Lora Bentley spoke with Charles Moore, CEO of RocketLawyer.com, about how cloud computing is changing the practice of law -- allowing increased efficiency and decreased cost to clients. He notes that maintaining compliance and privacy in a cloud computing situation is actually easier than it was in the past when the only hosted apps anyone used were e-mail systems.

Bentley: Tell me about RocketLawyer. What does it offer?
Moore: RocketLawyer.com really enables ordinary consumers and small business owners to use the cloud to do legal work on their own without a lawyer, and at the same time, to find a lawyer when they need one.

The lawyers featured on RocketLawyer.com are solo practitioners or small firm lawyers from different parts of the country. We have profiles from about 90,000 attorneys who are available to help consumers and small business owners with their legal issues -- online. Most of the services provided by the lawyers are provided online, without any need to physically visit the lawyer's office. It's really a virtualized law practice environment.

Bentley: What else does a virtualized law practice add to the equation?
Moore: We have lawyers from all 50 states, every major city, and most mid-sized and small cities around the country, so one of the more interesting things that cloud computing enables a consumer to do is sort of "geoshift." For example, you can get legal work done in a lower-cost area of the state, for example. Or, for matters that are national, like patents and other intellectual property issues, tax, immigration... you can find a lawyer in a lower-cost area, or who has expertise that's more specific to your matter.

Bentley: So assuming documents and privileged communications are stored in the cloud, and that your servers are physically located in different areas, how do you make sure different privacy requirements and other regulations are met?
Moore: Well, when we talk about cloud computing, primarily we're talking about using hosted applications rather than applications that are on your desktop.

Bentley: Sure.
Moore: Guess what? Folks have been using cloud computing for their sensitive information, their protected information, for as long as people have been using gmail or Yahoo Mail. Thousands of lawyers use gmail or other hosted e-mail services. Thousands if not millions of clients have gotten documents from their attorneys in e-mail. So for years, we've been putting sensitive information in the cloud.

I think what's happened is that we are catching up to that with a better way, which is that you have your own very well-defined portion of the network. Your data is very well defined as your data. Then there are privacy policies from the service provider, as well as terms of service that are very clear and that are specifically oriented to the work that you are trying to do. You've actually got a lot more coverage in privacy policies and the terms of service from almost every cloud vendor out there than you would have ever gotten from hosted e-mail.

Bentley: But each attorney has his or her own client engagement agreement, yes? You can't really standardize those.
Moore: That's right. We're the network and the software. The lawyers use us to get the work done in a virtual environment. The actual workflow is very similar to what happens in a bricks and mortar office. You're going to have a legal service agreement with your attorney. It can be done online. We support all that, but your legal service agreement will cover the service that the lawyer will provide and will be individualized for each client.