Perspective: The Legal Ethics of Using the Cloud

Grazed from BNA. Author: Dennis Garcia.

All law firms continue to face a highly competitive marketplace for legal services. Embracing leading technology like cloud computing provides law firms with opportunities to differentiate their firms and better serve their clients as the cloud can help law firms save money, be more collaborative, increase productivity, and enhance the security of client information – assuming a law firm is working with a trusted cloud provider.

However, since cloud solutions can involve entrusting sensitive client data with a third-party cloud provider, concerns may arise regarding the legal ethics associated with a lawyer’s use of the cloud. Fortunately, a growing number of US state legal ethics organizations – more than twenty in total and the latest being Tennessee from last September – have rendered opinions generally clarifying that lawyers can ethically use cloud solutions (or similar technology) so long as they exercise “reasonable care” in protecting their client’s information…

While these opinions are not technically legally binding, they offer important guidance in an area that has little or no case law. Since only a handful of these opinions (e.g., Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) provide some clarity as to what constitutes “reasonable care,” employing these best practices will help enable lawyers to use cloud solutions in a legally ethical manner:..

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