The firm’s secure document sharing portal aims to create greater efficiencies in the handling of litigation and help to reduce the risks of data breaches.

It is used to upload certain bulky and sensitive documentation, in many cases medical notes and records or reports. It has been used by the firm to share encrypted information with medical consultants, barristers, expert witnesses, interpreters – and, most recently, defendant solicitor firms.

The portal was recently successfully tested with “a major defendant law firm” and JMK now intends to roll out portal access to other firms over the coming weeks.

Cate McQuade, head of legal technology at JMK, said: “The biggest benefit to using the JMK portal is that we have reduced common data protection risks and inefficiencies with email communication.

“These include no longer having to manually apply passwords to sensitive attachments or deal with document corruption or attachment size restrictions which often apply with email providers.

“Of the 2,425 data security incidents that UK businesses have reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office in the last three months of 2020/21, 443 were emails sent to wrong recipients. Our portal helps to reduce the risk associated with misaddressed emails, intercepted emails or human error, thus protecting our clients and reducing admin time.”

Managing director Maurece Hutchinson added: “Our latest development allows us to securely share medical evidence, GP and hospital notes and records and court bundles with the solicitors acting for the other party.

“We’ve been able to export a link to the document directly from our case management system to our secure portal. From there, the document can then be viewed, downloaded, printed or brought into the other party’s own case management system as required.

“We are not aware of any other firm in Northern Ireland being as pro-active as we are in bringing such innovative solutions to the market and we are so very proud of what Cate and our legal technology team have achieved with our professional colleagues in defendant legal practices.

“We feel sure that our opponents will benefit significantly from the changes we are introducing.”