USA: COVID-19 does not increase cloud usage among lawyers

An interesting article on law.com recently addressed the question of whether the pandemic has led to increased use of cloud technology among lawers. A survey by the American Bar Association of several hundred members from law firms of all sizes paints rather the opposite picture. A fairly stable 40% of American lawyers continued to reject cloud technology.

The reasons given are not new. On the one hand, there is the cost risk involved in a transition from on-premise to cloud during the changeover phase.  More important, however, are security concerns. These can be roughly divided into two categories. One set of concerns is factually based. The fear that cloud providers could install spy software under pressure from public authorities and thus gain access to confidential information is usually cited. These reservations probably cannot be definitively dispelled for the USA.

It is more difficult to deal with dogma, such as the following. "Data storage in the cloud carries a higher security risk than on premise." Once you internalize this, it will be hard to convince you otherwise. So ultimately, it will be the clients who motivate their advocates to use contemporary technology. Or everything will remain as it is.

Parallels to current discussions are coincidental, but not necessarily wrong.

Digitization of the judiciary?

The highly esteemed Markus Hartung quotes the German Federal Bar Association on Twitter: "BRAK has already made a decisive contribution to this process [i.e. to the digitization] by setting up and operating the (... beA)". He leaves the quote uncommented - but I would like to take it up briefly:

In wide legal circles, the opinion still prevails that the use of word processing and e-mail as well as the use of legal databases is already "the" digitization. If one assumes this, the establishment and operation of a secure document transmission system is undoubtedly a step forward. But it is also only a beginning.

A further digitization of court proceedings will inevitably affect established principles. The immediacy of proceedings, for example, the decision by judges as persons at every stage of the proceedings, the performance-based remuneration of lawyers, and - yes, even the new idol called data protection. None of this will happen today or tomorrow, and of course it will require constitutional amendments - but digitization is more than just remote access to files, even if much has already been gained with the latter.