Flying in the clouds: practicing law by cloud computing.

• Author: Baker, Jonathan
• Position: Young Lawyers Division - Reprint

The issue of this article is this: What can a law office do to reduce the risks of improper access to its clients' confidential information when that information is stored via cloud computing?

But first, what is cloud computing? Cloud computing is best described as connecting your home to the electricity of a power plant instead of using one's own candles. (1) Put another way, cloud computing is analogous to connecting a home to a city water supply when previously that home drew its water from a private, individual well. (2) In cloud storage, a user receives a product by a common grid to which all the other users in the city (cloud) might have access. (3) However, in cloud computing, a neighbor can effectively travel through the pipes and arrive in your kitchen. Such a person could be anyone with access to the Internet, from a person in a nearby coffee shop to an overseas criminal organization.

Technically speaking, cloud storage is the keeping of one's information on another entity's server. Of course, that server is located in a different physical location. In addition, such a system is designated a "cloud" because it consists of a lump of every customer's information, whoever those customers may be. Yet there are no technical barriers separating the information of the various customers. (4) Information can be placed on a particular cloud server from any computer with Internet access; the user does not need a computer equipped with a hard drive. Thus, when a lawyer wishes to access the information previously stored via cloud computing, he or she merely goes to the website of the cloud service provider with the proper username and password.

Similarly, cloud computing allows firms to equip their office computers with the bare minimum software because the server and database of the cloud service provider does the heavy lifting elsewhere. For example, Gmail, Google Docs, and Yahoo!Mail are some common examples of cloud computing. No hard drives are needed to access these applications.

The benefits of having another person bear the energy and space costs of digital storage are stupendous. Cloud technology allows many persons to work on the same document, saving their changes to a master copy, which is stored via cloud computing. This avoids the hassle of multiple copies being exchanged during the revision stage.

What are the risks of cloud computing? Simply put, they stem from breaches in a client's confidential information entrusted to the attorney. Of course, the purest risk is that an unknown party may gain access to a lawyer's digital information while that information is stored on a third party's cloud servers, whoever or wherever that infiltrator may be. Such unauthorized access could be granted either by the negligent or intentional act of a cloud service provider's employee. "Even if a user ... knows that data is stored in the cloud, it might not be clear exactly where the data is stored." (5) This statement by Professor Felton of Princeton University expresses the first risk that a lawyer may face when using cloud computing: There is little traceability of the location at which one's documents are stored. Specifically, cloud computing generates many backups of any document stored on the cloud system. This can be a blessing and a curse as we shall see. Therefore, one document might be stored in 16 different locations, some of which may be politically unstable nations. (6) The international nature of security breaches is indeed real. Even a U.S. congressman recently noted that foreign governments such as China at times have breached the digital...