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.

This past week saw a wide variety of news, blogs and videos regarding SaaS content management and cloud computing all over the web. In this blog, we will highlight a few of them.

In August, during Ilta '09, A group from ii3 consultants produced live Ilta TV broadcasts of conference events and interviews. They have now posted the recordings of the broadcasts online and made them free to the public. One of the segments was called, "Software as a Service for Law Firms," and featured Tim Hooks of Chester, Willcox & Saxbe, LLP, as well as David Clark of Jones and Waldo. They discussed emerging SaaS technologies, and how SaaS solutions have helped their firms by reducing IT costs, and enabling their lawyers to practice law more efficiently.

Guest writer: Keith Schneider, Sr. Account Manager at NetDocuments

"Back from New Orleans after attending the annual Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) national meeting. Although the attendance was off by 35% from last year's we still received good attention at the NetDocuments booth. Because of the economic times the annual meeting was less of a "boondoggle", for those administrators who attended, and more of an educational trip than years past.

I recently read an article on how CIOs of SMBs can cut 50-80 percent of their communication costs, e.g. messaging, phone services, etc., by by moving to an Anywhere IT environment. The article can be found at http://finance.yahoo.com/news/CIOs-Can-Cut-50-to-80-Percent-bw-14715708.html

Using Yankee Group as a model SMB, CTO Jeffrey Breen and Vice President Steve Hilton uncovered more than $150,000 of annual savings opportunities. The new series of reports, "CIO's Guide to Cost Cutting" advise that SMBs:

I have posted an article on March 24th, 2009 that was included in Technolawyer, an email newsletter for law firms. This article highlights the key document management applications and some key features when shopping for a DMS. I thought it was well written, objective and worth posting to our blog readers:

Have you ever made a mistake or forgotten about something? If so, it's likely that your firm's manual system for storing and retrieving documents has caused you headaches thanks to misplaced documents, missing documents, misnamed documents, and many other mis-takes so to speak. You may benefit from a document management system (aka enterprise content management system), but where do you start? Earlier this year, legal technology consultant John Heckman penned a 25 page treatise on document management systems (DMS) for law firms. We asked him to distill the key points into two TechnoFeature articles. In Part 1 last week, John discussed the problems that a DMS addresses. Today in Part 2, you'll learn how to shop for and implement a DMS. This article contains 1,722 words.

Great to have Keith Schneider join NetDocuments as a Senior Account Manager based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Many in the legal community know Keith as the Product Champion for NetDocuments the past three years. It's nice to have him wear the "ND Hat" as a full time employee. Keith worked for LexisNexis for over 22 years as a client manager and product champion responsible for working with legal, government and national accounting customers to understand their information needs, business objectives and the firm's IT strategy. Keith was instrumental in forming the LexisNexis strategic alliance with NetDocuments in 2006 and, as product champion, directed the sales and marketing efforts within LexisNexis for NetDocuments.

Consider how technology has really made us more efficient over time. In 1986 I went to Europe and managed the european operation of a computer company. I remember around 1987 we got a fax machine….wow….it changed our lives. Then about 1992 we got email…. What a savings in time instead of printing and faxing, we simply typed and sent… I worked at WordPerfect and Novell with Groupwise in its early stages and now we all recognize how email has truly changed the way we do business and how we communicate. Its drastically helped us reduce paper…. (now of course I hear how many attorneys tell their secretaries to print their inbox for them….) Isn’t it sad to run across this item on the ABA's Site-Tation that states: " According to the 2006 Legal Technology Survey Report, 61% of attorneys save email related to a case or client matter by printing out a hard copy." Actually, it's probably a good thing that we didn't find the percentage of lawyers who later scan those printouts of emails as TIFFs to reconvert them to digital form. This isn't even a step toward a paperless office - it's a move toward a "papermore" office. OLD WAYS DIE HARD! By the way, one of the major lessons from the Katrina and Rita disasters was the vulnerability of paper records in disasters. The fetish for paper runs against technology and business trends. It places law firms and their clients at an unnecessary risk. Paper is not the most efficient mode of communication and it is no longer the most secure method of retaining informationâ€"but you CANNOT protect paper. BUT it sure a lot easier to READ!! Right?