Attorneys and paralegals
Reflect document, calendar, signature, and outside-counsel workflows without using a live matter.
For Legal Services
Phishing Simulation Planning for Law Firms and Legal Teams
Legal teams exchange confidential documents, filing notices, signatures, payment instructions, discovery material, and correspondence with clients, courts, regulators, and outside counsel.
A responsible simulation should practice verification without copying a real matter, exploiting client distress, or creating a false filing, settlement, or legal deadline.
Industry-specific scenarios • Safe campaign boundaries • Reporting practice • Contextual measurement
01Understand the work
Design around how law firms and legal teams actually operate
Start with the people, systems, authority, and verification routes involved in one real workflow. The exercise should practice an action employees can take without disrupting customers, operations, safety, or real incident response.
Finance and trust accounting
Reinforce callback and approval controls for invoices, settlements, retainers, and bank-detail changes.
Litigation and filing teams
Avoid active deadlines, court notices, service, discovery disputes, and consequential case events.
Clients and external counsel
Do not include external people without explicit authorization, communication, support, and data-handling arrangements.
02Choose the scenario
Use a recognizable request with a safe response
Give the scenario one learning objective and one explainable next step. Use fictional people, organizations, records, transactions, and incidents, and avoid exploiting a live problem or sensitive relationship.
Client document share
Practice validating a fictional client, matter, owner, access request, and destination.
Electronic-signature request
Ask employees to open the known service independently for an invented agreement.
Payment-detail change
Reinforce the approved callback and authorization process using a fictional counterparty.
Cloud account notice
Practice contacting the known provider rather than signing in through an unexpected link.
03Plan responsibly
Resolve operational questions before launch
| Consideration | Question to answer | Required preparation |
|---|---|---|
| Confidentiality | Could the scenario reveal a real client, matter, strategy, filing, transaction, or communication? | Invent all content and review every message, destination, export, and debrief. |
| Legal deadlines | Could delivery overlap a filing, closing, hearing, discovery, or transaction deadline? | Choose a lower-pressure period and exclude active consequential events. |
| External parties | Could a client, court, regulator, counterparty, or outside counsel receive or act on the exercise? | Use controlled internal recipients and isolated destinations unless separately authorized. |
| Result access | Who needs individual campaign events and how will they be protected? | Restrict access, define retention, and use findings for private follow-up and process improvement. |
04Run the exercise
Move from an approved brief to useful follow-up
- 1
Define one behavior
State the request being tested, expected verification or reporting action, authorized audience, permitted data, and intended use of the findings.
- 2
Confirm the real process
Make sure employees can reach the authentic service, contact, approver, reporting tool, or escalation route before testing the behavior.
- 3
Pilot end to end
Test representative accounts, locations, shifts, devices, email controls, landing pages, event records, reports, stop conditions, and follow-up.
- 4
Brief response teams
Prepare security, IT, operations, communications, managers, and relevant providers while preserving normal handling of unrelated real reports.
- 5
Debrief and improve
Explain the expected action, provide relevant private learning, and assign every process or control improvement to an accountable owner.
Source: NIST: Building a Cybersecurity and Privacy Learning Program
05Measure responsibly
Interpret campaign activity in business context
Record intended recipients, exclusions, successful deliveries, unique recipient events, verified reports, response handling, and completed follow-up. Reconcile automated inspection and repeated events before attributing activity to employees.
Show actual counts for small practice groups and document role, matter workload, device, delivery, scenario relevance, and reporting access. Do not publicly rank attorneys, teams, offices, or matters.
Use findings to improve real reporting, verification, identity, access, email, vendor, and support processes. A single interaction does not explain why a decision occurred and should not become an employee risk score.
Common questions
Common questions about Phishmake's features, onboarding, and support, answered to help you get started with confidence.
Can a simulation imitate a court filing notice?
Avoid active courts, filings, service, deadlines, sanctions, and case events. Use a neutral fictional document workflow that cannot prompt legal action.
Can real client names improve realism?
No. Use invented clients, matters, documents, counterparties, courts, and deadlines. Confidential client information is unnecessary for the learning objective.
Should clients receive law-firm simulations?
Not as part of an internal employee campaign. Any external exercise requires separate authority, communication, support, data handling, and contractual review.
How should legal-team results be handled?
Use restricted contextual reporting, private follow-up, and aggregate program findings that do not expose individual or client information.
Sources & further reading
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