Security in The Time of COVID

Your privacy is important to us.

So much of our lives are conducted online these days – we bank, learn, exercise, connect, and work in the digital space. The coronavirus has accelerated a global migration online in life-changing ways. Even though business has been conducted online for years, the swift changes of the past six months have raised further concerns around privacy and security. Digital companies continuously evolve how they process sensitive information, but especially right now, we’ve seen more and more scams and fraudulent activity. It’s hard to know where to look for information, or whom to trust!

At A Case for Women, we handle incredibly sensitive legal and medical information on a daily basis. Privacy and security are always on our minds. There are certain things that we’ve moved to doing electronically for security purposes – surprising though that may seem! For example, we snail mail paper contracts if we need to, but for the most part, we encourage people to sign encrypted electronic agreements. Generally speaking, digital agreements are more secure than sending a legal agreement, with personal information on it, through the mail.

Similar precautions are taken when we exchange a person’s personal information from our team to their law firm. We work through secure electronic applications that encrypt all sensitive information. Even within our internal communication systems, women are assigned a case number so that they are only referred to within our internal systems as their case number, rather than putting their personal information anywhere within our internal communication.

If you’re looking into your legal options, but are wary of sharing important medical and legal information online, here are a few privacy tips and tricks to keep in mind:

If someone calls you to talk about your case type, confirm that the person calling is from A Case for Women directly.
Once you make contact with a law firm or group like A Case for Women, note the email and phone number, and save it within your address book. That way if you are called or emailed, it will appear in your Inbox and you will know it’s the real deal! For example, no one at ACFW will ever contact you from an email address that is not an “@acaseforwomen.com” email, unless it is your agreement itself, sent from our secure digital signing application, DocuSign.
If you are still unsure about sharing personal information like your social security number, ask if you can share it with the law firm later once they truly need it. We tell all of the women we connect with that they can put in all 1s for their social security number if that makes them feel more comfortable. However, it is ultimately necessary for the law firm to have the correct social security number for the purpose of ordering medical records and reporting settlement funds to the IRS.

Security in The Time of COVID

Your privacy is important to us.

Issues

Worst Case Scenario: On Sheltering in Place with an Abuser