Protecting the record is as much an operational discipline as it is a legal one: knowing where your data lives, how it moves and who can touch it is critical for its safety.
Security Best Practices for Complex Cases
As a case becomes more complex, so too does the challenge of protecting the record, ensuring security and privacy are strictly maintained. Keeping confidential data secure requires more than just the protocols established by the parties involved in a case; it must extend to every ancillary vendor those parties employ
Let’s walk through some best practices for protection, including understanding your data’s journey, establishing clear guardrails, and following through with structured due diligence.
First, Map Where Your Data Lives
Most security gaps start with a simple problem: no one has a complete picture of where the data actually lives. Start by creating a data map for each matter, covering:
- Recordings (remote or in-room)
- Real-time feeds and rough drafts
- Certified transcripts
- Exhibits (native files, PDFs, demonstratives, physical items)
- Correspondence (email, collaboration tools, secure portals)
- Internal work product (memos, outlines, deposition prep, research)
Best Practice: Establishing a thorough inventory is non-negotiable when protecting the record from invisible security gaps. For each data category, note who hosts it, how it is protected, who has access and how long it is retained. This often reveals unmonitored shared drives, stale links, personal devices storing case materials or vendor platforms no one has vetted.
Lock It Up! Physical Security Still Matters
Complex proceedings are often still physical events, and no digital stack helps if someone can walk into a facility and eavesdrop. Choose secure, badge-controlled facilities that check in and escort visitors. Keep conference rooms locked when not in use, whiteboards and printouts out of sight and unauthorized recording devices out. Treat printed transcripts, marked exhibits, and counsel notes as sensitive physical media. It sounds obvious — until the room is booked back-to-back, everyone’s tired and a stack of notes or other material gets left on a side table at the end of the day.
Best Practice: Lock materials up when you step out; log anything physical leaving the room; and shred drafts and duplicates instead of tossing them in an open recycling bin.
Protecting the Record Requires Both Procedural and Technical Access Control
Strong encryption doesn’t help much if too many people hold the keys or if no one revokes access when someone is no longer involved in the matter. An unmaintained process carries just as much risk as an unsecured system.
For every system you rely on (transcript repository, exhibit platform, shared workspace), put role-based, matter-specific access in place, and keep a current roster of who has access — inside the firm and at each vendor. Ultimately, protecting the record relies just as heavily on who you let in as who you keep out. A single confidential-nonconfidential split usually isn’t enough for multiparty or multidistrict matters where protective orders often add an “Attorneys’ Eyes Only” tier.
Best Practice: Ensure your review platform is configured to enforce various levels of safeguards electronically.
Best Practice: Build an offboarding process so access gets removed when someone leaves the team, not just flagged to deal with later.
On multidistrict or other multiyear matters, participant changes may happen, so build a recurring access review into the case calendar instead of a one-time process at kickoff. As you map the full chain of custody for the record — from initial capture through certified transcript, including vendor storage, secure delivery and long-term archiving — a dedicated case manager can help maintain continuity across the court reporting process and ensure matter-specific requirements are consistently communicated from one proceeding to the next.
Digital Security Vulnerabilities
More incidents are caused by a public network, a weak password or a careless download to an unmanaged device than most people expect.
Best Practices:
- Avoid public or shared WiFi for any device touching case materials.
- Use firm-managed VPNs and private wireless networks.
- Disable automatic connections on laptops and mobile devices.
- Require full disk encryption and multifactor authentication for any system touching case data.
- Prohibit personal devices that don’t meet firm standards.
- Set clear rules for screenshots, downloads and removable media.
The Need for the Right Partners
Vendor oversight is a key part of your security posture. You’re only as strong as your weakest vendor. Vet vendors’ experience in complex litigation, and include their track record for discretion, not just their certifications. Complex cases can often involve high-profile or government entities, so proven ability for vendors to maintain strict protocols of confidentiality is critical.
Best Practice: Get concrete answers to your questions in writing. At a minimum, cover:
- Certifications and compliance: Find out which certifications or formal frameworks they follow and whether they can share a recent assessment. To really ensure they operate at the same level of standards as you, have them complete a security attestation and thoroughly examine their security trust centers.
- Access controls: Who can access recordings, transcripts and exhibits and how that access is provisioned, reviewed and revoked matters as much for vendors as for your firm and co-counsel. In complex or multidistrict matters, plaintiffs’ leadership often sets up a shared depository, giving multiple firms coordinated access to discovery, a workflow that’s separate from your internal process and that needs to hold up for years.
- Data residency and hosting: Be clear on where your data and backups are stored and which cloud providers are involved. Matters involving international parties, witnesses or data can trigger the GDPR’s cross-border transfer rules once an EU resident’s personal data enters the case file.
- Encryption and transmission: Learn how data is protected in transit and at rest, and whether assets are encrypted at the object level.
- Incident response: Find out whether a documented plan exists and how and when you’ll be notified of a data breach involving your matter.
- Subcontractors: Get a list of which third parties they rely on and details on how those parties will be held to the same standard.
Build these expectations into your engagement letters or master service agreements, and align them with protective orders in the case.
Training and Security Orientation
Training and culture underlie all of this.
- Run a brief security orientation at the outset of each matter to determine where data will live, how access will be managed, and what’s prohibited.
- Remind attorneys and staff that credentials are confidential and lost devices or misdirected emails must be reported right away.
- Publish a short response plan covering who to call and what to preserve if something goes wrong.
Build these habits into how you plan, staff and run complex cases, and security becomes part of how you litigate and protect your clients’ most sensitive information, not a separate task bolted onto the matter.
Related: “8 Top Tips for Handling Complex Cases” by Michael T. Murray and Stacey DiGerardo
Featured Image Licensed under the Unsplash+ License
