November 18, 2024
If you were to walk through your office right now, is there a chance that you might see any sensitive documents left unattended in a printer’s tray?
If you don’t have secure printing, odds are fairly decent that you’d find something that a visitor, a member of your cleaning staff, or employees from different departments shouldn’t see. At organizations without secure printing, around 30% of documents are forgotten in the tray, and 68% of IT pros for small to midsize businesses reported data losses.
Legal Document Security Must-Haves
While many law firms are reducing their dependence on paper-based processes with document management systems, there may always be a need to produce a significant quantity of paper documents, many of which will contain sensitive data.
Therefore, along with following cybersecurity best practices, law firms should consider the following measures:
- Restricting access to areas where sensitive files are stored
- Adding clean desk, visitor, anti-tailgating, and other important physical security policies
- Making sure your staff understands your physical security policies and why they’re important
- Implementing secure printing
What Is Secure Document Release?
Secure document release — also known as follow me printing, pull printing, or secure printing — requires that a user authenticates themselves at the printer before it will release a print job, either by swiping a badge or entering a PIN. It does this with the help of a certain kind of print management software, and it’s an elegant solution to having sensitive data left in a tray for anyone to see, or even accidentally scoop up.
It’s just one component of proper print security, but unlike many other security recommendations, this one can start paying for itself as soon as it’s implemented.
The ROI of Print Security at a Law Office
Taking an additional step to secure sensitive data is worth it for any business, but especially for a heavily regulated industry. But secure printing isn’t just about reducing risk; it also can help you do much more.
1. Reduce Print Costs and Waste
Personal printers encourage wasteful printing, which is why we discourage them whenever possible. But having a centralized office printer makes it easy to hit print and then forget about it.
That statistic I mentioned earlier — about 30% of print jobs getting left in the tray — also represents a terrible amount of wasted ink and paper. And we’re not even talking about the fact that some employees may use unsecured business computers for unauthorized purposes — like printing out their partner’s dissertation or their daughter’s birthday party invitations.
Requiring users to quickly authenticate themselves at a printer is going to cut down your print costs by quite a bit — from day one. And by the way, if you aren’t actively tracking what you’re spending on printing, it’s probably between 1–3% of your annual revenue.
2. Easily Track and Bill Printing
Secure print release software makes it very easy to see who’s printing what. So if there’s any misuse, you’ll be able to identify it quickly. And that’s nice, but again — if your focus is on rewards and not risk, you can also use this software to accurately allocate printing expenses to a certain client or to a department.
3. Meet Green Initiatives
87% of legal professionals said they now get RFPs asking about their environmental practices, initiatives, and results.
So not only does secure printing make it easy to cut down on waste, but it could also help you win more clients.
4. Improve Client Trust
Clients’ expectations around data privacy are evolving quickly. This isn’t unique to the legal industry, but a recent survey indicates that 49% of the respondents said that if they had a positive privacy experience with their second-choice brand, they’d make the switch.
It doesn’t require a big leap in logic to assume that if a potential client visited your office and happened to see information about other cases lying around, roughly half of them would at least consider signing with a different firm.
5. Reduce Print Delays
You might assume that having users authenticate themselves on a device might mean longer waits for important documents. But that’s not the case!
Instead of a first come, first served basis, this software allows you to prioritize certain users or certain types of documents. And if circumstances change quickly, you can manually override those permissions to make sure a last-minute filing makes the deadline.
6. Produce Print Audit Trails for Legal Compliance
Secure print release software can also help your firm produce print audit trails, which can help you demonstrate to regulatory agencies how sensitive documents have been handled.
Simplifying Law Firm Print Management
If you have an internal IT department, it’s entirely possible that they can help you implement secure print release at your firm. But as I mentioned earlier, this type of software is only one way of increasing print security. And if your IT team is like most, managing your print fleet isn’t high on their list of priorities or preferred activities.
Managed print services (MPS) is that rare office service that tends to make everyone happy because it reduces risk, frustration, and waste while saving time and money. A good provider should be able to make implementing secure printing — as well as other improvements — very easy. But an exceptional provider will also help you increase other aspects of print security, like making sure no default admin passwords are still active on any networked printing devices, and that any data stored on printer hard drives or NVRAM is encrypted.
However, if now’s not the time to find a managed print partner, we’re happy to provide you with just the software! Click the link below to view our recommendations.
