The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/11430
A Lofty View from the Year 2020 general capabilities provided by the larger solution provider. There are currently three service providers with cloud offerings for legal IT: Reed Elsevier (formerly LexisNexis), Thomson Reuters, and Autonomy. Each of these companies has deep roots in legal IT, but each also has a significant presence in other vertical markets and corresponding offerings for those markets. Each vendor offers a content management suite (which consists of collaborative and content creation tools paired with filing and search tools), an intranet, an accounting system, and a people management system (HR, payroll, timekeeping and benefits systems). Collaboration with clients is now largely done by simply publishing the documents one wishes to share to the client’s cloud, or, where that is not possible, through e-mail communication. Infrastructure is handled by the partner the vendor has chosen to work with, as all of these vendors have partnerships with both Google and Microsoft. Interestingly, none of the vendors mentioned provides telephony services themselves, though several have partnerships of their own with other cloud providers (and integrate with these providers). The VoIP telephony providers, by the way, were among the early success stories of cloud computing, as a good number of firms moved their telephone and network management services to these providers in the years 2010- 2013. These service providers offer telephone service and basic network and Internet connectivity, including all network hardware and management of the hardware. After some early hiccups, the model has worked well and is now well- established in legal IT. Data Centers One of the most significant technology cost items for firms in the past was the data center. They took up significant amounts of space, they were costly to build, and they consumed a lot of power, making them costly to operate. Yet, in spite of these issues, most firms had their primary data centers located in their main offices in the late 1990s. This started to change with the emergence of outside data center service providers and cheaper network connectivity. The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and some well-publicized difficulties experienced by a few impacted firms drove home the point that, at a minimum, firms needed to develop and test disaster recovery plans for key systems. Firms that relocated larger offices did not build new data centers, and firms that remodeled took the opportunity to reclaim the space occupied by the data center. By 2010, many large firms had moved their primary data centers to offsite locations, and almost all others had secondary and/or redundant offsite data centers. This trend continued for a few years after 2010, as network connectivity became more economical, but has since slowed as more firms have bypassed these facility expenses in favor of data storage in the cloud. Buying disk space and associated backup services based on the size of data from a service provider allowed for predictability of costs: no more hardware and backup software, and no need for expenses related to internal management. As a result, these service providers have been able to do for IT infrastructure what the ASPs of the 1990s did for applications: provide a reasonable, defined cost for a service that a business could easily predict and budget for. The costs of running a data center (onsite or off), including building and maintaining network equipment, servers, and telephony systems are significant. The facts that data storage is a necessity for firms, that the cost of data centers is high and that this is a service that can be more efficiently provided by larger service providers make cloud solutions for data storage a very attractive thing for most firms. The solution providers faced a thornier challenge gaining traction in legal IT as they had to confront the additional Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 75