in transit for files and email, multi-factor authentication on every account with no partner exemptions, access scoped by matter rather than a wide-open shared drive, and audit logs that show who touched which file and when. When a staff member leaves, access ends the same day, and we can show you the log entry that proves it.

If a client file leaks, "our IT person said it was fine" is not a defence. The controls above are the baseline in our security stack, and they are also what cyber insurers now require before they will write or renew a policy for a firm.

Data residency: keep client files in Canada.

Nothing in BC law flatly forbids storing law firm data outside Canada, but Canadian residency makes almost everything easier: your due diligence, your client contract terms, and your exposure to foreign legal process. Microsoft 365 supports Canadian datacentre residency, and we configure it as the default for firms. Backup copies stay in Canada too. For the fuller picture on which privacy law applies to your firm, we wrote a plain-English comparison of BC PIPA and PIPEDA, and our compliance practice can map your obligations to actual system settings.

Documents organised by matter, not by habit.

Most firms we meet store documents across a shared drive, individual inboxes, and desktop folders named "New Folder (2)". That is a confidentiality and continuity problem, not just an annoyance. We structure SharePoint or your document management system matter-centrically: one location per matter, permissions per matter, version history on, and retention rules that match your file-closure process. Conflict checks and file handovers get faster because the file is actually where it is supposed to be.

Wire fraud in real estate conveyancing.

Conveyancing trust payouts are among the highest-value fraud targets in the province. The pattern is consistent: an attacker compromises a mailbox at one of the parties, your firm, the other side, a realtor, or the client, watches quietly for weeks, then sends altered payout instructions from a plausible-looking address a day or two before completion. The money leaves, and it rarely comes back.

The fix is procedural first and technical second. Every new or changed payment instruction gets verified by a phone call to a number your office already has on file, never a number taken from the email, with no exceptions on completion day when the pressure is highest. Then we make the technical side harder to break: MFA everywhere, alerts on suspicious mailbox forwarding rules, phishing simulation for staff, and DMARC so your own domain is harder to spoof.

Downtime against a court deadline.

A limitation date does not move because your server died. Business continuity for a law firm is measured in hours, not days: could you file, appear, and bill tomorrow morning if the office burned down tonight? We set recovery-time targets with you, build the failover to meet them, and test it on a schedule. For most firms that means cloud-first systems, a documented recovery runbook, and a way for every lawyer to be working securely from another location within the hour.

Remote work without leaking files.

Lawyers work from courthouses, home offices, and vehicles between communities. In northern BC that can mean a four-hour drive between your office and the registry. The rule we enforce is simple: client files are only ever touched from a managed, encrypted device signed in with MFA. Personal laptops and family iPads do not get access. Intune applies that policy automatically, so nobody has to police it, and a lost laptop becomes a shrug and a remote wipe instead of a privilege-breach report.