Scalable DRM Protects Sensitive Documents on the Network

Computerworld - "Clients pay high fees to law firms," says Matt Kesner, chief technology officer at Mountain View, Calif.-based Fenwick & West LLP. "They are willing to pay those fees for legal advice. They hate paying for printing, addressing and mailing documents -- the process of accessing that advice."

As a result, about six years ago, Fenwick & West's clients began asking for a way to access their legal documents online that was more organized than e-mail attachments, says Kesner. So he started looking into collaboration software solutions, settling on EMC Corp.'s eRoom and Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint. But security remained an issue, particularly for highly sensitive documents pertaining to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and corporate auctions, which are a major part of the firm's practice.

"In the last year, clients have become increasingly concerned about security in M&A deals, which is a good thing," Kesner says. "ERoom and SharePoint have strong security, but it does not reach down to the document level."

What he needed was a technology that gives him control over documents when they are sent out over the network to clients. "We wanted something that would let us control who could access the documents and exactly what they could do with them -- whether they could edit them, print them or just read them," says Kesner. "And we needed a way to log who did what with each document. That was another client request."

In theory, the answer is enterprise digital rights management (E-DRM), a technology based on the idea that the only way to protect documents on the network is encryption. But the E-DRM systems Kesner initially tried either would not scale easily to cover Fenwick & West's 600-plus collaboration rooms and extranets, or they annoyed clients.

"The people who use documents don't care about their security," he says. "It is the people who own the documents who love DRM. So it doesn't take much of a problem to convince clients that they don't want to use it."

The solution came at him from several directions at once. "We were working with a consultant on Internet collaboration who pointed us in the way of SealedMedia in Los Gatos, Calif., and London. Then the people from EMC eRoom recommended it to us, and I bumped into them at a trade show," Kesner says. "It was a fortunate coincidence."

Whatever it was, Kesner began experimenting with SealedMedia Inc. in December, and by mid-January, he started using it with clients. By mid-April, Kesner was testing it with two clients totaling about 600 users. "It has scaled nicely for us, and the clients love it," he says.