Originally published on May 17, 2011 in our free SmallLaw newsletter. Instead of reading SmallLaw here after the fact, sign up now to receive future issues in realtime.
The number of Web (aka cloud computing or SaaS) applications for the legal industry is growing — document assembly, document management, practice management, time and billing, you name it. As you may have seen via the May 2nd issue of BlawgWorld, Luigi Benetton writing for Lawyers Weekly recently provided an excellent roundup of the current products.
At the same time, the multi-day outage of Amazon's Web Services (aka Elastic Cloud computing or EC2) server farm in Northern Virginia caused up to 45% of its clients to lose service for up to several days — some of them legal Web applications. According to Amazon's lengthy and very technical explanation, the outage was caused by a routine network update that malfunctioned. Two elements of the explanation are key: (1) Amazon services are clustered (i.e., a given application may not have its "own" server), and (2) Amazon does not always replicate services across different data centers (in some cases this feature is an extra option).
What's the Upshot for Small Law Firms Like Yours?
If you Google "Amazon outage," you will find entries for 2009, 2010 and 2011. However, on average, although there are no hard statistics, Web applications are likely to provide better uptime, better security, and certainly better backup than most small law offices experience using their own servers running traditional software.
So, yes, these Web services will crash, but so do in-house servers. The weakest link of a cloud solution is more likely to be your Internet connection. The United States ranks only 27th in the world in terms of download speeds, after powerhouses such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania.
If you opt for a Web application, part of basic due diligence should be to find out whether your data will reside on its own server or is part of a cluster, and whether it will be replicated geographically or only within the same server farm. Obviously a dedicated server is better as is geographic replication.
The Future of the Cloud Is Now for Some Small Law Firms
A recent TechnoFeature article by TechnoLawyer publisher Neil Squillante entitled The Looming Battle Between Traditional Legal Software and Web Applications speculated as to the relative future of traditional PC-based applications versus Web applications.
I see the problem from a slightly different perspective than Neil. He is looking at the "big picture." As a consultant, I get the question "What should I do right now?" This question is coming particularly from law firms that are running old versions of various software and are upgrading to Windows 7 and Word 2010. The older versions of their programs were integrated with older versions of these programs, but when Windows and Word are upgraded, the older integrations may no longer work. So upgrading to Windows 7 (especially 64-bit Windows) is likely to require upgrading many other programs, sometimes at substantial expense.
From this perspective, what the future holds may take second place to other considerations, in particular speed (response time of the application) and feature set (whether it will handle the tasks your current software handles). Firms that migrate from desktop applications to Web applications (particularly at the lower end) are likely to be upset by the slowness of the application. So you may wind up paying to upgrade your Internet connection for more bandwidth.
Also, the Web applications may not have the feature set law firms expect. For firms that have performed minimal or no customization of practice management programs such as Amicus Attorney or Time Matters, the lack of features may not be an issue. But firms that have highly customized desktop applications may find that the Web applications do not meet their needs. However, many of the companies behind these Web applications are adding features rapidly. Make a careful review of exactly what features of your current program you actually use, and then see if they are available from a prospective Web application.
Your Options and the Timing of Your Choice
Your choice at this particular point in time boils down to the following:
1. Should I spend money to upgrade all my hardware and desktop programs, and keep all my data onsite?
2. Or should I switch to a Web application knowing that it is likely to be slower and less feature-rich than what I have know, but that it represents the "wave of the future"?
SaaS vendors like to advertise that their Web applications will save you money. I seriously doubt these claims are true (as Neil noted in his article, no one has published a definitive study of these claims). Using these products is like leasing a car. It is likely to cost you more than just purchasing, but on the other hand you benefit from less investment up front, the security of fixed monthly payments, and fewer surprises down the road.
For a while now, I have recommended to law firms "Keep what you have if you are not unhappy with it, and see what the future brings in 2-3 years." However, not only is this timeframe collapsing, but the split seems to be approaching 50-50 for small firms making the above choice.
Written by John Heckman of Heckman Consulting.
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