Who knows better than lawyers that there's always a catch? A new survey produced by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) and the law firm of Fish & Richardson indicated that while organizations are generally amenable to legal service providers such as law firms storing their information in the cloud, most expect for their permission to be obtained first.

The survey is comprised of 76 responses from law firms, Fortune 500 companies and financial institutions. When asked if their organization allowed data to be stored in the cloud by a legal service provider, 82% of respondents—excluding law firms—said 'yes.' But 77% of that same demographic also said that they require notification first.

This could pose both a challenge and an opportunity to law firms, who may have to think long and hard about the most efficient method of obtaining that permission and how to best educate clients on the virtues of the cloud. Beau Mersereau, chief legal technology solutions officer at Fish & Richardson, highlighted the risk that firms take.

"I think that there's some reluctance there to asking for permission, because if the wrong clients say 'no' then you are effectively doubling your storage costs by having to maintain systems on prem[ises] and systems in the cloud," Mersereau said.

There's a chance that many law firms have not yet broached the problem. Last August, Fish & Richardson partnered with the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) on another cloud usage survey featuring 102 respondents, including members of the Am Law 100 and Global 100.  While 78% of all law firm respondents said they were storing client data in the cloud, the majority of that group also indicated they were not asking client permission first.

But the CLOC survey notes that many firm organizations would require some sort of notification—so where is the disconnect occurring? It's possible that some firms are still attempting to find the most efficient methodology for retrieving client permissions to go to the cloud, a process that could wind up taking some twists and turns.

"Some of these mega firms have thousands and thousands of clients that, if they don't respond, what do you do?," Mersereau said

Jason Barnwell, assistant general counsel at Microsoft and a CLOC board member, posited that legal professionals will always opt for permission if given the choice, but in practice might prefer a less cumbersome arrangement.

"You end up being burdened with these choices that you probably don't want to stop the world to wait for your response. … Maybe there is actually a more risk-adjusted approach to this," Barnwell said.

He suggested that rather than organizations requiring permission as sort of a general rule, that they instead ask law firms to keep them informed "when there's some truly interesting here," that they should know about.

For now, organizations appear split on how they want legal service providers to go about seeking their permission to put data into the cloud. Among CLOC survey respondents, the majority (56%) thought legal service providers should ask for permission by sending an engagement letter amendment. "Other" was the second most popular choice at 19%.

But no matter how firms ask permission to move clients' data to the cloud, there may always be the risk of getting a 'no' in response. Per Barnwell, attempting to maintain a hybrid approach—storing some client data in the cloud and some on-site—can wind up being costly for all involved.

"When you are pushing firms into that hybrid scenario, you're putting more cost on them that ultimately has to be born by the clients. Again, I'm not sure that people ultimately understand the trade-offs of what they are asking for," Barnwell said.

It may be up to firms to plug any knowledge gaps that do exist as they go about the process of seeking permissions related to the cloud, including emphasizing any potential benefits that may exist from a security or operations standpoint. Fish & Richardson, for example, is building cloud-specific machine learning models to drive insights around litigation pricing and automatically classify and route documents and information as it comes into the firm. Even if some clients are hesitant about the cloud, efficiency has a broad appeal.

"You can't have good machine learning models unless you have good data, and we need to be able to take the data that we have and be able to filter and clean it up. The fastest way to do that is in the cloud," Mersereau said.