The technology infrastructure of midsize and large firms has seen dramatic shifts in recent years. The consumerization of IT, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement, and of course the cloud, has revolutionized the way firms practice law and implement technology. The benefit of this shift is that it enables firms like yours to simply do more with less — more productivity, more mobility, more security, more functionality — plus disaster recovery. All of this costs less, requires less hardware, and involves a lot less hassle.

There have been a lot of great posts about the important questions you should be asking your vendor before doing business with them, and here is another. The cloud space is increasingly crowded and new companies are popping up every day – this makes your job as a business owner, attorney, financial advisor, or IT professional very difficult as you sift through the "cloud washing" and fluff to find the vendors who have appropriately invested in the right security, privacy, compliance, and redundancy measures.

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INTRO

"We've been using NetDocuments for over six years and have increased our productivity and collaboration across offices and clients." - Brian Marsh, Information Systems Manager

20 years ago Jim Payne and Dan Fears began their practice as an employment defense firm in California. Today, Payne & Fears has expanded into business litigation, insurance and construction law, with five offices across three states and employing nearly 100 people. Brian Marsh, the Information Systems Manager, led the switch from iManage to NetDocuments over six years ago, here's their story.

In the September/October 2011issue of The Pennsylvania Lawyer, published by the Pennsylvania Bar Association, practicing attorney and technology consultant, Shannon Brown, provides a very thoughtful and informative primer on the "why's and wherefores" of cloud computing. His article offers some important background for attorneys attempting to understand the "alphabet soup" of current cloud computing terminology.

Open Letter to CIOs everywhere:

As you've surely noticed, technology isn't just changing the functions of your employee's jobs, it's blurring the lines of work and life altogether by giving them a choice over how and where they work. We've all seen the stats, for example:

Today, work styles have become as unique as your people and your technology should reflect that. But you have choices, option #1 is to continue with the status quo. Option #2 is to embrace change and leverage the web and new technology to allow employees to be flexible enough to react to their clients needs in the most optimal way possible.

"Everything we do, we do differently than we did 18 months ago. We've reengineered the entire firm to change the client experience," said John Ohmer, CEO of YellowBrickRoad Financial Advisors. "It's made portfolio reporting and financial advising completely different than anything we've ever experienced."

What John and his team did was to go boldly to a place where they had not gone before...that place is called the cloud.

NAPFA National was the first financial services conference we have attended that was not a technology specific conference, so we weren't sure how many advisors would be there looking for technology solutions...turns out, nearly all of them were.

After spending the week talking about the cloud and hearing from the source what financial planners want from their technology to serve their clients, here is some of what we learned:

Investment banking is complex enough, anyone alive in 2008 can attest to that. Now couple that with the difficulty of sharing information in a secure and compliant way across offices and firewalls. That's the situation THiNKGREEN! Global Advisors was looking at before it made its move to the cloud.

"We used to have our own server but that was pretty dicey. It was usually reliable until it wasn't. If that went down, everything went to a standstill...Now we know that all of our documents are always available and safe in NetDocuments. Our whole idea was to be entirely in the cloud to eliminate wasted resources which bodes well with our green tech push." - Asmaa Parker, banking associate.

In the past year, NetDocuments' Partner Program has exploded from a small group of consulting firms to a global network of over 90 Partners worldwide.

Our Partners range in size from single consultants, offering a best-of-breed document management solution, to full-scale firms with multiple offices and hundreds of employees offering the end to end solution of selling, consulting, implementing and deploying the service.