Data security is a big issue for many top enterprises. With a raging increase in cybercrime, if you don’t have a robust data archiving policy in action, you can face data loss. Legal firms have to be extra careful when it comes to data archiving. Legal data archiving systems and data archiving policies should be maintained to enhance data security. 

Before jumping into how legal firms and law organizations can maintain and establish a solid data archiving policy, we should talk about what we mean by data archiving. 

What Is Data Archiving?

Data archiving is a way to store your files properly using cloud storage. These data archiving outlets are available online or can be outsourced. These trusted data archiving repositories are specially designed to store your over-accumulated data. 

This is a great way to maintain your stored documents. We know that over the period of any enterprise, there is a large amount of data saved for compliance, legal purposes, data records, and business intelligence. All of this unstructured data can be taken to these online storage servers and saved properly. Data storage considerations can make sure your data is maintained securely. There are two major types of data storage; data backup and data archiving. 

Data backup is a type of data storage to ensure all your data till the date is stored and saved in your own system’s processor. These backed-up files can be transferred from one system to another by making a copy. This way, if you reinstall certain softwares in your systems, you can easily restore your data. 

However, data archiving is nothing like data backup. With data archiving, you can transport your data from one entire system to any online cloud repository. These online inlets store your data for a longer term. Even if unfortunately your computer gets hacked or blacks out, your archived data will be there. Data archiving also helps to organize any unstructured data so that you can easily seed out your required files from a pile of important data. 

Why Does The Legal Industry Need A Data Archiving Policy? 

The legal industry is directly related to law and lawful regulations. It is very important that years of client records, legal documents, files, and evidence are kept and stored properly. It is very important to ensure compliance, as there can be many sensitive files present among the unstructured documents.

Make sure all your documents are safe not only from cybercriminals and fraudsters but also from unauthorized invasions. Not everything is supposed to be accessible to everyone. For this, it is important you have a robust and effective data archiving policy for the legal industry. Several articles of GDPR have accustomed rules for legal companies to retain certain emails. 

Email is a popular mode of communication. It is critical for any legal industry to maintain email-based information communication. Even during legal industry audits, your law firm can now increase data preservation and implement a data archiving policy that works best for you. Because legal documents may be required at any time, it is critical that you have access to them at all times.

5 Steps To Make A Legal Archiving Policy For the Legal Industry

Here are 5 interesting steps to make and maintain a top-tier data archiving policy for the legal industry:

1. Sort Your Data To Be Archived 

Only you, as a legal enterprise that has been in operation for so long, know how to manage your data. Your data archiving policy should reflect how you want your data to be found.

If you intend to sort your data by dates, categories, assignees, or case numbers, you need to clean your data first. You can also separate searchable and non-searchable archive items into separate folders. In this manner, you may assure that not all of your data is accessible to many employees.

As a member of the legal profession, you know each file has its own significance, which should be labeled and organized accordingly. You can maintain appropriate data archiving policies using strong data archiving software.

2. Ensure Data Retention Accordingly

Not everything must be retained for years, and your data archiving software may become overburdened because of this excessive data preservation. It is critical that your data archiving policies include retention dates and periods.

With properly tailored data archiving policies, you can keep only the information that is needed for a long period while decluttering and deleting what is no longer needed. Certain industry data retention standards must be followed by lawyers and healthcare practitioners.

Just like HIPAA wants the healthcare sector to retain a patient record for three to five years, similarly, legal practitioners have to follow certain data retention guidelines. If you're just beginning with an archiving plan, archive the records of clients or patients who are no longer active. While you must save their data for legal reasons, their files are no longer active and do not require continuous backup.

3. Disaster Management and Recovery

One issue about disasters like cybercrimes is that their likelihood of occurrence is unknown. It is critical that you remain prepared for any calamity that may occur. Several catastrophe recovery and management plans can be maintained with the use of online data archiving software.

Maintain a robust data archiving policy and a safety blanket to ensure that in the event of a data loss, you can simply recover your data.

Your disaster recovery and management not only save you time but also avoid the loss of important customer information and maximize your time and concentration. Data archiving software is highly efficient and quick when it comes to disaster recovery. You can not only save up costs but also reduce the burden of your IT team with data archiving policies for the legal industry. 

4. Holistic Data Archiving Policy 

One thing that you need to maintain throughout is your data archiving policy. A widely accepted policy that regulates HIPPA and GDPR policies is very important. Through professional and well-trained data archiving software, you would be able to regulate your data archiving policy for the legal industry. 

Even if your organizational structure changes or new staff are hired. You can keep your data safe and secure for a long time with holistic data archiving software. A data archiving policy stipulates the average archiving time to renew old data, the grant and removal of accessibility permissions, the types of files to be archived, data maintenance, and the data filing procedure.

All of this enables the safe retention of information and ensures that legal industries are always in compliance with government requirements.

5. Choose A Data Archiving Software

All of this is only possible when you have trustable and reliable data archiving software on board. With data archiving software you can acquire several services at once. These all-in-one data archiving software are designed to keep your data archived for a long time. With state-of-art E-discovery tools and disaster recovery policies, you can store your data in an immutable repository. 

Moreover, data archiving software is a widely accepted practice to save costs of data storage. If you increase your software’s data retention capacity or improve malware protection, it will cost you many bucks. But with data archiving software for the legal industry, you have a full-fledged repository that not only stores but also maintains your data for you. This way your legal data is protected, searchable and compliant along with being protected from cybercriminals. 

The Bottom Line

We can say that data archiving software is the need of the hour for legal systems. It is very important that a legal firm has a data archiving policy so that they not only ensure data security but also longer retention time. 

Stay tension free, and opt for ShareArchiver’s brilliant data archiving services. We ensure your data is maintained according to your rules. Our data-maintaining software is readily updated for our client’s streamlined usage. Check our data archiving services for legal industries now.