Corporate legal departments already have their hands full helping organizations to safely navigate the process of returning employees to the office or strategizing how to contend with potential budget cuts on the horizon. But what that means for regularly scheduled software updates to operating systems like Windows or—perhaps more importantly—to remote working tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams remains to be seen.

"2020 was the year that was supposed to be the year that all of the laggers, all of the people who did not go to Windows 10, finally went to Windows 10. All of those people, they have still got to get to Windows 10. They can't stop those priorities or shouldn't, but some of them probably are," said Christopher Zegers, director of consulting services, legal at Ivionics.

To be sure, not all software updates involve something as major as swapping out an entire operating system, but even prior to COVID-19, staying on top of patches could prove difficult for corporate legal departments. Brett Burney of Burney Consultants indicated that legal is not always the highest priority for company information technology personnel, who with the needs of so many other departments on their plate already may want to avoid the cybersecurity headaches associated with the more sensitive data that attorneys tend to access.

"Some of that I see changing. Especially with the legal operations role, I will see that many times IT departments will assign a person, a liaison if you will, to the legal department, because they are starting to recognize that, 'Hey, the legal department has some specific type of needs and we do need to support them better,'" Burney said.

However, a rise in remote working that may continue well beyond the pandemic may also be causing issues for legal departments looking to conduct software updates across employee laptops and other hardware. Ken Jenkins, principal and founder of the cybersecurity solutions provider EmberSec, noted that methodology by which corporations deliver updates can generally be a "mixed bag."

Some companies, for example, arrange for updates to be automatically pushed out and installed across a network of employee laptops, while others require user activation. The latter option may be more common among legal departments or law offices.

"They generally don't have a capability for remote software updates and security patching and so oftentimes it's left to the users. … Or they give the user the option to actually patch themselves, patch their own technology," Jenkins said.

But the legal departments and their organizations could be making updates to Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other collaboration tools more of a priority the longer that employees are prohibited from coming into the office. Zoom, for instance, released a software update in April with additional privacy and security features. According to The Verge, those measures include the ability to lock meetings or restrict screen sharing.

"The Zoom security components, I know I've gotten questions. There's very much heightened awareness, like is my Zoom compatible, is it updated? Or if they are using Skype or if they are using Microsoft Teams," Burney from Burney Consultants said.