TECHNOLOGY PROPERTY Getting Your Firm Ready to Move to the Cloud: Lessons Learned from Migrations Over the past five years, I have helped hundreds of law firms and thousands of lawyers successfully move to the Cloud. They have been able to retire much of their expensive physical infrastructure (file servers, DMS servers, database servers, email servers, and tape backups) and lower their maintenance costs. They have moved their documents and data to services hosted in the Cloud, accessible on any device over the internet. In so doing, they have gained access to enterpriselevel service and enterprise-level security. Software as a service (SAAS) has democratized the provision of high-quality legal software by sharing the costs of software development and maintenance across tens of thousands of users, making these services affordable for all. SAAS vendors focus on the benefits of their offerings and the ongoing costsavings, which are real. They often gloss over or underestimate the costs to your firm of migrating to their SAAS platform. In this article, I will share some lessons learned from helping law firms migrate to the Cloud. Some of these suggestions will lower the cost of the migration, and others will increase user satisfaction after the migration. What Should You Migrate to the Cloud? My most successful migrations involved firms who knew what they wanted to migrate to the Cloud, where they wanted to put it, and what they wanted to leave in place. Often, the hardest decision in moving to the Cloud is deciding what not to move to the Cloud. Technology—Property Editor: Seth Rowland (www.linkedin.com/in/ sethrowland) has been building document workflow automation solutions since 1996 and is an associate member of 3545 Consulting® (3545consulting.com).
Technology—Property provides information on current technology and microcomputer software of interest in the real property area. The editors of Probate & Property welcome information and suggestions from readers. You can migrate everything to the Cloud. Hosted network offerings allow you to simply upload your entire infrastructure to a data center—lock, stock, and barrel. Users will then use a remote access client like Citrix, Amazon Workspaces, or Azure Virtual Desktop to connect to their desktops. These solutions allow you to work in a cloud desktop window and do everything you can in your current localhosted network. Such solutions tend to be expensive and limited to the client-server software you use. You also pay for cloud storage of everything, even the things you never use. Furthermore, most virtual network solutions limit the devices you can use to access your data to your desktop or laptop computer. Though you may be able to view your desktop from an iPad, cellphone, or tablet, you would never want to work on your virtual desktop from such a device. Moreover, these solutions allow you to continue to use legacy software, which often has limited support or an end-of-life expiration date, rather than migrating to legal SAAS software. Migrating Your Work Product Documents. Some firms have started their journey to the Cloud by moving their documents to the Cloud. Although adopting DropBox and Box.com as a solution is tempting, there are access, security, and management reasons to look for more robust document management solutions (DMS).
If you plan to move to a DMS solution or already have an on-premises DMS solution, your firm should decide what documents should be moved. I recommend limiting the documents to attorney work product and client communications. Cloud DMS systems cost more for document storage than simple storage; the management part, which includes indexing, search, robust and granular security, and user management policies not available in mere cloud storage, adds expense to the service. Because of these costs, bringing over documents from cases closed a decade ago may not make economic sense. Your firm needs to decide in advance whether to limit the documents to be migrated and, if so, what to do with documents that are not to be migrated. Migrating Your Special Use Programs, Discovery, and Document Production. Not all documents are equal. A two-hour video is a document, but you may not need the DMS overhead to search the video because it is not a work product that will be edited. Similarly, a 100 MB .pst file (of Outlook emails) could be stored in a DMS, but it is more useful when reviewed from a Litigation Support System (LSS). There are cloud-based LSS systems like Lexbe, NextPoint, and Disco, where you can upload email files and run effective searches for document review and production. Putting those files in a cloud DMS or an unsecured file-share program is not the best way to use these files. Moreover, there are depositions, medical records, police videotapes, etc., that can take up terabytes of space on your network file server that should not be moved into a cloud-based DMS. In preparing for a migration, know what you are storing on your network and decide where you want it to go. Migrating Your Billing System. There are many reasons to migrate your billing system. The main reason is mobility. Lawyers and staff no longer work from a single location; they are on the move. They also work on various devices, including desktops,
Published in Probate & Property, Volume 37, No 6 © 2023 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.
November/December 2023 55
