UPDATE: CHECK OUT THIS POST by Erik Mazzone, Director of the Center of Practice Management at the NC Bar Association, on his Law Practice Matters blog. Erik is concerned that the proposed opinion will limit the cloud-based vendors that attorneys in NC can use based on the location of their servers. While most legal SaaS vendors will probably be in compliance by housing the data on servers located in the States, other non-legal SaaS companies, such as Dropbox, Google, etc., may not be in compliance with the proposed opinion because their servers are located overseas. Will this proposed ethics opinion have a broader reach than expected? Are these other services really safe to be using with law office data in the first place? See this post by Information Law Group discussing a recent Ponemon Study about cloud providers and security.
The North Carolina State Bar published the revised version of its proposed ethics opinion on the use of SaaS in law practice management on April 21st, entitled, “Formal Ethics Opinion 6: Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property”.
The direction that this opinion takes provides guidance to the practitioner, rather than attempting to write technology standards into an ethics opinion, which is not the safest place for it. Instead, the opinion requires that the attorney do a thorough job investigating the technology provider and any agreements with that providers to ensure confidentiality of the client data. They also include a reference the ILTSO standards in the footnotes of the opinion (www.iltso.org) along with links to other resources for attorneys to accomplish this process. (more…)