Peer to Peer Magazine

P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S U M M E R 2 0 1 9 53 The three pillars of a law firm are document management, email management and billing. Documents are the lifeblood of any law firm. Everything revolves around the creation, dissemination, retention and disposition of documents. Equally important is email as the most common form of communication both internally and externally. An estimated 80 percent of documents are shared via email. The average worker spends 52 percent of his or her time per year creating, sending and searching for emails. Lastly, once documents are created and shared via email attachments or links, the client must be billed. Having the appropriate technologies in place are vital to daily operations, and therefore the profitability, of a law firm. To make the biggest impact, any firm should start here when considering or adopting a cloud strate. Is a hybrid model right for your firm? • Consider the culture of the firm. Is your firm more conservative or do you tend to actively adopt leading- edge trends in technolo? • Think about data security standards. Are your clients adverse to or supportive of firm data being stored in the cloud? • What about the technolo life cycle? Has your firm made recent hardware or on-premise software investments? • Assess your data storage footprint. How much data does the firm store? Consider options to reduce archived volumes, then estimate the volume of data to be stored. Would storage costs make a move to the cloud cost- prohibitive? There are many more considerations once you have made the decision to migrate to the cloud. How to select a cloud provider • Select a cloud provider with a track record in the legal industry. This is important as you consider a provider's security credentials with your clients' requirements in mind (e.g., SOC2, SOC2+, ISO27001, FINRA, and HIPAA). • Consider a multi-tenant model vs. single tenant model, and select the provider that meets your needs. In a multi-tenant model, a single instance of the software and its supporting infrastructure serves multiple customers. Each customer shares the software application and also shares a single database. Each tenant's data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants. In a single tenant model, a single instance of the software and supporting infrastructure serves a single customer. With single tenancy, each customer has his or her own independent database and instance of the software. Essentially, there is no sharing happening with this option (e.g., a digital divide separates your firm from the firm down the street). • Select a provider allows for SSO (single sign-on) technologies, so users must only log in once to access multiple applications. Frequent fliers use TSA PreCheck for this very reason. • Consider custody of data, and select a provider which supports customer- managed encryption keys. The use of CMEKs allows the firm to maintain full control and responsibility for these keys. The vendor has no visibility or access. • Choose a cloud-first provider—one that offers an optimized client built on a robust and dynamic HTML5 user interface, making it ubiquitous across devices. • Look for a provider offering a RESTful (or Representational State Transfer) API using secure HTTPS connections which eliminate the need for legacy VPN. The maturity of the cloud has reduced the need for additional remote desktop technologies. You have made the decision to move to the cloud and selected the provider(s), now how do you get there? Choosing the right technolo partner to get you to the cloud should be as important as selecting the right cloud provider. Designing and building the platform to meet your specific firm's needs and then developing the best data migration strate are critical to the overall outcome. An experienced technolo partner will be able to share best practices and make recommendations regarding design to align with the firm's overall business objectives. This is a critical component to ensure the best possible user adoption. Select a partner with experience moving law firms to the cloud and the expertise in-house to dedicate to the project in order to deliver a seamless transition. The 2018 ILTA survey asked "How do you predict your firm's adoption of cloud- based solutions will change in the coming year?" On average 72 percent of firms responded as seeing an increase in adoption. If you haven't already taken the leap, now is the time. Moving to the cloud is no longer considering the "bleeding edge" or even the leading edge. The technologies are tried and proven and arguably more secure than your current on-premise infrastructures. Total cost of ownership for cloud operations is almost always more cost-effective with predictable spending, and user adoption generally increases due to the flexibility and improved mobility options. What are you waiting for? ILTA

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