Over the last few months, Reidel Law Firm has taken steps to develop and deploy a secured, encrypted communications platform for our clients, colleagues, and friends. Reidel Law Firm remains committed to providing top notch legal services in Franchise Law, International Trade Law, and Business Law while maintaining accessibility, (one of our Firm’s core values) to our clients, colleagues, and friends of the firm. Utilizing our own secured chat platform allows us to be in communication with our clients around the world while maintaining the utmost in data security and client privacy.
As part of our search for a secured, encrypted platform for use within the Firm and with our clients we primarily sought a platform which met the following characteristics:
- data sovereignty (meaning our data or our client’s data is not owned or collected by third parties);
- default encrypted communications;
- platform agnostic/flexible integrations;
- self-hosted; and
- free/open source software.
After a review of available options and what would be best for our Firm’s use case, we decided to utilize the Matrix protocol with the Element client for our secure, encrypted chat platform. The Matrix protocol allows for a decentralized communications platform which is also fully encrypted (even us, as the server host, cannot read encrypted messages sent within Matrix or on our server) and allows for flexibility for our clients to engage us in a multitude of apps or outside platforms. Within Matrix we can host public and private chats, encrypted video and voice calls, bridge other chat platforms such as Telegram, Whatsapp, Signal, IRC, and even SMS.
To learn more about Matrix and Element, click the logo above to go to Matrix.org. For detailed instructions on how to utilize our Firm Matrix server and enjoy secured, encrypted communications, download our Guide here. The Guide is offered to the public copyright free. Please use, revise, and implement it in your own business or organization. To join our Reidel Law Firm Matrix server click here.
