Both Sides Now: Use of the Cloud Goes Beyond Saving IT Costs

By Kelly Lake

Executive Director, Continuing Education of the Bar (CEB)

Using technology in a smart way seems an obvious way to save time in a law practice. How can attorneys best learn to utilize technology efficiently without taking too much time away from their law practices?

It wasn’t that long ago that “the cloud” was a nebulous, undecipherable technology fraught with security and privacy risks that made it a suitable domain only for cool start-ups and early adopters. Today, the worldwide cloud services market is forecast to grow 16% in 2016 to a value of $204 billion. Cloud computing and cloud-based services have moved beyond enterprise and are playing a big part in the transformation of virtually every professional services sector—health, financial, education, and yes, even legal services. That said, the 2015 ABA Tech Report Survey still suggests that adoption of cloud services among lawyers remains flat at around 30 percent, although somewhat contradictorily the popularity of consumer cloud services like Google Apps and Dropbox continues to increase.