What are the IT challenges for legal?

The UK legal sector is now a prime target for cyber criminals and a testing ground for fast-moving regulation and technology. Law firms hold highly sensitive client data, manage large financial transactions, and increasingly operate hybrid or fully digital practices.

Professional services, including legal, remain among the sectors most likely to identify cyber breaches, with medium to large organisations particularly affected¹. At the same time, regulatory expectations from the SRA, ICO and NCSC’s guidance on the legal sector are rising.

For many firms, especially small and mid-sized practices, partnering with a specialist IT managed services and cyber security provider for tailored IT solutions for the legal sector is becoming essential to stay secure, compliant and competitive.

Below are the key IT challenges facing the legal sector today:

1. Rising cyber threats to law firms
2. Law firm’s regulatory compliance, SRA expectations, and data protection
3. Legacy systems and fragmented legal IT
4. Hybrid working, digital courts and collaboration
5. Business continuity, backup, and ransomware resilience in the legal sector
6. Cost control and predictable IT spend
7. Skills shortages and 24/7 coverage

Law firms are attractive to attackers because they combine:

• High-value client data (mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, litigation, family law, criminal defence, etc.)
• Large financial movements (property, settlements, escrow, interest management)
• Time-critical work and court deadlines (increasing the impact of disruption)

Common cyber threats to the legal sector include:

• Ransomware and data exfiltration
• Business email compromise and payment fraud
• Account takeover of cloud email and case management systems
• Supply chain attacks via chambers, experts, and outsourced services

UK government cyber surveys¹ consistently show that:

• Professional services organisations report a higher frequency of identified breaches than the UK business average.
• Phishing remains the most common attack vector.
• A significant proportion of organisations experiencing breaches report a ‘material’ negative impact on operations or finances.

For many firms, internal IT teams are too small or overstretched to monitor, detect, and respond to modern attacks 24/7.

Law firms face overlapping regulatory and compliance demands, including:

• SRA Codes of Conduct and IT/cyber-related guidance
• UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018
• Money laundering regulations and Proceeds of Crime Act obligations
• NCSC guidance for the legal sector

The SRA has repeatedly highlighted that inadequate cyber security and poor data handling can amount to regulatory breaches, with potential outcomes including:

• Fines and disciplinary action
• Reputational damage and loss of client trust
• Mandatory ICO reporting and possible enforcement

Many firms struggle to translate these broad requirements into practical, day-to-day IT and security controls. Policy documents may exist but are not consistently enforced or technically supported.

Many UK law firms still rely on:

• On-premise case management and practice management systems
• Outdated document management platforms
• Point solutions added over time with minimal integration

Typical issues:

• Unsupported or unpatched systems create exploitable vulnerabilities.
• Manual, duplicated data entry and inconsistent document handling.
• Difficulty enabling secure remote access and modern security controls.

Unfortunately, legacy, or fragmented systems make it harder to restore services quickly after an outage or attack.

Remote hearings, digital bundles, and online collaboration are now part of day-to-day practice and wider government and programme^2. digital initiatives are pushing further online processes.

This creates IT challenges:

• Secure, reliable access to case files and documents from any location.
• Managing firm-owned and personal devices across home, office, and court environments.
• Protecting confidentiality in video conferences and digital disclosure.

Poorly configured cloud services, weak home-office security, and informal sharing methods (e.g. personal email or consumer file-sharing tools) can all increased risk.

Key controls include:

• Identity-centric security (Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), conditional access, advanced visibility, threat detection, zero trust principles – such as CyberGuard Net360).
• Properly configured Microsoft 365 (Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive) or equivalents with legal-specific policies.
• Mobile device management, encryption and remote-wipe capabilities.

These are often delivered and maintained via managed cloud and security services rather than ad-hoc internal setups.

Deadlines, court dates, and regulatory time-limits mean downtime has a disproportionate impact on law firms. 36% of medium businesses and 39% of large businesses reported being negatively impacted by cyber breaches¹. This is usually because of things like financial loss, staff time, and the requirement of new measures.

For legal practices, weaknesses commonly include:

• Backups kept only on local hardware or single locations.
• Backups not tested regularly for restorability.
• Lack of documented and rehearsed incident response and disaster recovery playbooks.

It is recommended² that companies have:

• Offline or immutable backups.
• Clear recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
• Defined roles and responsibilities during an incident.

Managed backup and disaster recovery services can provide:

• Off-site and cloud-based managed backup with immutability features.
• Regular restore testing.
• Support in developing and rehearsing incident response and continuity plans tailored to legal workflows.

Partners and practice managers face competing pressures:

• Growing cyber and compliance expectations.
• Need for modern tools to support productivity and hybrid work.
• Market pressures on fees and margins.

Ad-hoc IT purchasing and reactive ‘break-fix’ work can lead to:

• Irregular and difficult-to-predict spend.
• Accumulation of outdated systems that are expensive to run and risky to maintain.

For law firms, especially small and mid-sized practices, it can be difficult to:

• Recruit and retain specialist cyber security staff.
• Maintain up-to-date skills in cloud, security, and legal applications.
• Provide 24/7 monitoring and incident response coverage.

Many firms therefore combine:

• A small in-house IT function focused on user support and firm-specific knowledge.
• External managed IT and SOC/MDR services for depth of expertise and around-the-clock coverage.

This hybrid approach can help firms access skills that would be hard to maintain entirely in-house.

How Managed IT and Cyber Services fit into the legal landscape

For the legal sector, managed IT and cyber security services are increasingly used to:

• Provide secure, well-governed infrastructure (on premise, cloud, or hybrid).
• Deliver continuous monitoring, detection, and response to cyber threats.
• Support compliance with SRA, ICO and government guidance.
• Enable secure hybrid working and collaboration tools.
• Improve resilience through structured backup and disaster recovery.
• Introduce predictability into IT and security spending.

Practical next steps for law firms

1. Assess current risk – conduct a cyber and IT audit and review aligned to SRA guidance.
2. Prioritise high-impact improvements and implement Cyber Essentials-level controls.
3. Strengthen governance and processes, update policies, and run regular staff training.
4. Plan modernisation – build a roadmap for cloud adoption, system consolidation, and legacy replacement, and decide which functions remain in-house and which are best delivered by trusted managed service providers.
5. Review suppliers regularly – check IT and security partners understand legal-sector requirements and UK regulatory expectations, and define clear SLAs, reporting, and governance.

Handled this way, IT moves from being a source of risk and unplanned cost to a structured, manageable part of how legal services are delivered securely and efficiently.

1. UK Government’s The Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024
2. Ministry of Justice - The HMCTS Reform