Hill Dickinson adopts Tessian to prevent sensitive client data falling into the wrong hands

International law firm Hill Dickinson has selected cybersecurity company Tessian to prevent accidental data loss caused by misdirected emails and data exfiltration to non-business email accounts in order to protect sensitive client data.

With a number of clients in the financial services and healthcare sectors, data security is a number one priority for Hill Dickinson. The firm’s health practice works with some of the UK’s largest healthcare providers, and the team proactively sought out an email security solution that could ensure the safety and privacy of sensitive data, such as patient records, while not impairing productivity. 

Keith Feeny, director of IT and Operations at Hill Dickinson, said: ‘Data breaches are a huge concern from a client perspective. Having big directories of contacts with similar names can increase the chance of an email containing sensitive data being accidentally sent to the wrong person. This could have serious consequences. We wanted a solution that could stop people making a potentially costly mistake without restricting business as usual.’

Using stateful machine learning, Tessian is able to predict whether an outgoing email is about to go to the wrong person. The solution sits quietly in the background and automatically alerts an individual only when a mistake is about to be made. 

Hill Dickinson is also working with Tessian to stop sensitive information from being exfiltrated to unauthorised, non-business accounts. The firm’s IT team found that, despite each employee being issued with a company laptop, staff were still sending documents to personal email accounts in order to work on them at home. 

While some companies opt to blacklist all freemail domains to solve this problem, this approach can impede productivity and stop the firm engaging with private clients, small businesses or contractors that use freemail domains. Hill Dickinson therefore required a solution that would pose minimal disruption to business as usual but that could automatically prevent unauthorized emails. 

Feeny added: ‘We needed our staff to understand that data was at greater risk if sent outside the network. With Tessian in place, we are able to better control the flow of data in the firm and we can ask people to think twice before sending potentially sensitive information to their personal accounts.’

Tim Sadler, CEO at Tessian, said: ‘With high client expectations and a stricter regulatory landscape, there is no margin for error in law firms when it comes to securing the data they hold and process. But that does not mean security should restrict the way partners and employees want to work. Hill Dickinson can ensure its people are able to work effectively and efficiently, but without putting client data at risk’.