PSA – From October 2025, all solicitors in the UK will require a Cyber Essentials certification in order to continue to apply for LAA contracts.
One of our clients, a local law firm specialising in criminal defense, recently approached us for help in completing their Cyber Essentials certification, following the Legal Aid Agency’s new requirement taking effect from October.
We have a vast amount of experience with helping small and medium businesses across the south of England attain Cyber Essentials. We have also found a growing demand in recent months with SMBs operating in the private sector wanting to attain Cyber Essentials certification in order to continue to tender for government contracts. Due to our track record of successful certifications, we have built an efficient and standardised procedure that streamlines the whole process of reaching CE/CE+ compliance, meaning that if your business requires Cyber Essentials for an imminent project or contract, we can get you certified quickly and painlessly!
In this example, we quickly identified during our deep-dive session that the client needed to address their outdated and insecure network equipment, as this was no longer receiving critical security patches from the manufacturer and was therefore not compliant with the CE guidelines. Old network infrastructure is an easily overlooked point of vulnerability for businesses that don’t have an outsourced IT provider overseeing their IT. Draytek – one of the major small business router manufacturers – has had two major incidents in the past 12 months due to outdated and insecure firmware. These issues have caused significant downtime and left thousands of businesses up and down the country vulnerable to attack.
Compliance with Cyber Essentials requires a plan to keep network infrastructure such as routers patched on an ongoing basis. We helped our client by installing a managed next-gen firewall and security gateway, which will keep their business both protected and compliant.
By replacing this outdated infrastructure and making sure the data and systems they access have robust security in place (such as Multi-Factor Authentication) we were able to get our customer compliant well ahead of the October deadline, allowing them to stay competitive with other legal firms competing for government contracts.