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Lawyers continue to lag behind in cloud usage, cybersecurity

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: December 3, 2021

The results of the 2021 ABA Techreport are out. As usual, lawyers are far behind the rest of the business world when it comes to adopting technology—in this case, the movement of the rest of the entire worldwide commercial environment to cloud computing.
But then, the law business isn’t like any other part of the business world. The fact that client confidentiality and the necessarily secretive nature of the client-lawyer relationship has to make attorneys look more closely at electronic communications than most other businesses. And, in fact, the survey found that law offices do not undertake the most stringent online security measures—measures that both legal ethics and privacy concerns demand of them.
Or the fogies who make law office tech decisions don’t really know much about the technology. Nah—always err on the side of caution. Right, kids?
So, even with pandemic-caused use of the cloud in Zoom meetings, virtual court hearings, client communications, and the like, 2021 has seen almost no new adoption of cloud technologies by law firms over 2020.
Focusing questions on “web-based cloud services,” which encompass anything that uses a third-party solution for data storage or communication, the survey found that about 60% of law offices use cloud solutions (up from 59% in 2020).
Small and mid-sized firms reported the highest percentage of cloud use at 65%. Large firms are slightly less than that, and solos are at 52%.
A quarter of the lawyers surveyed said that their firms do not use any cloud services, while 15% said they didn’t know. My guess—they probably use some kind of cloud service without knowing what that is. Zoom? Facetime? Facebook Live? Dropbox (used by 62% of lawyers, making it far and away the most-used cloud service in the legal industry)? Those are cloud services. Technically, so is email.
At any rate, the use of virtual meeting spaces is interesting. While there are legal virtual meeting services, the general commercial meeting spaces held sway, including Microsoft Teams (41%), Microsoft 365 (48%), as well as iCloud, Box and Evernote all had a larger percentage of use than dedicated legal cloud space. Notice that Zoom is not listed. Don’t know why.
At any rate, the legal industry is far, far behind the rest of the world in cloud use. You might think that was because of security concerns, but maybe not. Next up is a look at cloud cybersecurity in the law office, and the results are scary.


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