Cloud computing means sky's limit for law firms

Last week my focus was on how law firms are next in line for a major technological upgrade. This week I want to focus on one example of that: cloud computing.

There are many other applications for this technology. From e-mails to Netflix to dropbox, our work and personal lives have been made easier by cloud services.

The McAfee Cloud Adoption and Risk Report 2019 says the average-sized organization generates more than 3.2 billion unique transactions in cloud services every month. A unique transaction includes a user login, a file upload, a document edit and so forth.

However, it is a different story with the legal profession. Legal-specific cloud services have not reached the same levels of popularity.

As an international legal hub, Hong Kong's lawyers face a pressing need to enhance their capabilities, and cloud technology is one of the most important things they should harness.

This is because law firms need to store a lot of data and store it securely. But some lawyers are worried that cloud services were not secure.

In 2019, the American Bar Association's legal technology survey said some of its biggest concerns about cloud applications were security, data privacy and ownership.

In addition to the need to protect client confidentiality, law firms have to deal with a wide range of sensitive and highly regulated data, such as medical, employment, immigration or financial records.

But perhaps some of the concerns are misplaced. When you look at the history of major data breaches and successful cyber attacks over the past five years, unsecure cloud services were rarely to blame.

A recent online survey conducted by KPMG and Oracle determined that most breaches were actually the result of firms failing to keep their internal security measures up to date, and even if the firm used a cloud service they had not properly updated their cloud services as recommended.

There are signs that things are changing, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the association's survey, just over 30 percent of firms said they have already adopted cloud solutions or are planning todo so. They say they are doing so in part because they offer greater security.

I think these firms are on the right track.

Cloud storage is compatible with the way that lawyers work today. Mobile access to documents, for example, mean that lawyers can easily pull out their phones and tablets to view the documents in court, at a client's premises or at home.

More importantly, cloud storage may be more secure than local storage systems.

The big cloud vendors, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud, are some of the established names in cloud services with good records on security.

These vendors can also handle law firms' security patching and upgrades with minimal disruption. Law firms usually do not have to grant the vendor total access to their IT environment to cloud services.

Finally, cloud technology also enables some additional services that can lower a law firm's storage cost and speed up the electronic discovery process for the purpose as evidence.

For example, many cloud services now come with built-in case management and automatic translation services.

For most firms, it's no longer a question of whether or not to move to cloud, but how many of their systems will make the migration.

Cloud computing, with its ability to securely manage complex databases and virtually unlimited resources, is the future for law.

That's a winning argument in any court.

Dr Jolly Wong is a policy fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge