Customer story: RWK Goodman

Preserving client confidentiality at RWK Goodman with Egress Intelligent Email Security.
Published on 30th Dec 2021

Established over 100 years ago, RWK Goodman is well-regarded as a dynamic and highly ambitious legal practice.

They provide clients with specialist business advice and legal services using the latest innovation in technology.

As one of the UK’s leading law firms, RWK Goodman provides clients with a range of personal and business legal services. The team at RWK Goodman consequently communicate with a diverse customer base, regularly sending and receiving sensitive data via email. One of Egress’ first customers, RWK Goodman has been adding Egress products to their technology stack ever since to ensure client data remains confidential and secure.

“Prevent is in a different league than using static data loss prevention (DLP) rules for email, which can be frustrating for users and an administrative burden for our Operations team.”

Dave Eagle, Manager of IT Operations and Innovation, RWK Goodman

Dave Eagle, Manager of IT Operations and Innovation at RWK Goodman, explained how their use of Egress has expanded: “Preserving client confidentiality and keeping sensitive data secure is the highest priority for our team – and it always has been. We started out using Egress Protect to make sure all our emails to clients were encrypted.”

Protect provides government and industry-certified email encryption, including for large file attachments, via an easy-to-use plug-in for Microsoft 365. As email has been increasingly relied on within the firm, particularly to support mobile working, Dave and the team at RWK Goodman recognised the growing risk of human error that required a different approach to resolve it.

“It’s so easy to send an email intended to one recipient to another by mistake,” stated Dave. “Maybe they have similar names and Outlook autocomplete suggests the wrong address, or the sender is simply in a hurry and makes an honest mistake. With Protect we’re able to revoke access to encrypted emails, but we wanted to eliminate potential data breaches at the point of send.”

“Preserving client confidentiality and keeping sensitive data secure is the highest priority for our team – and it always has been.”

Dave Eagle, Manager of IT Operations and Innovation, RWK Goodman

In 2018, RWK Goodman added Egress Prevent to their technology stack. The solution uses contextual machine learning to analyse emails and attachments, ensuring they’re sent to the correct recipient.

“Prevent is in a different league than using static data loss prevention (DLP) rules for email, which can be frustrating for users and an administrative burden for our Operations team,” explained Dave. “It works in the background and only alerts our employees when they’re about to make a mistake and misdirect an email, offering them genuine value and significantly reducing our risk profile.”

Using contextual machine learning, Egress Prevent analyses email messages and attachments to ensure they’re shared with the correct recipient, and intelligently alerts users to any mistakes.

“We wanted to secure our email without impacting user experience or productivity.”

Dave Eagle, Manager of IT Operations and Innovation, RWK Goodman

Finally, RWK Goodman has also benefitted from Egress Analytics, which provides detailed insight into how often advice is offered by Prevent and accepted by employees. “We’ve found Analytics to be an extremely useful tool to prove ROI. We can see every instance where an employee has accepted advice over encryption levels or not sent an email to the wrong person. This has helped my team to see the big picture and prove value back to the business without needing to run complex reports.”

In their partnership with Egress, RWK Goodman has enhanced client confidentiality and met corporate compliance goals, and benefitted from Egress’ usability. “From the board down, client confidentiality is our top priority, and Egress ensures we’re preserving that on email,” stated Dave. “Additionally, it helps with our continued compliance journey as we strive to enhance our security accreditations. We also wanted to secure our email without impacting user experience or productivity. The feedback from employees is that Egress has been a strong success. Users particularly like Prevent’s unobtrusive prompts and don’t feel overburdened by them.

“It’s also been really easy to deploy Egress. I think we only needed to send a single awareness email round to staff,” concluded Dave. “Egress has also always been great at taking on our feedback, and helping us to use Prevent and Protect in tandem with iManage – and we continue to work together on improving this integration work to further enhance our security options.”

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