“Cloud computing is merely a fancy way of saying stuff’s not on your computer.” Quinn Norton, “Byte Rights,” Maximum PC, September 2010
While so far halting, the legal profession’s migration to “cloud-based” platforms and services is inevitable. Cloud-based e-discovery platforms have been available for a decade, and a number of vendors provide cloud-based case management platforms. But for lawyers and IT managers, the prospect of migrating existing data to the cloud wholesale is stomach-churning. In addition to concerns about data security and durability some rational and some not the costs of such a migration are substantial, much of a firm’s existing IT infrastructure will be scrapped and in-house IT jobs will likely evaporate.
