Can you trust your lawyer?

Greetings Folks. I’m on my way to Syracuse where I hope to see some of you shortly and put some of my hard-earned money at risk at Turning Stone but first I wanted to tell you about an interesting takeaway from a New York Bar Association conference on cybersecurity that I attended yesterday.

Many credit unions are scrambling so fast to keep up with the latest technology being demanded by those darn millennials and their increasingly savvy parents and grandparents that using vendors often makes good business sense. However, every time you use a technology vendor you are opening up the credit union to potential cyber risks such as the stealing of personally identifiable information.

I know you already understand this but I for one never thought about the fact that your lawyer is also a vendor, a vendor that often has access to some of the most intimate information about the credit union’s information. For example, if you’re considering a merger then you’re exposing reams of data about the credit union and probably transporting it over the internet. Let’s say you’ve done a Fair Lending audit and want the results to remain confidential. Chances are your attorney has access to that information. And can you imagine what would happen if all those emails you’ve been exchanging about that potential sexual harassment or discrimination claim falls into the wrong hands. You get my point.

 

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