Lawyers and Incident Response can be a dangerous combo
Lawyers and C-suite leaders have the same basic mission: protect the enterprise from bad actors who want to do harm. But they often often approach the job in such polar opposite ways that they wind up fighting each other instead of working together.
A new academic report on the topic from researchers at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Innsbruck, Tufts University and the University of Minnesota tried to document how stark those differences have become.
“Cyber insurance sends work to a small number of [incident response] firms, drives down the fees paid and appoints lawyers to direct technical investigators,” the report noted. “Lawyers, when directing incident response often introduce legalistic contractual and communication steps that slow down incident response, advise IR practitioners not to write down remediation steps or to produce formal reports and restrict access to any documents produced.”