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June 30th, 2009 by The Clio Team

10 Things Every Lawyer Should Know About Legal SaaS

Over the past two weeks we’ve published a series of blog posts highlighting “10 Things Every Lawyer Should Know About Legal SaaS”. These posts are adaptations of a CLE presentation we’ve given at several conferences over the past few months on the topic of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and its growing impact on how leading-edge attorneys are practicing law today.

There are a lot of open questions around Software-as-a-Service, and here we’ve aimed to demystify the concept of SaaS and educate attorneys on how to evaluate the suitability of available solutions for their practice.

Part 1: What is Software-as-a-Service? A discussion of what exactly Software-as-a-Service is, and how it compares to the more traditional desktop computing model.

Part 2: Why (Or Why Not) Choose a SaaS Solution? Why SaaS offers compelling advantages over traditional desktop software solutions, and some of the compromises that have to be considered.

Part 3: Why Web-Based Practice Management? Why Software-as-a-Service is a perfect fit for practice management, particularly for solos and small firms.

Part 4: Security. An outline key concepts and terminology for web-based security, including SSL, server security, client security, and password security.

Part 5: Privacy. What you should be looking for in a web site’s privacy policies.

Part 6: Data Availability. An outline of the answers you want to be hearing when you ask your SaaS provider “What are you doing to ensure that my data remains available, even in the event of a natural- or human-induced disaster?“

Part 7: Total Cost of Ownership. An explanation of how to compare costs of SaaS to traditional desktop software via a Total Cost of Ownership calculation.

Part 8: Terms of Service. What to look for in the legal agreement describing the services your SaaS provider will provide you.

Part 9: Data Migration. How you can migrate your data from existing desktop software application to the web.

Part 10: Offline Access. Why offline access is important, and an outline of some of the technologies that make offline access to SaaS applications possible.

With this series of posts we hope we’ve answered many of the questions that exist on Software-as-a-Service. If you have additional questions, feel free to drop us a line, or suggest additional topics you’d like to see covered in the comments.