18 July 2019
With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) bringing the management of personal data into sharp focus, law firms face greater accountability in demonstrating security and compliance. More importantly, the inability to properly secure and protect client data can severely damage the reputation of even the most well-respected firms.
Fortunately, legal workflow automation can go a long way toward ensuring compliance and mitigating risk. By embedding compliance into every day processes, workflow automation can be the key to minimising compliance risks and enforcing compliant behaviours.
There’s a number of ways to use legal workflow automation effectively to enforce data protection policies and ensure compliance GDPR, as well as Know-Your-Client and EU Anti-Money Laundering (AML) directives.
Embed Compliance Expertise
Policies and procedures for personal data no longer need to be relegated to a spreadsheet or SharePoint document. With workflow automation, data protection best practices can be embedded into standardised workflow templates. As one lawyer makes a nuanced decision based on the data at hand, that expertise can be modeled into workflows and processes, enabling subtle judgements to be made en masse. The result is compliance that’s streamlined across the firm.
Risk-Based Business Acceptance
With the right legal workflow automation solution, firms can quickly identify high-risk clients and embed compliance procedures into the business acceptance process. Legal workflow automation enables firms to automatically evaluate new business opportunities based on a predefined set of rules, which can be determined by the firm. For example, this might include local and EU AML regulations. If clients are deemed high-risk, they can automatically be escalated for further review.
Pseudonymization of Personal Data
The introduction of GDPR brought with it a new concept - pseudonymization. Pseudonymization is the technical process of replacing the most identifying fields within a data record, such as a Social Security number, with artificial values (pseudonyms) from which the identify of individuals cannot be intrinsically inferred.
Pseudonymization can greatly reduce the risks associated with data processing, while also maintaining the data’s utility. Using legal workflow automation, client data can be immediately encrypted as it’s entered into a contact form or knowledge system. The data then can be pseudonymized to further safeguard the data and mitigate risk if there’s data breach.
Prove Compliance in Data Privacy Challenge
If the case does arise where your firm’s data privacy practices are in question, legal workflow automation can help prove compliance. Workflow automation systems can automatically archive workflows and associated data or documents. By creating audit trails, legal workflow automation can provide documentation of your compliance in handling client data.
To learn more about how legal workflow automation can help protect your firm’s data, get in touch with us or check out our video on knowledge workflows.