Hogan Lovells offices at 555 13th Street, NW in Washington, D.C. Oct. 25, 2016.

 

Cloud adoption has been a slow-brewing trend in the legal sector over the last few years, but a recent announcement that Hogan Lovells, the fourth-largest firm in the United States based on the National Law Journal's 2017 rankings, has opted to adopt a cloud-based document management system may indicate that legal is moving more definitively into the cloud.

Hogan Lovells recently announced that the firm plans to use cloud-based system NetDocuments as its primary document management system. Prior to the adoption, the firm was using two competing systems, iManage and OpenText, left over from the firm's merger of Washington D.C.-based Hogan & Hartson and U.K. firm Lovells in 2010.

Hogan Lovells deputy global chief information officer Gareth Ash explained the firm's cloud-based adoption was somewhat incidental to its decision.

“We did not decide to look for a cloud-based solution, rather a solution that would meet the needs of our business and the requirements of our lawyers, such as functionality, security and technical architecture,” Ash told Legaltech News. “The answer just happened to be cloud-based.”

Law firms have long floated concerns about data security around cloud systems. The 2016 Cloud Security Spotlight Report found that 53 percent of respondents were concerned about the security of their data, despite only 9 percent reporting actual cloud-based data security incidents. These concerns, coupled with the additive stresses firms are under to scale up their cybersecurity efforts and protect client data, have made it somewhat tricky for firms to take on large-scale cloud infrastructure adoptions.

Over the last few years, public education and information about cloud systems has changed those opinions dramatically, especially for larger firms. The International Legal Technology Association's 2017 Tech Survey found that 77 percent of firms with more than 700 attorneys planned to increase their cloud infrastructure in the next year.

To date, however, cloud adoption is more a general posture than a regular practice. The ILTA's 2017 Tech Survey also found that only 14 percent of firms use cloud-based document management.

Ash noted that data security was a “significant component” of the firm's decision to move to a cloud-based provider, as was the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set to go into effect in May.

“GDPR was certainly a factor in our assessment. The project is also not due to go live for some time after GDPR comes into effect, so we will also have time to see the implications of GDPR and make adjustments to our configuration and processes accordingly,” Ash said.

For a firm the size of Hogan Lovells, moving into the cloud isn't just a simple matter of exporting data from one document manager and importing into another. The firm has to get the system up and running for over 7,000 different employees across 49 global offices.

“We are in the very early stages of the project, and the rollout will be a key work-stream where we will inevitably trial different approaches in collaboration with our attorneys and users,” Ash said of the firm's strategy for adoption.

Generally speaking, the firm sees NetDocuments, like any operational technology, less as an experiment in innovation and more as a functional tool. “We started with our requirements and what solution could satisfy them. The NetDocuments architecture allows us to meet those requirements,” he said.