Why Gloucestershire businesses should get a cyber security audit
National Cyber Awareness Month is the perfect time for Gloucestershire SMEs to get a cyber securitry review done explains System 15's Nick Rowntree
If you are a partner or a practice manager at a Gloucestershire law firm have you calculated what the cost of a cyber breach might be? Every hour of downtime is an hour top fee earners aren’t able to manage cases or generate funds.
There’s a particular type of phone call that no legal Practice Manager wants to receive first thing in the morning.
It’s not usually dramatic; nobody announces that the firm has suffered a cyber-attack, nobody says the servers have failed, there isn’t necessarily a flashing red warning light indicating that a major crisis is unfolding.
Instead, it often starts with something far more ordinary.
A solicitor can’t access a matter file, or a shared document won’t open. Maybe emails aren’t synchronising properly, or the case management system is running unusually slowly.
At first, it feels like a minor inconvenience. By mid-morning, three people have reported the same issue. By lunchtime, fee earners are asking when things will be fixed. And by the end of the day, a problem that looked relatively small has quietly disrupted an entire department.
For most Gloucestershire law firms, this is what downtime actually looks like. Not a catastrophic outage. Not a headline-grabbing cyber incident. Just dozens of fee-earning professionals unable to work as efficiently as they should.
These disruptions are usually logged as IT issues, but in reality, they’re business problems.
Unlike many other sectors, legal firms generate revenue in a very direct way: when fee earners are productive, the firm earns money; when they aren’t, it doesn’t. That relationship is brutally simple, and it’s what makes legal practices different from most other businesses.
A manufacturing company may be able to make up lost production later in the week. A retailer might recover sales the next day, but a law firm rarely gets the opportunity to bill the hour that disappeared this morning because a system wasn’t available. Once that time is gone, it’s gone.
That’s why the true cost of downtime is so often misunderstood. Most firms look at the IT support invoice that arrives afterwards. Very few look at the lost opportunity surrounding it; the lost fee-earning time, delayed client work, and operational disruption that never appears as a line item on a budget anywhere.
The legal sector has become one of the most targeted industries for cybercriminals, and the statistics are alarming. Successful cyber-attacks on UK law firms jumped by 77% in a single year, rising from 538 to 954, according to research by chartered accountants Lubbock Fine. Meanwhile, an analysis of Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) data by NetDocuments found that reported data breaches across the legal sector rose by 39% between Q3 2023 and Q2 2024, exposing the personal data of roughly 7.9 million people around one in eight of the UK population.
What compounds the increase in cyber-attacks is that legal firms have become increasingly dependent on technology over the last decade. In a bid to streamline operations, case management platforms, Microsoft 365, document management systems, cloud telephony, digital dictation, electronic bundles, secure document sharing and remote access have all become essential parts of modern legal practice.
This has undoubtedly made firms more productive. It has also changed the impact of downtime.
Twenty years ago, if an employee lost access to email for an hour, it was frustrating. Today, a fee earner may lose access to correspondence, matter histories, Teams conversations, client documents and diary information all at the same time. Work doesn’t simply slow down in many cases it stops completely.
What makes this particularly challenging for firms across Gloucestershire is that clients increasingly expect quick answers and smooth communication, whether that’s a property transaction in Cheltenham, a business acquisition in Gloucester, or a family law matter in Cirencester. Clients don’t see the technology sitting behind the service. They simply experience the result when it doesn’t work; a delayed completion, a missed update, a frustrated client waiting for an urgent response. These are the moments where technical problems become reputational ones.
Interestingly, Practice Managers often tell us that the biggest frustrations aren’t major outages, they’re the recurring issues. The things that happen often enough to become normal.
The login issue that keeps returning. The shared mailbox that requires constant attention. The Teams problem everyone has learned to live with. The software integration that only works “most of the time.”
Individually, these problems seem minor. But for a busy legal practice, they create constant friction. Fee earners become frustrated, support tickets build up, productivity falls, and client response times increase. Nobody notices the true cost, because it happens gradually.
One of the most common patterns we see in Gloucestershire law firms is responsibility creep. There may be no in-house IT person, so technology gradually becomes somebody else’s responsibility — often the Practice Manager, the Office Manager, or a Partner who happens to be more technically minded than everyone else.
The result is predictable. Time that should be spent improving the firm, supporting staff or focusing on compliance gets diverted into chasing IT issues. Every hour spent managing technology problems is an hour not spent managing the business itself — and unlike external costs, this lost leadership time is rarely measured.
The reason isn’t complicated. Law firms sit on an unusual concentration of sensitive material, the type that provides the leverage that cyber criminals increasingly look for.
Even smaller, regional firms often hold:
There’s a lingering assumption that cyber criminals focus exclusively on large city practices with hundreds of employees. In reality, smaller regional firms are often viewed as attractive targets precisely because they may have fewer internal resources and less dedicated cyber security expertise.
Read our blog on why SMEs are just as much of a target for cyber criminals as large ones
The value of the information doesn’t disappear because a firm has twenty employees instead of two hundred, the transactions remain valuable, and so does the disruption.
From a cyber criminal’s perspective, legal firms represent the sweet spot between valuable data, trusted client relationships and tight deadlines. That creates opportunity. A delayed production line might cost a manufacturer money. A delayed conveyancing completion, litigation deadline or client transaction can cost a law firm money, trust, and potentially its reputation.
Cyber incidents don’t just affect systems they affect confidence.
Law firms are built on trust. Clients trust their solicitor with deeply personal matters, sensitive commercial information and significant financial transactions. Every client engagement is built on the assumption that this information will be handled securely and professionally, and that trust is often one of a firm’s most valuable assets.
When systems become unavailable or security concerns emerge, clients inevitably start asking questions: Has our data been affected? Is our information secure? Are you able to continue acting for us? What safeguards do you have in place?
Even where the answer is ultimately reassuring, the fact those questions have been asked at all can create significant pressure for Partners and Practice Managers alike. The practical disruption can usually be resolved quickly. Rebuilding confidence once questions begin to emerge is the harder challenge. Trust takes years to build and minutes to undermine.
For legal practices, cyber security is not purely an operational consideration, there are far wider compliance responsibilities to think about too. A serious incident may require internal investigations, client communications, risk assessments, data protection reviews and regulatory reporting.
What begins as an IT issue can quickly become a management issue. Partners, Practice Managers and Compliance Officers may find themselves spending days dealing with the consequences of an incident that lasted only a few hours.
Many firms still view cyber security as a technology problem. Increasingly, it isn’t, it’s a business continuity issue.
The real question isn’t “Will we be targeted?” Most firms already are, almost every day. The more important question is: “If something disrupted our systems tomorrow, how quickly could we continue serving clients?”
That’s where proactive IT and cyber security become critical — not because they guarantee nothing will ever go wrong, but because they reduce disruption, improve resilience, and help firms keep operating when problems arise.
If your document management system became unavailable this afternoon:
For many firms, those questions provide a clearer measure of cyber risk than any technical report.
A legal-sector IT and cyber security review can help identify:
When technology stops supporting any local legal firm, even temporarily, the effects are felt far beyond the IT department in most practices, they’re felt directly on the bottom line.
For Gloucestershire law firms, understanding those risks before an incident occurs is significantly easier than dealing with them afterwards.
As part of National Cyber Security Awareness Month (October 1-31st) we are offering a FREE Cyber Security Audit. Book yours now.
System 15
Kestrel Court
Waterwells Business Park
Quedgeley, Glos. GL2 2AT
System 15
Kestrel Court
Waterwells Business Park
Quedgeley, Gloucester, Gloucestershire. GL2 2AT
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