Ride the Lightning

Lawyers Are Clueless About Whether They are Using Cloud Computing

November 9, 2016

As all programmers are fond of saying, "Garbage in, garbage out." So when I read my friend Bob Ambrogi's blog post on November 6^th saying that fewer than 4 out of 10 lawyers use cloud computing, my radar twitched.

Apparently, Bob had the same reaction because he wrote a new blog post on November 8^th saying exactly what I was thinking – less than 4 out of 10? No bloody way.

As Bob noted, he was merely reporting the results from the ABA 2016 Legal Technology Survey Report which indicated that only 38% of lawyers use cloud computing. Like Bob, I agree that the survey accurately reported what respondents told them. The problem is that lawyers have no idea what cloud computing is.

Fairly routinely, we ask audiences when we lecture whether they use cloud computing. Usually, about half will raise their hands. But when we explain what cloud computing is and talk about Gmail, Yahoo and other e-mail services they may use, when we explain what Dropbox and its brethren are (cloud services) and talk about cloud-based case management – Clio, Rocket Matter, My Case, etc. – and a ton of other legal and business service providers that are cloud-based, almost all the hands in the audience shoot up. They simply don't know they are using cloud computing.

This is one reason why it is so important to educate lawyers – they can't protect confidential data in the cloud when they don't even know it is there!

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