The allure of cloud computing is inherently a perfect match for the sole and small-firm lawyer. As practices today downsize or fragment and take cost-cutting measures to stay competitive, the cloud’s ability to act as a central repository for just about anything, while virtually eliminating the need for expensive client-server hardware, is one big enticement. Add to this web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS), whereby lawyers can form ad hoc workgroups around their file sharing, and suddenly you have a very powerful collaboration platform for flexible, scalable practice management.
Admittedly, all this wasn’t top of mind for Russell Alexander when he decided to unify the data of his small but growing Lindsay, Ontario-based family law practice seven years ago. Already heavily invested in a traditional client-server based network that linked up with a second office in Whitby, and later a third in Markham, information stored one server at one location would be mirrored and backed up in the other locations, providing both inter-office access and safety through redundancy.
Not long after, they began scanning all physical documents sent or received, saving them digitally onto the server as part of a transition to a largely paperless office environment. That’s when Alexander had a ‘eureka’ moment and added data centralization to the mix.
“What we can do now is use a web-based program called Dropbox,” he explains, demonstrating the ease with which a group of files can be drag-and-dropped from his server, straight into the cloud.
“So, if I’m in family court and I have a few hours waiting for my case to start, not only can I respond to emails, but I can work on all the documents from my iPad, just as if I was sitting at my desk. Similarly, being in a rural community, if we have a day where there’s a snowstorm or something to this affect, myself and all my staff can continue to work from home – or wherever. The ability to access your work remotely really was the fundamental change in our firm,” says Alexander.
Let's Get Physical
Choosing cloud vendors that are reputable, with a good history and protocols for archiving data, is a given. And while most of these vendors are using redundant storage methods already, experts stress the importance of keeping multiple copies locally, in the event of a cataclysm at the other end.
“Local is the key,” says Tang. “The cloud is, in essence, just another backup. But it’s not a physical copy that you have on your premises.”
With this in mind, he implemented a fluid methodology for local backups, which quickly became part of his firm’s regular daily routine, as laptops and mobile devices get docked at work and home. “Since I’m a small and not a solo, I needed to create a ‘built-in’ process my colleagues would follow, but that wouldn’t require a lot of special effort on their part,” Tang explains.
Whether backups are made to solid state RAIDs, consumer grade external hard drives or inexpensive USB thumb drives doesn’t really matter, he says, so long as they are geographically diversified, and always accessible. “Because, my email is my life – if I lose that email, my legal risk is uncountable,” says Tang.
Professional liability is also first and foremost on Fleischman’s mind. At his law firm, that means having their central computer also participate in the office’s Dropbox account so that, “if for any reason there is ever a problem with the cloud, we always have an up-to-date local copy of everything,” says Fleischman – careful to point out that files are always distributed, never moved.
Just as critical for him was the synchronization of data among three lawyers, three in-house staffers and eight independents. One missed file or tilted backup schedule could easily spell disaster, should the unthinkable happen.
“It’s why we like Dropbox, and I know that box.net and SugarSync do it as well,” says Fleischman. “They synchronize automatically, allowing each of us to use our own local backup solutions, and independently of one another. Because everything is synchronized as among our machines, we’re effectively all getting the same backups.”
Storage wars
With literally hundreds of web-based file archiving solutions available, selecting the right one(s) for your practice can be challenging. Each has its strengths; some are basic file lockers geared towards single users while the majority offers some degree of customizable team-sharing controls with intelligent housekeeping across your various desktop and mobile devices.
Others, still, go beyond simple archiving duties to provide solutions for very specific needs and situations. Jay Fleischman, a New York City bankruptcy attorney and online legal marketing consultant, has been using one such service for several years now.
“I love Evernote,” he exudes, describing it as a long-term storage with semantic search capabilities – where the cloud remembers everything, or so it would seem – that is best suited for all those typically scattered, miscellaneous matters.
“It essentially replaces a three-ring binder,” continues Fleischman. “I use it for note taking and for storing voice memos. But I also use it to save photos and videos, blog post ideas, articles received that are ‘to be read later’, or bits from an email. Or, when I’m working on a particularly large matter and I’m trying to organize URLs and resources that come up during my online research, I’ll use Evernote for that as well.”
Not surprisingly, lawyers are finding some other very creative uses for Evernote. One user wrote online how she’d regularly scribble case notes atop her legal pad and take a photo of it with her smart phone. From there, Evernote would stash it away with the ability to later search based on, among other things, the automatically stamped time, date and GPS-geotagged location of where that note was taken.
For Felix Tang, partner at Innovate LLP in Toronto – a progressive law firm that is entirely cloud-based – it was the need to manage and secure his own intellectual property already sitting online that led him to another rather unique service called Backupify, which specializes in archiving personal content from social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogger, and Flickr.
“It’s one of those, okay, are you really going to manually back up all your social media accounts on a regular basis? Probably not. But, would you pay a company $3-5 a month to do it for you automatically? I’m getting to the point where I probably would, especially as my firm’s social presence grows,” says Tang.
Stressing further that cost effective, forward-looking solutions are of utmost importance to his young firm, Tang prefers to use what he calls a “best in breed”, combinatory approach of several free or low-cost cloud services, always careful to choose products that are built for tomorrow. He doesn’t have any hard fast rules for this, only guidelines and principles – like own your data, be able to get it out, and pick cloud solutions that are going to grow with you.
Services, he says, like Zimbra. Designed to hook up to email clients like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook Exchange Server, plus many others, it will download and archive email for you on an automated basis. But it also has a nifty surprise for lawyers.
“Zimbra’s interesting because one thing I wrestle with as a law firm is electronic discovery,” says Tang, pointing to the optional (paid upgrade) Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliant archiving and discovery module. “I’m not about to pay an individual thousands of dollars to go through my electronic documents when I can just type it in and do it myself,” he reasons.
“Knowing that Zimbra is allowing me to backup my mail, but also that in the future they can siphon all the stuff out in various forms and do an archive and discovery, that’s just very smart,” says Tang.
The suite life
Apart from straight storage and retrieval solutions, the real ‘killer app’ for many solo or small-firm practitioners might well lie in cloud-based software that knits data archiving together in a more meaningful way with every day lawyering activities. That’s according to Erik Mazzone, author of the Practice Matters blog and director of the Center for Practice Management in North Carolina, who claims that an all-in-one suite can be the key to maximizing productivity.
“What I mean is essentially database software that integrates your front office and back office time and billing pieces together. You take a Clio, or a Rocket Matter, or a LexisNexis Firm Manager; I think this kind of SaaS is underutilized by lawyers today,” says Mazzone.
Made specifically for the legal industry, these services combine file archiving and remote sharing with project management/collaboration, marketing and client relations tools, vendor/supplier data and office automation, all under one hood.
Admitting that it is possible to achieve similar results with the a-la-carte approach, Mazzone points out, “so long as you have strong hooks between the moving pieces.”
What he’s not a fan of is having a bunch of little satellites set up that don’t talk to each other very well. “You know, where you’re entering data in five different places and the data’s sitting in seven different formats. It’s a hassle and it’s inefficient,” says Mazzone.
From a functional point of view, often the only distinguishing features between legal-specific software suites and the more consumer oriented options boil down to pre-defined fields and workflow. Though he says that both systems are built on the same backbone of an a SQL database with a PHP generated HTML interface, Fleischman believes dedicated legal systems are often easier to adopt because lawyers can walk into them understanding what everything means, and how the various fields should operate.
“I always say that it’s very dependent upon who you are and the way that you work,” adds Fleischman, arguing that his firm chose the stand-alone Google Calendar over a suite with integrated scheduling simply because it happened to work with the way that their collective minds think.
“You’ve also got these major generic business CRM solutions like Salesforce.com and Infusionsoft, and things of that nature,” says Fleischman. “If those work for you, that’s great. But, many of those systems do a lot more than we need them to do, and those extra layers of complexity are very difficult to strip away when you’re in a training phase. That’s why we don’t use them. We work with what we like.”
Making the leap
Underscoring that any move to the cloud should be a firm-wide initiative, Alexander suggests including your other lawyers and staff in the plan, from the start.
“It makes it much easier and you’ll likely get much less resistance,” he says, adding that people are naturally going to be reluctant of letting go of that paper file and desktop comfort zone.
“It takes time to change the firm culture. Ultimately, you want them to buy in to the process and take ownership,” says Alexander.
Likewise, Tang suggests that you take a slow but steady course, picking one or two features of your firm’s data portfolio at a time. ”But when you do switch, you can’t switch half-way,” warns Tang. “That’s the worst thing you can do I think, from a technologically standpoint.”
While most commercial cloud services are rock solid by any IT department’s standards, Mazzone instills the importance of running fire drills every now and again, to “find out how you go about restoring data that is lost and actually putting yourself through the paces with your chosen software before you have a cataclysm,” he says.
And for the sole practitioner or small-firm lawyer who’s still not sold on the whole idea, Fleischman points to his newfound bottom line as the single greatest takeaway. Long-term savings so clearly offset the time involved in making a move to some of these systems, he believes that any law firm should be net positive within twelve months of implementation.
“There’s no question about it,” says Fleischman. “We cut our overhead expenses by such a remarkable amount of money that my partner still doesn’t believe it!”
Never having to worry about additional Microsoft Office Exchange licenses, alone, he says is a remarkable feeling.
“Now, would I tell somebody to move off of that Office-bound platform if everything is working? No, because you’re not spending any money today. But, if a typical server’s going to last you for five years and you’re four years into it, you know damned well that you’re going to have to spend between $5,000 and $10,000 at bare minimum to get everything updated and replaced,” says Fleischman.
Instead, he suggests beginning to make the gradual transition to web-based systems so that when the year comes and your server fries on a Thursday afternoon, you don’t have to worry about the downtime. “And you don’t have to worry about cutting that big cheque,” Fleischman laughs. “Because everything is already migrated, and you’ve had a whole year to test it. That’s peace of mind.”