Sustainable technologies have gained significant traction in recent years, with businesses across various industries striving to reduce their environmental impact while remaining competitive. The legal industry is no exception. Embracing sustainable technologies helps reduce the environmental impact of your legal practice and offers significant cost-effective advantages for legal firms like yours, improving the bottom line. But what are the benefits that your legal practice will reap?

Energy efficiency is a crucial aspect of sustainability, and sustainable technologies offer significant advantages over onsite infrastructure in terms of energy consumption. Legal practices traditionally had onsite infrastructure, such as servers, networking equipment, and storage devices, which require high levels of energy to operate and maintain. This energy consumption leads to higher utility bills especially given the current energy crisis, increased carbon emissions, and a larger environmental footprint.

Moving away from onsite infrastructure and transitioning to cloud-based platforms such as Azure or AWS, as well as adopting cloud-based applications, which for legal practices could include Clio, App4Legal and others, your practice can significantly reduce its daily energy consumption.

Due to their large-scale operations, cloud service providers will have hyper-optimised their infrastructure by implementing advanced cooling mechanisms and energy-efficient hardware to optimise energy usage and reduce carbon emissions. This of which isn’t achievable with onsite infrastructure.

If your legal firm embraces sustainable technologies, you can significantly reduce your energy consumption, lowering utility bills and reducing your environmental footprint. A win-win all round.

Investing in onsite IT infrastructure can be a significant financial burden for legal firms, particularly for smaller practices. Purchasing and maintaining servers, network equipment, and storage devices require substantial upfront capital investment and ongoing expenses for upgrades and replacements. For example, replacing your server every 7 years becomes very costly. However, adopting cloud technologies eliminates the need for such capital expenditure.

Sustainable cloud technologies are usually offered via a subscription-based model, where your legal firm pays for the services they use monthly or annually. This eliminates the need for upfront investments in onsite infrastructure such as servers. Additionally, the cloud service provider bears the costs of maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure, reducing the long-term financial burden on your business. This subscription-based model provides greater cost control and allows you to allocate your financial resources strategically.

Effective collaboration is essential in the legal industry, where teams often work on shared documents and need real-time access to client information. Traditional onsite infrastructure can limit mobility and collaboration, requiring your team to work from a physical location and limiting the ability to collaborate in real-time.

Sustainable technologies, such as cloud computing and SaaS solutions, allow your staff to work remotely from anywhere with an internet connection, with seamless access to files and applications, enabling your team to work and collaborate with clients and colleagues simultaneously. This eliminates the need for physical proximity and streamlines workflow, resulting in improved efficiency and reduced operational costs for your legal firm. Both of these ultimately lead your legal practice to control its costs better.

The security and integrity of data and information in the legal industry are paramount, as it’s a legal requirement. Cloud service providers implement advanced security protocols, encryption techniques, and access controls to safeguard data against unauthorised access and cyber threats. These providers have dedicated security teams that monitor and mitigate potential risks, offering a level of protection that is often beyond the capabilities that your legal practice could deliver.

Although, we must note that it’s also best to work alongside a reputable IT-managed service provider to ensure all endpoints to your IT eco-system within your legal practice are as protected as possible, with some even adding a strong focus on the continuous training and upskilling your employees on cyber risks.

Cloud-based solutions also offer reliable data backup and disaster recovery options. Automatic backups and redundant storage systems ensure that critical financial information is protected and easily recoverable in the event of data loss or system failures. This level of data protection reduces the risks associated with onsite infrastructure and provides peace of mind to you and your clients.

However, remember to question the frequency of the backups, and that the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the Recovery Time Objective (RPO) meet your expectations and requirements should you need to recover your information and data in the event of an incident or disaster.

All of these contribute to minimising the risk of an incident and subsequent data loss and downtime, reducing the potential financial and reputation impact on your legal practice if these security measures weren’t in place.

Embracing sustainable cloud-based technologies in the legal industry offers significant cost-effective advantages over traditional onsite infrastructure. Your legal firm can achieve a competitive edge while reducing its environmental footprint by reducing energy consumption, minimising capital expenditure, improving productivity and collaboration, and enhancing data security.

If sustainability and cost control are high on your business agenda this year, we can help you achieve these goals. We’ve worked in partnership with several legal firms enabling them to adopt cloud technologies and increased their sustainability and cost control, so don’t hesitate to contact us or call us on 0345 504 8989.