Law firms hold data that remains valuable after a breach: client files, privileged communications, transaction documents, investigation material and sensitive deal data. Attackers can exfiltrate it for extortion or misuse outside the firm's trusted environment.
PastWipe™ reduces the usable value of stolen or exfiltrated data outside approved conditions and records each control decision as evidence. Selected protected material can be denied when the identity, device, purpose or environment no longer satisfies policy, reducing the leverage created by a usable stolen copy.
Where law firms start
- Client and matter files: advice, correspondence, evidence and working papers
- Privileged material: legal analysis, investigation records and sensitive communications
- Deal and data-room documents: due diligence, transaction drafts and disclosure material
- Litigation and disclosure bundles: documents exchanged with courts, counsel, experts and other parties
- Business records: client onboarding, billing, identity and internal governance information
Example workflows
- Compromised deal room: transaction documents are usable only by named participants, on approved devices, for the declared matter and period. Requests outside those conditions are denied and recorded.
- External counsel or expert: privileged material shared for a defined engagement remains subject to purpose, identity and environment conditions after it leaves the firm's systems.
- Exfiltrated matter files: selected files copied during an incident do not become permanently trusted merely because access was valid when they were obtained. Later use is re-evaluated against current policy.
- Incident evidence: evidence records show which protected material was requested and what was allowed, denied, restricted or degraded, supporting investigation and client review.
Designed to support evidence for…
- incident investigation and response
- client reporting and matter governance
- data-protection and information-handling review
- third-party, supplier and professional-risk assessment
Intellectual property owners
IP-intensive organisations handle information whose value depends on staying confidential: patent drafts, designs, source code, expert reports and trade secrets, often shared with experts, co-counsel and manufacturing partners outside their own systems.
- Expert and co-counsel sharing: material shared with an expert is usable only for the declared engagement. If the expert's environment is compromised, the security state for that route can be changed.
- Client-owned control: clients set conditions on documents they share, with a record of each release decision.
- Trade-secret exposure: design files copied to a personal device are no longer released once identity or device conditions fail, and the records support a chain of custody.
Fits the existing firm stack
- Uses available identity and device signals from existing systems
- Works with client-controlled keys (see Deployment)
- Sends evidence records to existing monitoring (see Integrations)
Scope an evaluation · Request an executive briefing · Brief for procurement and legal teams (PDF) · Enforcement and evidence scope