Cyber Essentials for Law Firms: Why It's Now a Baseline Requirement

What Cyber Essentials Requires

Cyber Essentials covers five technical controls that address the most common causes of cyber incidents. For law firms, each maps directly to a real threat:

• Firewalls: boundary protection preventing unauthorised access to your network — critical for firms with client portals
• Secure configuration: removing default passwords, unnecessary services, and software — prevents basic exploitation of fee earner devices
• User access control: least-privilege access, ensuring staff can only access what they need — limits damage from insider threats and compromised accounts
• Malware protection: anti-malware on all devices — baseline defence against ransomware and email-borne attacks
• Patch management: all software updated within 14 days of critical patch release — closes the vulnerabilities attackers exploit

Cyber Essentials Plus: When You Need the Higher Level

Cyber Essentials Plus adds independent technical verification — an assessor actually tests your controls rather than accepting a self-assessment questionnaire. For law firms, CE+ is increasingly required by:

• Cyber insurance underwriters requiring verified controls for higher-value policies
• Legal aid contracts with the Ministry of Justice
• Panel appointments with large corporate clients who mandate supplier security standards
• Local government legal panel appointments
• Insurers and financial institutions requiring external validation of their legal panel members' security posture

Cyber Essentials and Coro: Achieving Certification With the Right Tools

The five Cyber Essentials controls map directly to what Coro delivers out of the box. Coro's endpoint protection satisfies the malware protection requirement. Its access management controls satisfy the user access control requirement. Its device management satisfies secure configuration. Firms deploying Coro for the first time typically find that certification is significantly accelerated because the controls are already in place and documented.

Cyber Essentials Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling

Cyber Essentials protects against commodity attacks — automated scanning, opportunistic phishing, and malware that targets unpatched systems. It does not protect against targeted attacks, sophisticated ransomware groups, or the supply chain risks that have hit law firms in recent years. Think of CE/CE+ as the entry requirement and then build upwards from it with additional controls appropriate to your firm's risk profile.

Frequently Asked Questions