Biglaw, Email Scandals, Technology

A Sensible Solution To The Problem Of Personal Email And Web Browsing At Work

Maybe your firm should look into this approach?

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As we’ve been chronicling in these pages, many major law firms are following the lead of Wall Street and banning personal email at work (e.g., Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo!). As a number of firms explained to us, in this age of rampant hacking, it’s all about data security — the data both of the firm and its clients. Allowing lawyers and staff to access personal email services on the same computers used for storing privileged and confidential data puts that data at risk. So clients have been asking — or even requiring — their outside counsel to prohibit employees from using personal email in the office.

It’s understandable, but it’s still annoying. If you’re stuck at work waiting for a partner’s edits on a document, it would be nice to be able to catch up on personal email — or do some online shopping, or book travel for your next vacation — while you wait. Given the long hours that lawyers log in the office, it’s inconvenient (to put it mildly) to only be able to check your personal email or do your personal web browsing from home. Some lawyers buy their own smartphones, tablets, and wireless hotspots, which they bring into the office so they can field personal correspondence while at work, but that involves extra cost and hassle compared to simply logging into personal email from your office comoputer.

One firm might have a solution. Last week, lawyers at Milbank Tweed received the following message from Dierk Eckart, the firm’s chief information officer:

Here’s a bit about Silo from the website of its maker, a company called Authentic8:

Each time they launch Silo, users get a freshly built browsing environment with SSO links to provisioned apps. All web code is contained within Silo, meaning apps are insulated from exploits, and business data is kept separate from personal browsing. Users interact with a benign display of the web app, keeping all web code off the device. And at session end Silo is destroyed along with all transient browsing data, leaving the device and server stateless. With Silo, your web apps live beyond the reach of network, client-side or web borne exploits.

You can also check out this product review over at Re/Code. On the positive side, Silo sounds quite secure; on the negative side, it sounds a little slow (although perhaps it has gotten faster since it was reviewed in March 2014, and perhaps Milbank is using a version that’s different from the one reviewed by Re/Code).

UPDATE (10/26/2015, 4:00 p.m.): A more recent review of Silo is available over at Network World.

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If you’re at Milbank, feel free to let us what you think of Silo by posting in the comments — perhaps using Silo as your browser, so there’s no record of your having commented.

Earlier: Biglaw Trend Alert: Say Goodbye To Gmail
Which Biglaw Firm Has Blocked Personal Email?

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