Wedlake Bell
Improving information security with resilient and robust security solutions
Wedlake Bell is an international law firm based in the City of London with 160 lawyers and staff. Their international connections give them access to over 600 legal specialists. The organisation wanted to improve information security, in particular with regard to Internet and email.
The ease with which documents can be transferred and amended by email has become crucially important in the provision of legal services. However the resulting need for extensive Internet security and mail monitoring means that information protection systems must be designed to ensure they do not disrupt normal business practice.
Partnering with Plan-Net, law firm Wedlake Bell has implemented a perimeter firewall and content security solution that protects sensitive information from Internet threats and reduces the risk of lost business as a result of technology failure.
Founded in 1780 and based in the City of London, Commercial English Law firm Wedlake Bell now has 42 partners, supported by over 160 lawyers and staff. The firm's alliance with leading Minneapolis lawyers Fredrikson and Byron provides direct access to US legal advice; while in Europe Wedlake Bell has established the Trans European Law Firms Alliance whose headquarters in Brussels offers access to over 600 legal specialists across Europe.
Modern reliance on email as the principal method of both external and internal communication inevitably raises concerns about information security, especially in the highly confidential legal environment. Indeed, the transmission of business sensitive documentation via the Internet requires robust protection from external attacks. As Internet security risks continue to evolve - from viruses to spam, hackers to phishing attacks - Wedlake Bell recognised the need to minimise the risk of security being compromised.
"The previous firewall was reasonably good and had worked well, but it had no resilience and was about to become unsupported," explains Linda Webster, Head of IT at Wedlake Bell. "Wedlake Bell had replaced other parts of the mail infrastructure but the single point of failure was the firewall, web and mail monitoring elements."
With its emphasis on global business, the firm also requires excellent information availability 24/7, creating a need for resilience as well as good security. "Like any law firm, communications are highly time sensitive. If the email system goes down it causes pain at best, and loss of business at worst," she says.
Wedlake Bell already had a strong existing relationship with Plan-Net following the successful delivery of high profile technology solutions over the previous year. Plan-Net was asked to review the firm's current information security practice and to design a more robust and effective solution for perimeter and content security.
Plan-Net recommended a firewall solution as well as the WebMarshal and MailMarshal filtering tools to run on Microsoft ISA servers. In addition to ensuring excellent security for internal staff, the solution also had to provide secure access for external lawyers and those working remotely. The firm has several different approaches to remotely accessing the Exchange mailboxes, including Outlook Mobile Access and Outlook Web Access, which was reflected in the overall system design.
A key concern was how easily the new system would bed in. Wedlake Bell's user base is 185 strong and still expanding, so with new rules engines for both email and the web, the firm expected some teething troubles. Staff were warned that they might find themselves blocked from sites they normally visited, but Plan-Net's consultants ensured that the impact was negligible; an important consideration for a firm with only a small in-house IT team.
The project plan took into account another of Wedlake Bell's key issues; the need to minimise any disruption to the practice. "As working hours in law firms tend to be long, we had to keep downtime to an absolute minimum and schedule it for Friday evenings," Webster explains.
The close working relationship between the consultants and Wedlake Bell's systems administrator also allowed the in-house staff to be involved in the design and implementation. This knowledge sharing has ensured staff can now support the new system internally.
One of the primary benefits of the new security solution is the improved user control over email. Both WebMarshal and MailMarshal utilise an intelligent scripting language allowing rules to be constructed in a straight forward manner. This means users can easily modify the behaviour of both mail scanning and web scanning filters.
MailMarshal provides a further feature allowing users to manage their own spam. A notification is sent informing a user that emails have been quarantined, providing a summary of the email information. Accessing the SpamConsole enables the user to release or delete emails, as well as update the personal policy to allow or block types of mail. As Webster says, "One person's spam is another person's email. Using MailMarshal enables users to take control over their email, further reducing the overhead on the IT department."
Looking ahead, the firm is assessing the options for improving the security of remote access to systems, including email. Wedlake Bell is currently working with Plan-Net to evaluate two factor authentication or biometric enabled smart-cards for certificate based authentication to Windows and single sign-on to applications.
She concludes, "Plan-Net has delivered a very secure, robust and flexible layer at the perimeter without restricting the internal functions of the business. Wedlake Bell is now confident that sensitive information is secured from Internet threats. Critically, with a highly resilient design, if problems occur the failover kicks in, minimising the risk of costly business disruption."
