More than three quarters (77 percent) of respondents in a recent survey of British workers in the legal profession say they believe the lockdown has proven they can work effectively from home.  But, over half of the respondents also say their company should be doing more to help.

In the survey by Atlas Cloud (which was covered by Caroline Hill of Legal IT Insider), 56 percent of respondents said they believe their company should be doing more to help them work productively from home. The study looked into the working habits of more than 3,000(!) office workers of which just over 100 were legal sector workers.

More than a sixth of legal workers (17 percent) are using a personal laptop for homeworking and almost two thirds of those (63 percent) are storing work files on their personal device, raising concerns about the security of business information.  Ruh-roh!

Atlas Cloud says that the legal sector is now facing a “trilemma” of homeworking problems – a global shortage of laptops; poor home broadband connection; and cybersecurity issues.  In addition to less than half of legal workers saying their employer helped them to make adequate provisions to work from home long-term, 20 percent said they need their company to act urgently to enable them to work productively from home during the lockdown.

Pete Watson, CEO of Atlas Cloud, which delivers IT services on behalf of Ward Hadaway, Wellers Law Group, Sintons and Hay & Kilner, said: “We are living through the largest overnight change in British working habits since the outbreak of the Second World War.”

“Our research shows that almost half of workers believe they need more help from their employers to cope with the technological challenges of working from home. However, the research also shows that legal workers are not working from home as safely as they could be from a business and cyber security aspect.”

In my Digital Detectives podcast interview with Sharon Nelson and John Simek that I promoted earlier today, we discussed the potential impact of the pandemic and the potential for data breaches to go way up as organizations are more vulnerable than ever before with all of the remote workers.  Not just in Britain, but all over.  I wonder if a similar percentage of US legal workers have the same concerns about their ability to work productively from home.

So, what do you think?  Do you feel your organizations are giving you what you need to work effectively from home?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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