Silver linings in the cloud

As the market for legal services changes rapidly, law firms of all sizes need to be flexible, responsive to client needs and cost-efficient. One consequence of this change is that practice management systems, once considered as just part of the plumbing, are becoming a key strategic asset to serve clients while maintaining profit margins.

A significant development in this regard has been the move of practice management systems from the firms’ own servers and desktop computers into the cloud. Rather than being installed on a firm’s own computer systems or servers, cloud-based practice management systems and their data are located on a remote server and accessed via the Internet. This means that firms require no specialised hardware or software to use cloud-based systems—everything works through a normal web browser such as Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, enabling the system, data and documents to be accessed from wherever a lawyer—or