While cybersecurity practices have become a standard part of today's law firms, a growing number of firms are looking to stand out by offering holistic, preventive and technical services for their clients with data protection needs. Such a trend represents an evolution of law firm cybersecurity offerings, spurred in large part by client demand and a changing legal workforce.

To be sure, there are number of ways in which law firms are moving to offer these new cybersecurity services. Some, for example, are expanding their offerings through partnerships.

In September 2018, for instance, Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie announced it had partnered with eosedge Legal, a cybersecurity consulting firm, in order to grow its technical cybersecurity expertise.

Kenneth Van Winkle, managing partner at Lewis Roca, said the impetus behind the partnership was the “need for an integrated law and tech approach to address cyberthreats” in today's market. He explained that clients want firms to help them be “more proactive in conjunction with cybersecurity and data breach issues as opposed to be being reactive.”

By partnering with eosedge, Lewis Roca believes it now has the “tools and ability to advise on what [clients] should be doing, and the technical expertise to know how to protect their data,” he said.

In addition to technical expertise, eosedge Legal will also be providing Lewis Roca with access to its proprietary risk management technology platform called CyberGaps, which uses a “prevention assessment methodology” to help determine a client's potential cyberrisks, said Doug DePeppe, founder of eosedge Legal.

While Lewis Roca is leveraging partnerships to grow its cybersecurity services, others have opted  to start anew, banking on the belief that a novel type of cybersecurity service demands a novel type of law firm. New York-based Beckage, for example, launched in August 2018, to “bridge that gap between IT and the lawyers,” said Jennifer Beckage, the firm's founder and former Phillips Lytle partner.

A big part of that means bringing on board attorneys who are well versed in both technology and the law. While Beckage launched with five attorneys, it is still looking to grow with additional attorneys who can “take a different approach to the practice of law, in an innovative way and are not afraid to roll up their sleeves with their clients,” Beckage says.

To be sure, Beckage isn't treading into completely untrodden territory. Some firms have been ahead of the curve for years, having already combined technical and legal expertise together as a cornerstone of their cybersecurity practice, not an evolution of it.

These include Chicago-based firm Edelson, which has an in-house forensics lab that helps them understand how modern consumer technology operates and whether it violates privacy laws. Another Chicago firm, InfoLawGroup, also provides hands-on technical expertise to help clients with preventive cybersecurity due diligence matters as part of its on-demand “chief privacy officer” service.

Some in Big Law also have been offering technical, preventive risk management in their cybersecurity practices early on as well. “It is a trend now, but it's also how we've structured our practice for the last four years,” said Evan Wolff, partner at Crowell & Moring.

That others are following in the footsteps of the few before them is a testament to growing supply of cyber expertise in the legal world.

“Relatively speaking, there is a dearth of attorneys out there with technical backgrounds. But I think that is changing a bit, because there are more technical folks getting into the law,” said Jeff Poston, partner at Crowell & Moring's Washington, D.C., office.

What such cybersecurity expansions required, therefore, are a new type of attorneys who recognize that the technical security issues a client faces are not just for their IT staff. Wolff said, “we used to call these things systems problems,” but now they're business problems that are part of legal's purview.