Cloud at a tipping point

Microsoft has at last put its shoulder behind the cloud computing movement with the recent betarelease of Office365. It joins the heavyweight Google in this fast growing market. Cloudcomputing is here to stay. In this article we put forward three compelling reasons why law firmsshould be taking the cloud seriously: saving money, improving collaboration and the emergenceof cloud enterprise applications specific to the legal market.

Despite these compelling reasons, law firms are still nervous about going cloud. Concernsabout compliance, security and integration are barriers to adoption. However, providers such asGoogle are actively targeting these issues and the barriers are slowly coming down, pointing toa pending IT revolution, poised at the tipping point.

Reason #1: save money while improving emailEmail is without doubt an essential business tool, encompassing email messaging, calendaringand personal contact management. Providing a fast, accessible, safe and user friendly emailservice is arguably the most important task of any law firm’s IT department. This is not as easilydone as it might seem; lots of time, money and sleep is lost by CIO’s delivering a seamlessemail experience to their users. Let’s look at two very different approaches to providing thisservice, through two fictional case studies - TradFirm and Cloudy & Partners.

TradFirm’s sprawling email ecosystemTradFirm established itself in the early 00s and now has 30 partners and 60 support staff,across two cities. TradFirm is typical of many law firms when it comes to email, using on-siteservers which it keeps in a data room at their head office. Over the years, TradFirm’s IT teamhas diligently added new services and infrastructure to support them, with full funding from thepartnership.● The email server machines are replaced every three years; they need to be, with the

increasing amount of data and traffic they need to manage. In addition to hardwareupgrades, the server software is upgraded too, itself a significant project.

● Each computer has Outlook installed, which employees use for managing email. They’reusing Outlook 2003 and are planning to upgrade to 2010 but have not managed to do thisyet.

● For remote access, IT provides Web Access (hosted on another server) and access viaVPN; but users must use the company laptop - other PCs are not supported.

● The amount of data they manage for email is best kept on a Storage Area Network. Thisis a large storage device which provides the best level of performance and redundancy.They are expensive and require specialist skills to maintain.

● As 90% of email traffic is junk, they subscribe to a spam filter service which removessuspect email. This is an annual subscription, paid on a per user basis.

● Senior lawyers have started to use their own smartphones and iPads, demanding the

ability to use them to access their corporate data; forcing IT to install a separate server toprovide this.

● In the event of a disaster - fire, flood, etc - email data is backed up each night (by aseparate backup server) and stored elsewhere by a specialist storage company, whichcomes each day to collect tapes. There is a monthly fee for this service, plus they payrental space for a special remote site which can be activated in the event of a disaster.

● As well as disaster recovery, they also have strict SLA’s agreed with the partnership.Email must be available for 98% of the time month by month. IT met the challenge by“clustering”, which means providing two servers instead of one. If one dies, the othertakes over. This doubles the number of servers IT manages to provide email.

TradFirm’s IT department maintain a lot of hardware in the background to support email (Image © Google, Inc)

As well as the specialist software, each server has an operating system which must bemaintained - regular software updates (or patching) takes a considerable amount of time eachmonth and causes frequent service disruption, scheduled for out of business hours.Despite the complexity, the email service performs excellently and is well maintained but likeother similar sized organisations it costs hundreds of dollars per user to deliver it.

Cloudy & Partners aim to shake the marketLate last year, 25 partners from various law firms defected from where they were and startedtheir own practice, Cloudy & Partners. They’re based across 5 cities with support of 30permanent staff. They chose to outsource some business processes such as recruitment andbookkeeping. Cloudy & Partners considers itself a “disruptive” law firm aiming to provide fixedprice or lower-cost legal services to clients. A strategic focus is to drive value from all theirnon-billing departments to keep their overheads down.

The IT Manager looked at providing an email service in the same way as TradFirm but herbudget was simply not big enough. Realising the firm needed to investigate other options, she

eventually chose to Go Google.

Google provides an email service via ‘the cloud’ as part of the Google Apps suite. For a fixedfee per user per year ($50 USD), Cloudy & Partner’s corporate emails are stored on Google’sservers and accessed over the Internet (or via Outlook).● They were able to import data the partners brought with them - a collection of Outlook

PSTs, Lotus Notes email files, contact lists and documents.● The IT team does not need to manage any email infrastructure - no backups, no spam

filters, no clustering, no storage and no mobile servers - all of these email ‘add-ons’ areincluded.

● Users can access their corporate data using an internet browser (such as InternetExplorer, Chrome and Firefox) from the office, at home, or on secondment at a client. NoVPN is required, just a connection online.

● The firm can enable a “bring your own technology” policy - any mobile device, PC orMac, are all supported

Reason #2: new, better ways to collaborate

Attachments = copies, extra work and wasted timeLindsey works in Business Development at TradFirm and has been tasked with creating aproposal for a valued client. She puts together the first draft and sends it to the two partnerswho manage the client relationship, as well as two support staff. They get the document as anattachment and are asked to provide comment. Three of the four make edits and send it back.

Lindsey has to combine the three edits in Word - not an easy task. On sending the revisedversion 2 of the proposal, the partner who failed to reply to the first email has questions about thedifferences between the two versions and Lindsey feels frustrated at having to firstly combinethe edits and now having to check many versions to find out which revision happened when andby whom.

Work on the document together, not your own copy of itMeanwhile, over at Cloudy & Partners, they need to quickly create job descriptions for a bunchof paralegals they are urgently recruiting to work on a large litigation case. The matter partner’sPA, Alison, creates a draft job description using Google Docs. When she has finished, sheshares it with the partner.

After editing, the partner shares the document further - opening it to the billing solicitor and thehead of litigation support. Each of these make edits, even at the same time (see thescreenshot).

Markers show where other people are editing the document, in real time.

While everyone is editing this, Alison is briefing Jeff, the recruiter at the external recruitmentcompany. As soon as the document is finished, Alison can share the job description with himeven though he is not Cloudy & Partners employee. Jeff is also able to view the completedocument history to see who changed what and when, giving him an idea of the evolution of thekey skills he should be looking for when interviewing candidates.

Alison also sets up a Google spreadsheet, sharing with Jeff and the group. This is where they’llkeep track of applicants and their relative statuses. They use one spreadsheet, centrally storedin the cloud, securely shared inside and outside of Cloudy & Partners and which everyone canupdate as the recruitment process happens.

Even more collaboration apps included with the cloud

The IT department at Cloudy & Partners has a suite of applications which they can call upon totackle problems that their lawyers bring to them:

● “We need to communicate better when working from home and with colleaguesinterstate” - instant messaging, voice and video chat, through Google Talk

● “The client wants a central store of matter information where we can upload documents,share a calendar and create task lists” - create a website easily using Google Sites

● “Where can I store these CLE training videos?” - try Google Video for Business● “We’re thinking of opening an office in Singapore. What will the cost be to provide email

and how quick can you set it up?” - the cost of computers plus $50 USD per user, peryear; if we really tried, this can be set up in one day.

For TradFirm to tackle the same issues, they will undoubtedly need to buy more hardwareand/or software, embark on a full IT project, or outsource just that particular slice of functionalityto a third party; certainly costing more than $50 USD per user.

Reason #3: A growing enterprise app store

Google enables software companies to create their own applications which interact with Cloudy& Partners’ data. Clio andRocket Matter are two examples of this, specifically targeted at theLegal sector - practice management software which hooks into corporate data stored withGoogle.

Clio: one of the best practice management solutions taking the US by storm.

There are highly effective CRM, finance and HR applications available too, all provided on thesame cost basis - an annual user fee - with no hardware or data on site for the Cloudy &Partners IT team to manage.

As more and more businesses Go Google (over 3,000 sign up each day), software providerswill be increasingly attracted to develop for the platform, meaning firms will be able to findsoftware which fits their needs closely.

Barriers to law firm cloud adoption

TradFirm, whilst recognising the benefits of cloud, chooses to remain firmly on premises, citingthese issues:

● Existing system integration - TradFirm uses a document management system, voicemaildelivery in email and digital dictation software - all of which interact with Outlook andsend/receive/store email. Integrating these with a cloud provider like Google would be anexpensive task in terms of change management and dollars.

● Security concerns - How safe is our data, who owns it and how can we be certain thatnobody else can access our intellectual property?

● Loss of control - If TradFirm’s email servers start performing badly or drop out of service,there is something that they can do about it, instantly. With the cloud model, you are atthe whim of the provider with the only respite being to log service calls.

● Australian Privacy Law. Recent changes mean that all Australian organisationstransferring personal information overseas must ensure that this information is given thesame protection as that provided under Australia’s privacy framework. TradFirm doesnot want to risk being held liable for a cloud provider’s negligence or incompetence,should data be compromised in an offshore data centre.

Are these barriers enough to stem the tide?

Google provides answers to the security and data ownership concerns, which are outlined onthis blog post. Google operates a 99.9% SLA, with severe financial penalties for them shouldthey miss this target - 2009 and 2010 uptime was 99.91% and 99.98% respectively.Performance problems have not surfaced despite over 3 million businesses using the service fortheir corporate email.

Google Apps and now Office365 are changing the IT industry. Just as you don’t keep a watertank in your garage for that moment when you need a bath, why should your firm maintainprocessing and storage capacity for 2,000 users when you only need to serve 150? IT servicesare becoming a utility, just like water. Turn the tap, there’s your email account.

The barriers to moving cloud reflect nervousness, rather than fact - ‘what if’ rather than‘because’. We’re all waiting for one or two more high profile case studies before we follow.Firms that go first will realise savings year upon year of more than 40% on the cost of providingemail. They would also improve collaboration within the firm and between their clients andsuppliers - strengthening relationships. Are you ready to fly to the cloud?

About the author

Tony Brooks is a Google Apps Deployment Specialist, with over 8 years Legal technology experience. He is the owner of Feynbrook, a company offering cloud and data integration consulting services for law firms, businesses and nonprofits.

Further reading

Bradford & Barthel Press Release, ILTA Innovation Award 2010 for Google Apps deployment -link Socialmind blog post - “Cloud storage and privacy - the dark side of the silver lining” - link“Google Apps & Microsoft Exchange 2007 - Total Cost of Ownership Analysis (Radicati Group,Inc) - linkHow Google Apps improves productivity - “Measuring the Total Economic Impact of GoogleApps”, Forrester - linkGoogle Enterprise Blog - Getting Gmail to 99.99% - link