Faceless Internet Lawyers – Can They Be Trusted? A study of Usable Security for Legal Services

Abstract

Details on the context and background of work: Legal service has lagged behind other online services this is because lawyers are traditional risk adverse, trained to poke holes in ideas and look to the past for how things should be done. There have been many articles wrote about client confidentiality and solicitors duty of care, that have expressed a concern about internet safety. Having the clients trust and actually being trustworthy is of the utmost important to our legal system, if we are to move legal service on-line.  We need to understand how we can design a system, that is both?  A system that not only feels safe and secure but actually is.  A system that is a joy to use and can be trusted the way that you would trust your solicitor, enabling the sharing of sensitive correspondence with the convenience of never having to leave your home. Usable security, maybe the answer to this but it is a relatively new field in computer science and has provided some good theories that could be applied to legal services, yet there have been very few actual case studies.