Law firm Fish & Richardson released a new cloud usage survey this week and one major takeaway is that law firms appear to have gotten over any initial hesitation that may have been preventing them from utilizing cloud storage services. However, not everyone feels as strongly about giving clients a heads up first.

The survey was assembled in cooperation with the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) and based on 102 responses from chief information officers at ILTA Global 100 law firms, some of whom are also Am Law 100 members. According to responses, 78% of law firms surveyed are storing client data in the cloud, with another 8% planning to head in that direction.

So what’s driving law firms from the comfort of their own on-site storage? Beau Mersereau, director of legal technology solutions at Fish & Richardson, framed the decision in terms of dollars and cents—and he doesn’t expect the migration to stop any time soon.

“One of the things I think that law firms are looking at is just trying to reduce IT costs. So many systems are very complex and they also use a lot of compute resources and storage resources, and sometimes it’s better to let someone else manage that for you,” he said.

The need for such IT systems at law firms isn’t ending any time soon. Electronic documents are the lifeblood of most law firms, and Mersereau noted that many law firms are becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of email they are storing.

Those issues are reflected in the survey’s breakdown of the types of cloud services that law firms are gravitating toward. Mimecast, a cloud-based email security and compliance platform, was at the top of the list, being used by 46 of the firms surveyed. It was followed by e-discovery services (41 firms) and email management solution Office 365 Exchange (32 firms).

“Mimecast is really popular from the perspective of spam filtering and then also disaster recovery for your email system. If your internal system or your cloud provider goes down, at least you have another place, at least from your client’s perspective, email is still working for you,” Mersereau said.

Storing client data in the cloud can be slightly more complicated. When asked whether or not they receive permission first before sending client information up into the cloud, 68% of all law firms surveyed answered in the negative. The results were split right down the middle once the sample was reduced to the 22 law firms that qualified as both Am Law 100 and ILTA Global 100, with 11 asking for permission while 11 did not.

For now, the preferred approach may hinge more on the nature of the client than a blanket firm policy.

“There are a lot of law firms that do business with the large financial services organizations out there, and historically those organizations are very conservative when it comes to storing their data in the cloud,” Mersereau said.

Some have even put that hesitation into writing with outside counsel guidelines dictating how client data is to be handled. Among the respondents that were both Am Law 100 and ILTA Global firms, 73% said that they audited those guidelines to ensure compliance, 23% did not and 4% audited “where applicable.”

Even if clients are not initially on board with the idea of the cloud, it may ultimately be like pushing against gravity. The cloud has become more than just a storage facility, offering analytics or machine learning capabilities that Mersereau thinks may exceed services that law firms can provide on-site.

“If you’re telling your law firm to be innovative and not allowing them to use the cloud, that’s a problem in my opinion,” he said.