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How Law Firms' BYOD Policies are Evolving as Work from Home Continues

Article:  Hudgins, Victoria. “Forgetting Something? Firms' BYOD Policies May Need Updating in Remote Work Era.” Legaltech News. Law.com, November 17, 2020. https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2020/11/17/law-firms-are-allowing-more-flexibility-byod-policy-adjustments-should-follow/?slreturn=20210031180621. 

This article details how extended work from home in the Covid era has lead many law firms to reconsider their BYOD policies.  Among the changes brought on by extended work from home are:

  • more people able to work from home instead of just a select few
  • people logging in on their personal networks
  • people logging on computers shared by other users
  • people using remote access full time vs only when traveling between offices
More people logging in remotely creates security issues because the new people logging in remotely may not have been trained in how to use remote access securely.  People logging in from their home networks creates security issues because the home networks are likely less secure than the network at the law firm.  Similar issues happen from people logging in from shared computers.  If the employee's files aren't protected from other users, confidentiality and privilege issues can develop.  Finally, more people using remote access can create capacity issues if the network isn't prepared to absorb more remote traffic.

As an employee at two companies that had to change their remote work policies in the wake of covid, I've seen these change firsthand.  When the outbreak first started in March 2020, I was working at a place that didn't let temporary employees work from home for any reason.  When the higher ups decided to close the office for covid, they decided to let us bring our work laptops home with us and log in from home.  To help improve security, we logged in using a VPN when we accessed files stored on the company network.  Unfortunately, the VPN was not ready for this amount of traffic at first and frequently crashed.  Eventually, they beefed up its capabilities and it stopped crashing.

The second company that I have worked at during covid is in the process of transitioning away from a BYOD policy.  When I started with the company in November 2020, I was issued permissions to a Microsoft Office account and a third party site to work on but told to log in with my computer.  In January 2021, the company decided to convert to a policy where they issued computers to workers to log in on.  

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