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HR, legal and finance

Digital skills courses for lawyers: professional secrecy, case files and generative AI

In brief

A law firm keeps court documents, correspondence covered by professional secrecy, and the data of people who are not its clients. It works to deadlines, with electronic filing and associates who come and go. Skillrung courses for lawyers start from that material: which channel a document travels through, what happens when the firm is locked out, and what is never handed to a generative AI tool.

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Secrecy depends neither on the medium nor on the urgency

A lawyer's case file lives on several media at once: the case management software, a mailbox, a file-sharing space opened one day to send an oversized document, the personal phone used to reach a client between two hearings, sometimes an automatic transcription service. Each takes in correspondence whose confidentiality is the very substance of the profession. The courses do not restate the principle, they translate it into decisions about channels: which tool receives a court document, what you accept from a client who sends everything through a consumer messaging service, what becomes of a sharing link.

A locked-out firm means deadlines running and secrecy breached

Ransomware in a law firm produces two distinct harms, and the second is the more serious. The stoppage first: no more access to case files, no more electronic filing, no diary, in the middle of procedural deadlines that do not suspend themselves. Exfiltration second: the attackers copy the data before encrypting it and threaten to publish it, which turns the incident into a direct breach of professional secrecy. The courses build a response sized for a small firm: an offline backup and a tested restoration, two-factor authentication, and a one-page plan of who to call and in what order, kept off the servers concerned.

Generative AI: the risk is not the one you would expect

The best documented danger is not a data leak, it is invention. Before the federal court for the Southern District of New York, submissions were filed in 2023 relying on decisions that did not exist, produced by a generative AI tool and reused without checking; the court imposed sanctions. A model produces references in the right format and well-turned quotations: nothing in the appearance distinguishes a real reference from a fabricated one. Hence two rules: no reference reused without having been found again at its source, and no document dropped into a freely accessible service.

What the firm has to be able to demonstrate

A firm is responsible for the processing it carries out, including for the data of people who are not its clients: opposing parties, witnesses, third parties named in a file. The regulation expressly provides for the processing of sensitive data necessary for the establishment or the defence of legal claims. What remains is what can be demonstrated: a record of processing, retention periods for closed files, a contract qualifying the software vendor and the host as processors, individual access rights closed on departure, and a written course of action in the event of a breach.

Sources

What the official text says

Every figure or legal statement on this page points to its primary source, with its date. We publish no figure without a verifiable source.

Frequently asked questions

What lawyers ask us

Can I exchange documents with my client through ordinary email?

It is the channel the client will use anyway, and forbidding it achieves nothing. What is decided is what the firm agrees to let through it, what moves over to a protected space, and what becomes of the documents received: filed in the case file, then erased from the mailbox, which is not a place of storage.

A fellow lawyer is asking me for a document by email: how do I check?

By calling back on a number you know, never on the one given in the message. Impersonating a fellow lawyer is a common scenario, because it opens access to documents without having to force anything at all. The phishing course trains this check on reconstructed messages written in the vocabulary of procedure.

What should I do if the firm falls victim to ransomware?

Isolate the computers from the network without switching them off, call the software vendor and the insurer, inform the bâtonnier who heads the local bar, and deal immediately with the deadlines under way. If personal data is involved, the breach is notified to the French data protection authority (CNIL) within 72 hours. Filing a police report comes next, with the evidence kept as it is.

Can I use generative AI to draft submissions?

To structure, reword or summarise a text you provide, yes. To produce references, not without checking: non-existent decisions have already been filed before a court and sanctioned. Every reference is found again at its source before being cited, and no document from the case file goes into a freely accessible service.

Does the GDPR really apply to a law firm?

Yes, with no size threshold, and it also covers the data of opposing parties and of third parties present in a file. Professional secrecy does not excuse the documentary obligations: a record of processing, retention periods, contracts with providers, management of access, a course of action in the event of a breach. The GDPR course builds them from what the firm already has.

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