REMOTE VIDEO DEPOSITION: CARRIERS BANNING ZOOM

We hear from our sources that several insurance carriers have banned the use of Zoom due to security concerns. The short list of carriers includes State Farm, GEICO, Hudson Insurance and Auto-Owners. There may be others.

We are aggressively exploring alternatives to Zoom that can be used as platforms for you to continue work on your cases in compliance with dictates from these carriers. Our focus is to continue to provide you with:

      1) Professional handling of your exhibits,

      2) To be able to deliver a polished ‘trial-ready’ video presentation on the back end, while,

      3) Achieving significant expense reduction for your cases.

These security concerns may be extinguished with the release of Zoom 5.0, whose release we outline below. We suspect that once these carriers’ IT departments examine Zoom 5.0 that they will be less cautious about Zoom henceforth.

Summary:  

The folks at Zoom have released a major update to their client application that takes the worry out of any security concerns for your remote video depositions.  There are other enhanced features too, which make this update attractive enough that we recommend updating your computer’s Zoom client to Zoom 5.0.

At Image Resources, we have researched best practices for remote video depositions and we are ready to maximize all of the new security enhancements for your remote depositions and mediations.

Discussion:  

Security threats have nagged at some attorneys who have been reluctant to use Zoom as a platform for their depositions and mediations.   In our opinion, the security threats in Zoom to date have been overblown a bit by the media.  We believe that virtually all of the issues so far can be thwarted by

      1) Using the waiting room to approve participants before letting them into the event, and

      2) Requiring a password.

At Image Resources, both of these preventive measures are standard practice. The development teams at Zoom feel this hasn’t been enough.

In our continuing effort to keep our clients up to date, here’s good news for those of you using Zoom for remote video depositions or mediations. Zoom has released a major upgrade of their client software known as Zoom 5.0. As you know, to take advantage of Zoom one must download a small client application onto your device.  With a desktop or laptop, it usually comes from zoom.us , and for a tablet or smartphone you can grab it from Apple Store or Play Store. Zoom feels so strongly about this update that it will be required for all meetings as of May 30.

In The Weeds A Little:

The biggest feature that should interest you is that Zoom 5.0 “is upgrading to the AES 256-bit GCM encryption standard, which offers increased protection of your meeting data in transit and resistance against tampering,” according to their website. Those in the know tell us that AES 256-bit GCM encryption is “the gold standard” of encryption and is used by the US government to secure data.  Note, though, that this is not “end-to-end encrypted” which may be added in a future update.

Other Improvements: 

Zoom 5.0 has all of the security features grouped together and now the Security icon is in the meeting bar, as opposed to accessing previously in the meeting menus.
We are now able to define password complexity, such as length, alphanumeric, and special character requirements. Zoom has added a new encryption ‘shield’ icon to their user layout. The shield will go Green when the enhanced GCM encryption is being used. Clicking on the shield icon will open up a Statistics page for more
encryption info.

There are a few dozen other features in Zoom 5.0, but those aforementioned are the ones that really caught our eye.  We expect that with Zoom 5.0 we will find other improvements we can incorporate to enhance your experience.

Of note:

As of April 18, paid users were given the option to ensure their data isn’t being routed through China.  With this new feature, rest assured Image Resources will make sure that your deposition will not be routed through Chinese servers.

Let us take care of the Technology so  you can focus on practicing law!