Doing more with less is a mantra for many businesses—and in-house legal teams are no exception.

But new technologies are helping corporate legal teams meet the challenge, and cloud-based software is one of the leading tools.

Cloud usage among lawyers grew 40 percent from 2016 to 2017, indicates the American Bar Association Techreport 2017, with 52 percent of firms reporting some use.

The key cloud computing benefits remain constant, the survey notes, including that lawyers and law firms see the cloud as a fast and scalable way to use legal tech without having to spend big bucks upfront in new hardware, software and support.

Instead, cloud services are typically paid for by subscriptions or, increasingly, through pay-as-you-go “consumption” pricing, which enables buyers to pay only for what they use.

Big Gains in Discovery

But it will be in the arena of discovery that in-house legal teams will get the most benefit from cloud-based solutions.

That's because discovery is often the most expensive part of legal proceedings. A full 42 percent of chief legal officers say managing costs of e-discovery or keeping within budget is their biggest e-discovery challenge, a recent survey indicates. The next biggest challenge: handling ever-increasing volumes of data.

With cloud-based discovery, in-house legal teams will have:

• More insight into data. For many companies, requests for document production involve a patchwork of methods, including having employees forward responsive emails and other documents to in-house legal, copying that data to a physical USB drive and shipping it off to outside counsel. This is a manual, time-consuming process. In addition, the piecemeal collection—requiring coordination between IT, employees, vendors and lawyers—also keeps the corporate legal team guessing as to what data the company has and what it might be missing.

With cloud discovery solutions, data is uploaded to a central repository, giving in-house legal full visibility into what's there and what might be missing. What's more, employees don't have to search their files. With browser-based platforms and drag-and-drop uploads, IT teams can collect bulky employee files with reams of email off company servers and automatically upload them.

With greater visibility into incoming data, in-house legal teams will have a better handle on early case assessment and issues likely to arise in each case.

• Ability to cull useless data. One reason discovery is so expensive is that too much data is often pulled into a case. Without tools to quickly cull useless data, in-house teams end up punting too much material to outside attorneys for review. This drives up costs and leaves companies reliant on outside counsel to assess data prior to culling. With a cloud-based, central repository for data—and state-of-the-art tools to quickly identify relevant documents or privileged data—in-house teams can reduce the amount of data that needs closer review. This process of sorting the wheat from the chaff prior to sending to outside teams can dramatically reduce downstream review costs.

• More predictable costs. Instead of sending files to outside counsel, companies can invite lawyers into cloud-based discovery databases. That way, in-house teams will be better informed as to what outside partners are doing and what the costs will be.

• Ability to do more work themselves. With easy-to-use tools, in-house teams may do more of their own discovery, reducing outside fees.

• Reduced security risk. Cloud technologies always raise security concerns. Through 2020, public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) workloads will suffer at least 60 percent fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers, estimates market researcher Gartner.

For corporate legal teams, use of cloud-based repositories for data will reduce, if not eliminate, the need to make physical copies of data and then to ship that data to others. Small in-house legal teams also often lack the bandwidth to assist and supervise data collection, leaving it largely to employees and others who might be unfamiliar with best practices. Ad hoc methods of gathering documents increases the risks that metadata—the data about the data—will be altered and that chain-of-custody will be compromised.

Secure cloud-based platforms enable administrators to add employee custodians as needed so that legal can direct collections with tighter control. For instance, in-house legal teams may be able to invite those in possession of data to upload files into a web-based app—or have IT do it. As such, the legal team can track, supervise and guide collections in real time, reducing risk.

Innovation in Legal

More in-house legal teams will look to new technologies to improve service and reduce costs. As noted by the Bloomberg study, sheer volumes of data are becoming a challenge. That will drive some to change. In the past, an employee investigation might require review of that employee's email and hard drive. Now, that employee may well have data spread across email, Slack, Facebook, Dropbox and elsewhere. Such data explosions are occurring all over the place.

New innovations will drive digitization in legal, too. Nearly 850 companies now develop and sell technology for the legal market, according to Stanford Law School's LegalTech Index. Of those, almost 40 are working in e-discovery on everything from artificial intelligence to metadata management to making on-screen reading easier and faster. In-house legal teams who seek a competitive edge will be early adopters of such innovative tech.

Andy Wilson is chief executive officer and co-founder at Logikcull.com, which he launched in 2004 with CTO and co-founder Sheng Yang. He is the visionary behind Logikcull's product and marketing strategy, which focuses on simplifying and democratizing the processes associated with revealing what's in data to three simple steps: upload > search > download. He earned his bachelor's degree in business information technology from Virginia Tech.