can representative attest us dropbox documents

What if the change meant that the application failed?.What if that change subtly altered the intent and meaning of the document?.Given that Dropbox has no access controls, there is nothing to catch the occasion when the agent inadvertently makes a change to the document and saves it back. This is likely to be a Word document or something similar. Supposing a client chose to share a proposed patent application with an agent using Dropbox. So, what could be the consequences of using Dropbox to share legally important documents like briefs, patent applications, arguments etc?

These are the basic requirements that have to be in place so that one can avoid the circumstances where one person (inadvertently) deletes or corrupts a document belonging to another person possibly without even realising they did it.Ī further requirement in most regulated environments is to be able to maintain an audit trail of who did what and when.ĭropbox supports none of these mechanisms. Some may be able to delete a document, others may not. Some have No Access, some have Read access only and some have Read/Write access. The owner of the file or folder can define the access rights of people and groups of people. As the Dropbox website itself says:Īny member of the folder can add, delete, or edit files within that folder.Īnybody operating in a corporate, shared, environment will be familiar with access controls on files. This is the major flaw with Dropbox in a shared environment: It has no access controls. All participants can now see the document and, crucially, can amend it. In this use case, one or other party places a document in a Dropbox folder that has been shared with the other party(s). A contrary view can be found in Snippets. This concentrates on whether Dropbox can be used without jeopardising the tenets of Attorney-Client Privilege. A good analysis (from a US perspective) can be found on. Much has been written about the general use of Dropbox and whether it can be used in the legal services industry and maintain compliance.

This applies to any professional, but I think is of particular applicability to anybody in a regulated industry. What I want to discuss is the suitability of Dropbox for one specific use case: sharing documents with clients. Suffice to say that it is probably the most popular Cloud Service for sharing documents between computers. You’d need to have been living under a stone not to have heard about it by now. Legal services professional should not use Dropbox to share documents with clients because of the lack of access controls.

Can representative attest us dropbox documents