MSBA Legal Tech Month | The New Attack Surface: Cybersecurity in the Age of AI

About this session

For two decades, law firm cybersecurity has been built around a familiar set of controls: endpoint protection, email filtering, multi-factor authentication, and user training. Generative AI has quietly broken several of the assumptions those controls rest on. Attackers now produce flawless, contextually accurate pretexting at scale, defeating the spelling-and-grammar heuristics firms have trained staff to rely on. Meanwhile, the greater exposure is often internal: attorneys and staff pasting client matter content into consumer AI tools that sit entirely outside the firm's security stack, otherwise known as shadow AI.

This session walks through how the threat landscape has evolved and, more importantly, what defenses are emerging in response. We'll cover AI detection and response (AIDR) and the new category of tools built to see AI usage the way MDR sees endpoints, data governance approaches that make AI safe to use rather than merely prohibited, and the identity and verification controls that hold up when voice and video can no longer be trusted. Attendees will leave with a practical assessment framework for their own firm.

What You'll Learn

• 1Identify how AI has changed social engineering, business email compromise, and wire fraud tactics:
• 2Recognize shadow AI exposure and its implications for confidentiality obligations and client engagement terms:
• 3Understand the emerging AIDR and AI governance tooling categories and where they fit in an existing security stack:
• 4Evaluate whether current firm policies, insurance, and vendor agreements actually address AI-related risk:

CLE Credits: 1.0 Standard CLE Credit. Event Code: TBD.

Registration deadline is October 11, 2026. Remote instructions are included in the registration confirmation email and will also be emailed to you the day prior to the event.