Mind your business. Making the Move

• Author: Mark Richman
• Pages: 17-18

Business of Law | MIND YOUR BUSINESS

MIND YOUR BUSINESS

Making

the Move

What should legal organizations

consider when assessing how the

cloud fits into their future?

BY MARK RICHMAN

The COVID-19 pandemic—

coupled with the remote and

hybrid work models that

arrived in its wake—has

spurred a move to the cloud for many

of the key business systems that legal

organizations rely on, from document

and email management to collaboration

and more.

Parts of the industry, however, have

yet to move from on-premises installa-

tions to the cloud . What should these

organizations—spanning law  rms, cor-

porate legal departments, solo practi-

tioners and other legal organizations—

consider when assessing how cloud  ts

into their future?

Compliance is complicated

With each passing year, the compliance

and regulatory environment gets more

complex. From Brexit and the General

Data Protection Regulation to the Cali-

fornia Consumer Privacy Act, there are

a host of new laws and regulations that

govern where data needs to be stored

and how it needs to be managed.

Building your own data centers in a

variety of different countries to ensure

data physically resides in those regions

isn’t a viable or practical undertaking

for anyone but the largest and most

well-resourced organizations. Conse-

quently, to successfully manage these

ongoing changes, IT and business

leaders will have to rely on cloud and

software-as-a-service platforms to keep

their data private, secure and aligned

with increasing and changing glob-

al regulations as part of their digital

strategies.

Cloud vendors—those providing a

cloud-based document management

system, for example, or a cloud-based

billing system—provide greater  exibil-

ity for legal organizations on this front.

Vendors that leverage a modern cloud

with an infrastructure-as-code founda-

tion can deploy new instances of a SaaS

solution at the push of a button in any

geographic location hosted on public

cloud infrastructure.

Take the example of a British law

 rm with European Union clients.

The data for those clients needs to be

domiciled in the EU . Rather than going

through the costly and time-consuming

process of  nding a data center in the

EU and manually con guring servers,

the law  rm’s cloud vendor can leverage

public cloud infrastructure and deploy

a new instance of its service in the EU,

allowing the  rm to service its EU cli-

ents without breaching any compliance

protocols. This approach would likely

come together more quickly and cost

the  rm less.

The above scenario highlights the

importance of legal organizations rely-

ing on cloud-based vendors that utilize

a public cloud infrastructure provid-

er with the broadest possible global

footprint.

In a world where a thicket of new

regulations increasingly needs to be

Illustration by Sara Wadford/Shutterstock

ABA JOURNAL | APRIL–MAY 2022

17