Is your law firm ready to face a legal case? Can you prove that your clients are not
deliberately concealing anything from the court? Do you have the proper procedures in place to
establish transparency of transaction with your clients?
These are all critical questions that you must be ready
to answer regardless what type of law firm you are. So what should you do to be prepared for the technological
innovations?
Retention Policy
What is your retention policy? Does this have anything to do with your clients? Retention policy basically defines the
practices of your law firm in preserving documents, email messages, and other
transactions that go through your cloud computing servers daily.
It must state the specific timeframe that messages or
documents should be stored. This also
helps to give you flexibility when you have limited storage. How long should your files remain in your cloud
computing servers? At least six years is
the suggested timeframe, but this can vary depending on how your law firm
handles cases.
The Regulations
To make sure that your law firm keeps out of hot water,
the best practice is to be updated on the laws that cover digital storing. This may be local or the contract between you
and cloud computing provider, it does not matter, the important thing is that
you are aware what the law requires from your specific business.
It may sound funny reminding a law firm to be updated on
laws, but, a lot can be missed during the transition to new technology. For example, is your firm prepared to accept technology
innovation in cloud computing? Then you
must abide by the data retention policies of the sensitive data storing standard.
This will help you cope with government regulations as
well as observing pertinent customer privacy laws to keep your firm out of
legal cases.
Reliable Systems
What use would be a perfectly written retention policy or
knowledge of the regulations if you do not have a reliable system to back it
up? Many law firms think that it would
be easier to get by with cheap systems, unfortunately, what they do not
understand is that having reliable systems is a sign of professionalism.
This is because it is beneficial to the everyday
operation of your law firm and allows you to justify in court that you are
taking every precaution to protect your client’s data and keep everything
legitimate.
Reliable systems do not only allow you to stay online
99.9% of the time, it also gives you the ability to immediately get back online
when disaster strikes. Therefore,
disaster recovery strategies are part of reliable systems to deliver business
continuity.
This means that your cloud computing provider should
guarantee you maximum uptimes with a contingency for load balancing as well as
failover scenarios. This is something
that you should see in your Service Level Agreement (SLA).
There is so much more valuable to the ability to minimize
crashes and downtime with cloud computing.
It will give your law firm long-term growth through client retention and
trust. This is something that only a
reliable and efficient cloud computing system can provide.
Personnel Education
Education should cover all of your law employees, not
just those handling IT work. It is
important that everybody understands the consequences of communication in a
digital age. As the leading resource of
your law firm, it is important that they are aware of their legal
responsibilities and the potentials for legal discovery. This includes ensuring emails are easily
located, monitoring of system performance, and reliable backup procedures.
Helping educate your personnel on the requirements of the
law can save your firm from a lot of legal scrutiny and tremendous
headaches. This investment in their
education should not be costly because of the availability of many online
courses should there be no one in your pool of lawyers to educate them on this.
Are your employees aware why you give more protection in
saving documents and communication? This
is equally important because they may find themselves before a judge to
establish whether files are being intentionally protected or not.
Understanding the importance of cloud computing compliance
should be emphasized on all employees of the business. There is no question that there has to be a
lot learned during the transition to new technology.
If you want to be better prepared for the consequences of
a legal battle, one of the best ways is to have a reliable provider to back you
up. NexStep is one of the leaders in the
implementation of management-free technology that makes it easier for law firms
to prepare for technological innovations.
Contact Keycom to get the benefits of cloud computing
for your law practice, you can easily remote computing your law firms anywhere as long as there in internet connections.
