For all of the attention paid to hacking, DDoS attacks and other types of malicious cybersecurity threats, the one that keeps the most law firm technologists up at night is something used every day: email. According to the 2015 Am Law LTN Tech Survey, phishing emails are viewed as the single biggest security threat to the law firm, frightening 25 percent of the survey's respondents the most.

However, a report from Google, conducted with the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, actually says that email is becoming safer than in the past. The study found that email encryption is increasing across the board, both within Google's Gmail service and in other email providers, and email authentication is becoming normalized.

The study found that both inbound and outbound encryption between Gmail and other email services is on the rise. Between December 2013 and October 2015, the number of encrypted emails sent from outside sources to Gmail increased from 33 percent to 61 percent of all emails. The number of domains receiving Gmail encryption in outbound emails, meanwhile, rose from 60 percent to 80 percent over the same time frame.