The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

Remember  that old Twilight Zone episode ?  ( It’s a cookbook! )   Well, this time, it’s  not hungry aliens  that are coming for us: it’s your server, and what it really wants is your wallet.   If you haven’t fully adopted cloud software, you’re likely storing your documents and email on a server.  But, there are a lot of associated costs for maintaining physical servers, like: the space they require, their need to be cooled, the electricity they suck up, the requirement to manage your own data backup and the frequent replacement cost.   But, when you are entirely cloud-based, you’re essentially renting server space from another entity (probably Amazon or Google, even if you’re using another vendor), and all those affiliated costs go away.  And, since  the cloud is essentially eternal (at least so far as your lifespan is concerned)  the replacement cost never accrues.  Instead, you pay monthly o r  annual fees for ...

You know what’s really scary?   Losing your law firm data.   Even so, many law firms don’t utilize effective data backups. Every business needs to backup its electronic data; but, the imperative is even more important for law firms, which have ethical and fiduciary duties tied to their client relationships.   And, although it’s now 2018, many law firms subsist on remarkably thin data backup systems.   This is true even though law firm data loss is not an extremely rare or impossible occurrence.   Fires, floods, natural and manmade disasters -- those all still wipe out law firm data.   So, if you’re concentrating on securing your law firm data backup, there’s no time like the present to get a handle on it. This is a three-step method to making sure your data is recoverable: (1) Set up a physical data backup.   It doesn’t really matter what it is (some firms still use backup tapes) -- just have something in place.   (If you’re p...