It's that time of year again, kids are getting ready to go back to school, the snow cone stand outside NetDocuments HQ is packed with sales and support staff and the annual ILTA technology conference is about to begin.

This year, the ILTA Conference is being held in Las Vegas and will get underway on August 22nd and run until August 26th. We'll be there all week at booth #809/811. The theme for this year is Strategic Unity and should cover a number of relevant topics such as mobility, cloud computing and more.

Hello techies, look at your hardware...now look at mine. Now back to your hardware. Now back at mine. Now look at your's again. Sadly, it may not be like mine. But if you got rid of your old servers and legacy software and moved to the cloud, it could look like mine. Look down, now look up. Guess what techies? You are in the cloud with the man whose hardware your hardware could be like...welcome. Here in the cloud we do things differently, and so do our friends.

This week I discussed the current trends in UK legal technology with Jason Plant, who is an IT manager at a large UK law firm and also writes a popular legal technology blog titled No Option for Law Firm!.

Q: Thanks for your time and sharing your knowledge with us Jason. First off, what do you see as the most important current trends in legal technology in the UK?

A: I posted on my blog what I thought were the top 5 legal technologies in 2010 at the start of the year. I stand by them although I probably would reorder them a little to give the following as the top three.

Has the world been rid of its cloud computing security concerns?

Probably not...but that day is getting closer. According to a few recent studies in a few technology conservative industries, people and businesses are becoming much more comfortable with storing and managing their data in the cloud.

Even the most technology risk-averse markets such as health care, finance and government are rapidly adopting, and even advocating, disruptive cloud technologies at an ever increasing rate.

Part I: SaaS for Lawyers; Part II: SaaS for Financial Advisors; Part III: SaaS for Accountants

JFK's goal was to send a man to the moon; Bill Gates wanted to put 'information at your fingertips'; and Sun Microsystems claimed that the computer was the network. JFK's dream was realized by Neil Armstrong, Bill Gates's dream has been realized by the iPhone and Blackberry, and Sun Microsystems dream is now truly being realized by anyone with a Facebook, Pandora, or Google account through cloud computing and SaaS.

The NetDocuments legal team is excited about their trip to Los Angeles in June for LegalTech West Coast, which will take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center on June 23rd and 24th.

During the show, the legal team, consisting of Matt Duncan, Keith Schneider and Kirsten Walker, will be hanging out at booth #325 and will be talking SaaS, cloud computing, document management and legal technology all week. Commenting about the event, Matt Duncan said, "LegalTech West Coast 2010 represents a great opportunity for us to meet with many of our existing law firm customers in the region, as well as connect with other firms that are growing increasingly interested in cloud computing and SaaS."

Tomorrow in New York, Microsoft is releasing its latest edition of Office 2010 Web Apps which, in my mind, will mark Microsoft's full acceptance of the SaaS software delivery model. Furthermore, Microsoft's development of web applications for the cash cow that is MS Office, officially shifts the standard from legacy software to SaaS.

In an interview with USA Today, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com said, "We're entering an entirely new paradigm." This new paradigm is one where businesses and consumers alike are no longer bound to physical locations or forced to use complex technology to manage networks and files but freed to move about freely in the clouds. About this paradigm shift, ECM chief executive Joe Tucci said, "We're now going through what I believe is pretty much going to be the biggest wave in the history of information technology.''

OREM, UTAH – March 9, 2010 – NetDocuments, the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) content management service provider announced today that the national law firm Jackson Lewis LLP has selected NetDocuments as its firm-wide document management service. Jackson Lewis is a leading firm dedicated to exclusively representing management in workplace law across the nation.

NetDocuments will be deployed across the firm's 600 attorneys in 45 offices nationwide. NetDocuments' professional services team with the assistance of EncoreTech, a certified NetDocuments Training Partner, have commenced migrating all the firm's documents from each of the 45 offices into a single, global NetDocuments repository accessible to all employees anytime, anywhere. NetDocuments offers the firm a unique advantage to deploy incrementally and capture a faster return on investment and time-to-value effect as compared to traditional document management systems, which are so typically burdened by the hardware, software and setup issues resulting in months to years of exhaustive deployment.

OREM, UTAH – February 8, 2010 – NetDocuments, the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) content management service provider announced today that the national law firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP, with over 400 attorneys, has selected NetDocuments as its new document management service across its twelve offices.

Nelson Mullin's conversion to SaaS-based NetDocuments liberates the firm and its IT team from the need to continue managing and maintaining server hardware and desktop software across its offices, resulting in more focused face time with users. NetDocuments also blends collaboration, and document, email and records management into a single, globally-accessible repository, as well as superior searching from what they had before.

This post was authored by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments sales and marketing group.

The Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and is a vital part of the United States Constitution. As data stored in the cloud continues to proliferate, the debate on how this law relates to the security of this data will become increasingly important.

Recently, a very in depth analysis on this topic was released in the June 2009 edition of the Minnesota Law Review titled, "Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing." The article discusses how the fourth amendment relates to data stored in the cloud. The article was written by David Couillard, who is in his final year at Minnesota Law School.