Technology Overview
Skadden’s technology environment is designed to support our legal teams 24 hours a day and seven days a week as they perform complex and diverse work for clients worldwide. Utilizing secure, reliable collaboration tools is a cornerstone of our architecture. Our systems are built upon a combination of on-premise and cloud-based applications designed to allow for secure, encrypted access to work resources from anywhere in the world.
Our critical work utilizes a variety of systems and tools located on-premise and in the cloud. The Firm has deployed a firmwide document management system where documents can be secured at the document, matter or client level. The system allows for collaboration between legal teams, granular security and access auditing. Our systems are designed to enable secure communications and document exchanges across authenticated devices. Message transfers to and from clients utilize forced encryption when required, but are otherwise handled using opportunistic encryption. These resources are engineered for seamless collaboration.
Our legal technology platform is designed to leverage both on-premise and cloud-based solutions for handling client documents and information. Accordingly, we are able to tailor our approach to meet the specific requirements of each client and each matter. While we maintain our own staff and technology resources, we can also leverage your approved vendors for printing, data conversions and eDiscovery reviews and productions. We utilize a full range of legal technology resources, including those for document management and review, transcript management, technology assisted review (TAR), and case and docket management.
We are able to create collaboration resources for unique case requirements, including secure extranet environments. These provide a convenient platform for the timely exchange of documents; sites are equipped with security, password authentication and user timeout keys. We have a Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) available for secure file transfers.
Skadden’s knowledge management initiatives provide our attorneys with a comprehensive portfolio of global knowledge resources strategically delivered directly within the attorney workflow to enhance the quality, efficiency and value of legal services. Our knowledge systems, available to our lawyers Firmwide, seek to foster lawyer efficiency.
Information Security
We utilize internal and external monitoring tools designed to deliver data and network safety.
Encryption plays a key role in our security — we encrypt data at rest and in motion. We also deploy both firewalls and intrusion detection and prevention systems, and continuously monitor our resources from our network operations center.
The Firm’s application suite is centralized and virtualized, avoiding the need for local storage of client data. This improves our information security and results in faster and more reliable systems.
While security tools are critical, nothing is more important than involving our attorneys and staff in the security process. On an annual basis, all personnel must review and agree to comply with Firm security policies, attend a mandatory in-person ethics training and complete a security awareness training program.
Reliability
Skadden selects as partners highly respected names in technology — including Citrix, Dell/EMC, Microsoft and Cisco — in constructing and supporting our technological workplace. It is important that our applications and resources work together and that Firm technology is able to stay ahead of the curve. In addition, we maintain an experienced staff that works on security and business continuity, including a team of engineers.
Skadden utilizes consolidated regional data centers so that the physical components of the environment receive attentive security. The Firm’s network design also includes redundant data centers to provide geographically separate data protection. A key factor is the use of failover technology, which allows standby systems to operate in the event of a failure.
Our Standards
The Skadden team has always been committed to security and confidentiality, which are engineered into our technological environment. We maintain ISO/IEC 27001 certification and our data centers are SOC 2 certified.