The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/11430
SMART MOVES Collaboration in the Cloud A Paradigm Shift Brings Staggering Cost Reductions technology, the software and business processes evolve day to day, week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter, for the same cost. Your firm’s strategic processes will evolve with them. With two industry giants like Google and Microsoft offering competing collaborative hosted environments, it’s only a matter of time before your clients and competition will be adapting to this technology and paradigm. The firms that do not invest now will be left behind. G With the introduction of Google Apps and Microsoft’s cloud services, the legal technology industry is moving in a new direction. Why invest in onsite servers when you can host your servers for a fraction of the cost, host your services with cutting-edge technology companies and invest in their evolving software models? By investing in these companies, you are also investing in their business models; as their products evolve, so too does your firm’s business model. As you embrace this new paradigm, choose carefully and plan your exit strategy. A VAST PARADIGM SHIFT WITHIN TWO YEARS The collaborative environment is a true paradigm shift. By making e-mail, calendaring, authoring, sites and video/chat collaborative, the hosted environment is redefining how firms will be sharing information. Before long, video and voice chat could become the industry standards for video training and VoIP communication; video chat could become as collaborative, integrated and searchable as e-mail, traditional chat and documents; and Google Voice could be 32 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer one are the days when firms could sit back, watch and wait two to three years for an industry-wide rollout to become stable, safe and ready for investment. With collaborative, cloud-hosted integrated into applications as a digital dictation solution, with all apps integrated into a hosted open source DMS. To highlight how fast these services could evolve, let’s look 24 months ahead at what investment in Google Apps could mean for your firm and where a business strategy involving Google Apps could take your firm. By investing in a collaborative environment like Google Apps, your firm will restructure from the ground up in organizational management, information management, desktop and mobile applications, and IT operations. ORGANIZATIONAL MANAGEMENT Your investment in a collaborative environment allows you to reassign roles and streamline your enterprise. The front-line tools are so powerful and user friendly, your decision makers can apply changes through the front end directly off their project maps and rely on developers solely to tie in the back end through open source development. Your resources can be redirected to fit the continually evolving and competitive needs of your attorneys, clients and your competition. Project management is truly collaborative, and the resource interaction is in real time, making attorney project management a source of revenue. The cost savings in hardware, software licensing, resources and increased efficiency are staggering. INFORMATION MANAGEMENT Your information management realm has been retooled completely in secure layers of transparency, and efficiency increases are realized across the board. There is no need to e-mail a document that you can now share. Your users leave comments in real time while sharing documents, spreadsheets, presentations or workflow using a chat/message combination with consistent layered versioning. They leave video/voice notations in lieu of written comments. Playback features rewind and retool