Extract from Cat Casey’s article “On-Prem Legal Tech’s Swan Song”
In a recent Law.com article, reporter Victoria Hudgins discussed the historical resistance to cloud adoption in legal and gave voice to some of the industry’s frustration at the pace of innovation in law, or lack thereof. In the end, Hudgins concluded that law firms remain steadfast in their attachment to on premise technology.
I beg to differ.
In my experience, this simply could not be farther from the truth. If anything, firms are hitting turbo-boost, not slamming on the breaks, to get to the cloud. Dynamic challenges in security, scalability and access are driving a mad dash to the cloud—and those clinging to on-prem are realizing just how much they are falling behind.
While historically, law firms and their enterprise clients maintained prohibitions on cloud-based technology, over the last several years many firms have dusted off their engagement letter templates and outside counsel guidelines to eliminate just those barriers to innovation. The concerns and outside counsel guidelines that previously precluded cloud adoption are falling to the wayside as the computational power, cost savings and elasticity of cloud solutions entice practitioners facing e-discovery challenges.
