Data's role in the economy can hardly be overstated—it's been called “the new oil” by a number of different industry experts over the last decade. But while data is increasingly easy and valuable to collect, storing and securing it can be a whole other ball game.

Bryan Cave has announced the offering of its data center legal service. Drawing upon its private equity real estate and mergers and acquisition practices, the firm will advise organizations on legal issues surrounding the physical locations of their data. The new service will operate under Bryan Cave's data center and cloud infrastructure team, which is staffed by about 40 attorneys.

Jim Grice, partner at Bryan Cave and leader of the firm's data center and cloud infrastructure team, explained that the firm is hoping to position itself to help organizations deal with some of these considerations in a moment of particular transition for data storage technology. While best practices of a decade ago dictated that organizations should keep data on internal data servers, increasingly organizations are moving important data into the cloud, or hosting data on external servers leased or rented elsewhere.