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.
