I have previously written a couple of articles about email security at law firms in Norway & Denmark. I have also written about email security at Apple iCloud, labor unions in Norway, the Norwegian National Security Authority (NSM), the Norwegian Data Protection Authority (Datatilsynet), and the decades old online.no platform from Telenor Norway. Plus many others, with lots more articles and statistics to show in the coming weeks and months.

I have scanned them all using the excellent free service of Dutch Internet Standards Platform (Internet.nl) and analyzing the results, I see that quite a few Norwegian lawyers seem to use free email platforms like Hotmail (Microsoft), Gmail (Google), iCloud (Apple) and the old Telenor online platform in Norway.

Now it is, to the best of my knowledge, illegal to give formal legal advice to anyone in Norway without having the proper law education & experience. But may I say that I don’t think it is very smart from a confidentiality & privacy perspective for lawyers to use free email platforms for handling email communications with clients?

I prefer to think that lawyers are well aware of the general “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” rule, which makes it even harder to understand why they choose such services given their line of work.

Lawyers are legally (and ethically) bound to keep all information related to client representation confidential. Yet, by using such free services, they are at risk of all email communication being fed into the surveillance/advertising algorithms, serving ads to the clients & lawyers based on their perceived interests. Which could be an interesting study to see the results from!

So without providing legal advice, my personal security & privacy based advice would be to avoid using lawyers using these services, and for lawyers to not use them. Period.