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This is the last in a three-part series on data accessibility, security and privacy. In case you missed it, here’s Part I: Data Accessibility and Part II: Security.

Privacy is final component of our discussion of Clio’s data accessibility, security and privacy strategy.

Privacy is a critical component of online data security, as without a proper privacy policy your Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider could potentially resell or distribute your confidential client data without your permission. Your SaaS provider’s data accessibility policy ensures proper data redundancy measures have been put in place, while your provider’s security statement details how data is properly encryped and protected. However, without a clear privacy policy, the privacy of your own and your client’s data is not guaranteed.

At Clio we have structured our Privacy Policy to align with those of TRUSTe, the internet privacy giant boasting the strongest and most trusted privacy policy model in the business. This ensures that subscribers to Clio enjoy privacy protections in accordance with TRUSTe’s strict privacy principles, and that we respectfully treat all customer information as though were sensitive. Our aim is to assert that information entrusted to the care of Clio is being stored and managed responsibly, and that ownership of said data remains firmly assigned to you – indefinitely.

The October 25th edition of the Economist contains an insightful special report devoted to the topic of Software-as-a-Service, and the increasing significance of the “cloud” in modern business. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, but this excert sums up the report nicely:

In the years to come companies are likely to venture much farther. For one, operators of computing clouds such as Amazon and Google have shown that this is a far more efficient way of running IT systems. Secondly, many firms will find they have no choice. The way in which their IT infrastructure has grown is proving unsustainable. Most corporate data centres today are complex warrens of underused hardware that require more and more people, space and power to keep them going. The current economic malaise will increase the pressure on companies to become more efficient. More has to be done with less, which is cloud computing’s main promise.

Although the definition of the “cloud” is as nebulous (pun intended) as its terminology, it’s clear that the economies of scale offered by certain outcomes of cloud computing, such as Software-as-a-Service, are profound for small businesses.

If you think it’s time to take advantage of cloud computing, maybe it’s time to put your practice in the cloud with Clio.

We’re pleased to announce that Clio has become a sponsor of the ABA’s GP|Solo division. The ABA GP|Solo division is exclusively dedicated to the needs of general practitioners, solo and small law firm lawyers. Given Clio has been built from the ground up to address the needs of general practitioners, solos and small firms, we saw a great fit and have committed to financially supporting the division through a sponsorship.

If you’re not already a member, we encourage you to join GP|Solo today – one of the benefits of joining is an exclusive GP|Solo discount on Clio!

Sean Doherty of Law.com just wrote a fantastic review of Clio. To kick off the review, Sean points out the overhead associated with traditional desktop software:

Practice management software is the lifeblood of most large law firms. But with their high cost and management overhead, many solo practitioners and small law firms do without it. Instead, they use a variety of tools like Outlook Contacts for client management and Excel work sheets for time and billing.

With Clio’s web-based practice management, Sean points out “there is no local software to install or maintain”, and that your data is accessible from anywhere you have an Internet connection.

The review chronicles Sean’s experiences in settings up his practice’s data in Clio and exploring Clio’s features over the course of our free 30 day trial. We encourage you to read the entire comprehensive review, but we especially appreciate Sean’s summary: 

To develop my own practice performance metrics and reports and engage in client management and billing is time-consuming. For a monthly subscription fee of $49.00 for attorneys ($25.00 per month for non-attorney support), plus copious storage capacity, it’s hard to resist giving Clio a test drive.

The TechnoRelease announcing Clio‘s October 1, 2008 launch sparket the most interest among TechnoLawyer members for the period September 29 – October 12. The copy from this TechnoRelease is included below and available here. A big thanks to our TechnoLawyer readership!

THEMIS RELEASES WEB-BASED CLIO — SECURE SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE (SAAS) FOR SOLOS/SMALL FIRMS USING PCS, MACS, AND IPHONES 
By Themis Solutions Inc.

September 29, 2008 — Vancouver, BC — On October 1st, Themis Solutions Inc. will announce the general availability of Clio, a comprehensive web-based practice management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for lawyers. Clio is specifically designed for solo practitioners and small law firms using PCs and Macs; it can be accessed from any Internet connection and from iPhones.

Clio will be demonstrated at the ABA General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division’s Fall Meeting on October 2-4, 2008 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Secure and easy-to-use, Clio provides case/matter management, time tracking, billing/reporting, client contact and document management, task scheduling, trust accounting, and performance metrics for independent lawyers to benchmark their business goals.

CLIO FEATURES 

• Matter/Case Management: Effectively organize and manage all case, matter and client information through Clio’s intuitive, user-friendly online interface.

• Time Tracking: Clio tracks time by client, matter, and task, allowing lawyers to reduce lost time and eliminate paper or Excel timesheets.

• Billing and Reporting: Clio generates customized invoices and outstanding bill reminders. Lawyers can create useful reports to help with accounting.

• Document Management: Securely access documents online and save unlimited document versions.

• Trust Accounting: Many compliance issues result from poor tracking of trust accounts. Clio solves this problem. Maintain accurate trust and bank transaction records to ensure that funds are appropriately tracked.

• Client/Contact Management: Clio’s contact management system stores information on clients, matters and billings.

• Task Scheduling: With Clio’s complete calendaring and reminder system, appointments are easily clicked, dragged and viewed by day, week, or month. Data can be imported and exported from Google, Outlook or iCal calendars into Clio.

• Practice Performance Metrics: Track current, expected, and target billing figures daily, weekly, monthly, or annually.

SECURITY

When considering web-based solutions like Clio, lawyers are understandably concerned about ensuring the security of their client data. Therefore, Clio’s developers have focused their attention on security to address these concerns, making Clio a secure and reliable solution.

• External Security and Data Backup: Clio uses password protection with bank-grade 256-bit SSL encryption. Data is backed up daily to a secure, offsite data center, and daily third-party audits are performed to ensure data security.

• Internal Security: Clio can restrict access to confidential files or client records by individual or by group via rights-managed security.

• Client Data Ownership Guarantee: Clio firmly believes lawyers should be able to retrieve their data from Clio easily and conveniently. Users of Clio can easily export from Clio at any time.

SPECIFICATIONS AND PRICING

Clio is operating system independent and can run on PC, Macintosh and Linux computers. It supports Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0, Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, Safari 3.0 and Google Chrome.

Clio is affordably priced by monthly subscription. Pricing is $49/month for lawyers and $25/month per support staff member. This cost includes all technical support, maintenance and upgrades.

ABOUT THEMIS SOLUTIONS

Themis Solutions Inc. is based in Vancouver, British Columbia. With cooperation from the Law Society of British Columbia, the company has developed its flagship product Clio which is a web-based SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) practice management system for solo and small firm attorneys. Visit www.goclio.com or call 1-888-858-CLIO.

This is the second in a three-part series on data accessibility, security and privacy. In case you missed it, here’s Part I: Data Accessibility. Part III: Data Privacy will be posted next week.

Clio employs multiple levels of protection to ensure your data is secure. However, before going into detail about how we implement this security, we should elaborate on what exactly we mean by data security.

Data security is often used as an umbrella term to refer to multiple aspects of security – in this series of blog posts we’ve broken the overall concept of data security into three parts: Data Accessibility (referring to data backup, data escrow, etc. – see Part I for more details), Data Security (described here) and Data Privacy (described in Part III, to be posted next week).

When we refer to data security , we are referring to one concept in particular: keeping your data secure so that only properly authorized  users are able to access your data.

We’ve implemented this data security using  four primary mechanisms: password security, internal rights-managed security, end-to-end bank-grade 256-bit SSL encryption, and external security audits.

The first layer of security is provided by password security: the only way of access your practice’s data on Clio is by entering the correct password. This is why it’s so important to choose a strong password for Clio (or any other online service). Some good articles on the importance on strong passwords include this article by security expert Bruce Schneier and these tips on choosing strong passwords by Microsoft.

The second layer of security is the internal rights-managed security provided by Clio. This makes it select specific users who can “see” certain matters or contacts. For an especially sensitive contact or matter you may choose to make it “private”, so only you can see it, or share it with a specific group within your firm, such as the “Senior Partners” group.

The third level of security provided by Clio is end-to-end bank-grade 256-bit Secure Sockets Layer  (SSL) encryption. SSL is an encryption standard used by leading online banking and financial institutions that makes electronic evesdropping on your communications with Clio’s servers impossible. This means that, for example, you can safely and securely access your practice’s data using a public WiFi service at your local Starbucks.  You can read more about the technical details of SSL encryption in this excellent Wikipedia article: SSL.

Finally, we have contracted the world’s largest dedicated security company, McAfee, to perform comprehensive network security and  vulnerability scanning. This continuous penetration testing and security scanning helps ensure your data is safe. You can read more about the McAfee Secure designation Clio has earned here.

With external password security, internal rights-managed security, and SSL encryption you can rest assured your practice’s data is both safe and secure with Clio.

We’re extremely honoured to be featured in Legal Management Magazine’s Tech 10 List. Legal Magazine is an award-winning journal that informs law firm managers, legal administrators, and managing partners on important trends in technological innovations, general business practices, and other areas of interest to the legal industry.

Attorneys have a fiduciary duty to ensure their client data remains accessible, secure, and private. At Clio we’ve gone to every reasonable length to deliver on these three critical areas, and we’ll elaborate on exactly how we’re doing that in a series of blog posts.

In this first post, we’ll describe how we’re delivering on data accessibility. Data accessibility means that you can rest assured that your data remains safe and accessible regardless of natural or man-made disasters, hardware failures, etc.

With traditional desktop software, ensuring data accessibility means performing regular backups, storing those backups offsite, keeping archival versions of past backups, etc.

This strategy works fine for desktop applications, but how does it translate to web-based practice management applications like Clio? How do we protect your data and ensure we’re doing at least as good (and hopefully even better) a job ensuring your data is accessible?

At Clio we’ve put three layers of data redundancy and protection in place:

First, we back up your data at least four times a day to a local backup facility. This provides a “snapshot” of data over the course of a workday so that, in the event some key data is accidentally deleted by one of our users, we are able to recover the data to a state that is, at worst, a few hours old.   

Second, on a daily basis we back up your data to our secure, offsite, and geographically distributed backup facilities. Even if one geographic replicate of our backup data fails, we have several others to fall back upon.

Third, on a weekly basis we replicate a copy of your data to a secure third party data escrow provider. This ensures your data remains available even in the event of a service or business interruption. In the event of a service or business interruption your data will remain available through our third-party escrow provider.

With these three layers of data redundancy, Attorneys can rest assured they’re meeting personal and fiduciary responsibilities to keep their practice’s data 100% accessible, even in the event of an unexpected disaster.

We’re extremely proud to announce that web-based practice management has arrived with today’s General Availability release of Clio. We’ll also be demonstrating Clio at the ABA Solo and Small Firm conference in Santa Fe, NM on October 2nd.

So what exactly does this mean? To date, we have been running a “closed beta” consisting of select, highly engaged users who have been providing us with invaluable feedback and guidance in helping shape Clio. This closed beta has culminated in a product that we feel is now ready for general release.

What it doesn’t mean is that we’re finished with Clio, or that we don’t want or need your feedback on feature ideas for Clio. Clio will continue to evolve and improve over time. We’re firmly committed to delivering the best web-based practice management solution we possibly can, and we need your continuing feedback and support to help that happen.

We’re offering free 30-day evaluations of Clio, so sign up today. We look forward to hearing from you with comments or questions at info@goclio.com.