Cloud service providers still haven't made the legal industry a true believer in the cloud's cost-efficiencies just yet, according to the results of the 2019 LTN Law Firm Tech Survey. 

While lawyers are beginning to embrace the cloud, 58% of firms polled in the survey, which gauges top U.S. law firms' technology opinions and usage, said their biggest cloud challenge is the cloud's cost savings not being great enough.

Miles & Stockbridge IT chief information officer Kenneth Adams said his firm has used the cloud for roughly five years, and praised the cloud's efficiency and cost-effectiveness, but he still hasn't seen similar cost savings from a cloud-based email platform yet. "We still have an in-house email [system] because the cost isn't worth it going to Office 365 for email. It's so cost-prohibitive," he said.

To be sure, different cloud platforms will elicit different levels of savings. Law firms and legal tech consultants said determining which legal tech platform is most cost-effective to move to the cloud includes evaluating how frequently the platform will be used and if the provider's pricing model is appropriate to their usage.

Volpe and Koenig shareholder Robert Leonard said his firm examined and decided to migrate its document management and docketing system to the cloud, but not other on-premises technology because those platforms provided features and pricing that made it worth it. 

"It's sort of like a capital expenditure analysis," he explained. "Moving to the cloud, it's a subscription, monthly or yearly payment model per user versus if you build your own server or maintain your own server yourself, then you have a large upfront cost. But then you have in some instances less subscription-based cost. It's not 100% cut-and-dried."

HBR Consulting technology executive Matt Coatney said law firms that constantly use an on-premises software usually decide not to switch to a cloud-based alternative because then they're faced with a  per-data usage pricing model. Instead, more firms are most likely to leverage the cloud for backup storage because it doesn't incur computational costs, he said.

However, legal technology consultant and Dennis Kennedy Advisory Services president Dennis Kennedy argued law firms aren't accurately measuring the direct and indirect expenses of the cloud.

"What I found is that people don't consider all the costs or they don't factor in the inconveniences and problems," Kennedy said. "They either don't give it a cost or they don't look at the savings they get in the whole context."

He added, "If you don't assess a cost or value on peoples' time, employee time and convenience, I think that skews your calculations. And also, one of the big benefits of cloud tools is to capture data and analyze data, and I don't think legacy software allows you the same opportunity to look at data for efficiencies and patterns."

As cloud computing platforms multiply, cloud service providers, including Microsoft, are actively pushing clients such as law firms to their cloud-based products. However, Coatney and Leonard both acknowledged law firms will wait to see how other firms adapt before following.

"Software companies are definitely moving to cloud-based solutions but we are not necessarily early adopters, we don't want to be the guinea pig with our clients' data and risking our ability to provide services," Leonard said. "We go for the tried and true, so no, we don't feel pressured to adopt software that only exists on the cloud."