As COVID-19 forces many law firms and companies to go remote, it's also spurring a wave of layoffs. Taken together, those two factors are creating yet another potential security and regulatory risk for many organizations. As remote employees are terminated, lawyers warned that personal electronics leveraged for work and internal miscommunication in a largely dispersed workforce could make it harder for companies to revoke data access and get back their IT equipment.

To be sure, revoking employees data access on a mass scale isn't a widespread issue yet, noted Polsinelli shareholder Iliana Peters. "The companies that have the ability to have workers work from home more [and] have remote capabilities, those companies are being less affected by this recession," she said.

Still, Peters noted that these days, revoking a remote employee's access to corporate data requires a lengthier process of assessing and obtaining all the corporate data in the employee's possession.