Professional firms send their most sensitive material in the least secure way available: as email attachments. Contracts, accounts, personal data – attached, sent, and from that moment permanently outside the firm’s control. Forwarded anywhere, sitting in inboxes forever, unrecallable the instant the wrong address autocompletes.
Clients feel the other half of the problem: attachments too large to send, version confusion when documents bounce back and forth, and no way to know if anything arrived safely.
The tools that fix this are almost certainly already in your Microsoft 365 licence. Shared securely through OneDrive or SharePoint, a document becomes a controlled link: permissions you set, expiry you choose, access you can see and revoke.
What secure client sharing looks like in practice:
- Links with set permissions, not attachments
- Expiry dates on anything sensitive
- Access revocable after the matter closes
- One live version, not seven emailed copies
- An audit trail of who opened what, and when
- Client portals for long-running matters
- Large files handled without size-limit workarounds
- A firm-wide rule, so practice does not vary by person
For firms across Guildford and Cranleigh, this is also an increasingly common client and insurer question – ‘how do you share our documents?’ now appears on due-diligence lists.
You already pay for the secure way. The change is habit, not budget.
If your firm still shares client files by attachment, explore our Microsoft 365 services for Guildford professional firms.
Find out more about our IT Support and Cybersecurity services for Guildford SMEs.
