Keeping Tech Grounded: 3 Barriers to Cloud Adoption in Legal

Ricci Dipshan, Legaltech News

Despite the hype around the cloud's ability to bring efficiencies to legal, two recent surveys found a significant amount of cautious resistance among law firms to the technology.

The "Partnership Perspectives Survey" of 25 AmLaw 200 law firm partners, for example, found that while 56 percent of respondent firms used cloud technology in some capability, less than one-third (28 percent) used it for collaboration purposes, and 64 percent did not leverage it towards its core legal business processes.

Released around the same time, the "2016 ILTA/InsideLegal Technology Purchasing Survey" of 175 ILTA member law firms also found a falling demand in cloud technology, with only 25 percent of firms planning to purchase cloud-based tools over the next year, compared to 33 percent in 2015.

So what is driving legal's hesitancy to move to the cloud? Here's a look at three key factors that are stunting the technology's adoption:

1. Malware Risk

The surveys that found legal's lukewarm support of cloud technologies also found a significant push by law firms to focus on improving their cybersecurity. And herein lies the biggest barrier to cloud adoption—despite the benefits cloud technology can bring, many find the risks posed to data security too high to bet on.

The problem is that the cloud's power to foster collaboration and extend data access is also an inherent weakness through which cyberattackers can more easily spread malware over a network. The situation is especially troublesome with cloud-based applications. The "Netskope September Cloud Report," for example, found that over half (55.9 percent) of cloud-based malware uncovered in enterprise-approved cloud applications were shared either internally among a workforce or externally with clients and customers.

The report also found that almost 44 percent of this malware delivered some form of ransomware, which encrypts files within a network or computer in exchange for a ransom payment.

Jervis Hui, product marketing manager at Netskope, noted that "malware, and ransomware specifically, have been an increasing trend lately. And specifically within the cloud context, [they] can be easily hidden because organizations may not have the visibility and controls in place to detect these threats. And once malware gets into the cloud, a fan-out effect takes place and can infect others through share and sync functions."

2. Data Loss and Mishandling

Allowing more access to data through the cloud means having to oversee how a wider pool of employees manage and handle sensitive information. And like cybersecurity, the risk of failing to properly address this vulnerability can be disastrous, ending in either data loss or a compliance mishaps.

According to Netskope's report, the majority (76.5 percent) of data loss or mishandling happens within cloud storage processes, while around 18 percent happens through webmail. Over half (53.4 percent) of this lost or mishandled data is personally identifiable information (PII), the survey found.

The risk is also not just limited to shadow IT cloud applications—widely used, but unapproved applications—within an office. "On the shadow IT versus enterprise cloud systems side, we've noticed a mixture of both in terms of violations," Hui said. "Employees may not know that they're not allowed to upload [sensitive data] into their sanctioned cloud storage app and cause a compliance violation, or they may share confidential client documents through an unsanctioned app that isn't secure and trigger a violation that way."

Organizations can mitigate this risk, he added, through routinely training their employees on proper data handling methods and having oversight into their data access. "A lot of this has to do with training and security processes. Employees are just trying to get their jobs done and in the most efficient way possible—sometimes this means using apps that are not secure or sanctioned by IT, or sending and sharing sensitive data through a cloud service that may not be secure."

3. Contractual and Technical Limitations

For law firms that can meet the data security challenges associated with cloud technologies, resistance to adopting cloud-based tools may be more a case of contractual and technical limitations. While the ILTA survey found that security was the number one barrier, it also found a significant number of law firms shunned the cloud due to client concerns with the technology (48 percent) or integration challenges (45 percent).

Ari Kaplan, founder of Ari Kaplan Advisors, noted that sometimes resistance to the cloud is "just practical—the opportunity to really embrace it hasn't happened yet."

"It may be that some of the law firms that are not necessarily using the cloud for things like e-discovery or other litigation support related functions, because they have an existing [client or vendor] contracts" preventing them from doing so, he said. "At some point they will consider a new strategy."

Integrating cloud technologies into a workflow and IT infrastructure is also no easy task, and some law firms may be struggling with how to not only start the process, but make sure it sticks. "The challenge is trying to figure out how to get started and then how to move along the continuum to broad adoption," Kaplan added.

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