The Florida Bar recently stood up a Standing Committee on Cybersecurity and Privacy Law. The reason is straightforward. Roughly seventy percent of Bar membership works at solo or small firms, and most of those firms have no dedicated security staff at all. A managing partner or office manager is usually the closest thing a ten-attorney firm has to a security function, and that person is already running client intake, billing, and case management.
This matters more than a typical regulatory update because of what small firms actually hold. A personal injury or property insurance litigation practice carries medical records and financial documents for hundreds of clients. A healthcare law firm carries protected health information as a matter of routine business. None of that changes because a firm is small. What changes is who is responsible for protecting it, and at most South Florida firms under fifty attorneys, the honest answer is nobody has been assigned that job.
Law firms have become a preferred ransomware target for a simple reason. They hold concentrated, high value data (medical records, financial records, litigation strategy, settlement terms) and historically have had weaker security controls than the industries they represent. Several Florida firms have already been hit publicly, with patient and client data exposed in incidents that made the local legal press. Cyber insurers and larger corporate clients have both taken notice, and outside counsel guidelines are increasingly starting to ask questions that smaller firms are not prepared to answer.
None of this requires a full-time Chief Information Security Officer, and for a firm this size that would not make financial sense. What it does require is someone who can assess where the firm actually stands today, identify the gaps that matter most (client data handling, email security, vendor access, incident response planning), and put a remediation plan in place that a malpractice carrier or a corporate client's outside counsel guidelines would actually recognize as adequate.
That is fractional security leadership. A firm gets the judgment and the roadmap without carrying a full-time salary, benefits, and overhead for a role that does not need forty hours a week at a firm this size.
CMBNetworks works with South and Central Florida law firms on exactly this. Fractional CISO engagements, HIPAA/HITRUST readiness for healthcare-adjacent practices, and security posture reviews built around what a cyber insurer or an outside counsel guideline actually expects. Start a conversation.