Before I started my law firm, I didn’t use any kind of a password keeping software. I was very nervous about the idea of having an app or something on my computer or something web-based where I would stick in all of my passwords, my banking passwords and the passwords that I use to make quarterly payments to the IRS and passwords to my email and my practice management software. But when you run your own law firm, you will have so many hundreds of passwords that it’s impossible for you to keep track of them. Unless you’re reusing passwords in a way which is ridiculously stupid and dangerous. If you’re going to have very complicated, unique passwords that use to log into all of the hundreds of systems and portals and things that you’re going to need to utilize over the course of running your law firm, you absolutely are going to have to have some kind of a password keeper that can generate complicated passwords, that can save them for you.

And yeah, is it a little bit scary to think, oh my God, there’s one service out there that literally has every password? Yeah. But you know what’s scarier is every other alternative. You can’t write down on a scrap of paper hundreds of passwords. You can’t reuse passwords, you can’t use your birthday or your dog, and you need to use multifactor authentication in order to protect these things, and you need to take advantage of the best technology. And so there’s a bunch of different options that are out there. I picked one a couple years ago. Is it the best? I don’t know. It’s more than adequate for my purposes. And I have hundreds and hundreds of passwords in there. It is so locked down with multifactor authentication, with scanning my face before people can get in there. I am absolutely sold on the idea that it is essential.

And you’re really kind of weighing two different risks here. I mean, the risk on the one hand, if you put all your eggs in one basket that somebody’s going to get in and steal your stuff or that maybe some bad actor at the company that provides a solution for you is going to get into your passwords. Those are pretty remote risks.

When you think about what you’re getting and what you’re getting is 12 characters, 16 character passwords with different symbols and numbers and non-alphabetic characters and all kinds of stuff that has a virtue, all locked down with multifactor authentication. The trade-off that goes with that as compared to the alternative, which is keeping the password somewhere that isn’t secure, not having really long passwords, not having gibberish passwords, using passwords that have something that someone could guess at because it’s your town you were born in or something like that. The risks of that approach far outweigh the risk. And it’s in my mind, purely fictional and hypothetical that someone’s going to break into your password keeper and steal things from you. To me, it’s a no-brainer. I would come out of the gate, absolutely. With some sort of a password keeping solution, it’s a non-negotiable part of my law firm.