Online Storage For Lawyers?

alharaka writes "I have a relative that has been a lawyer for over two decades. In passing conversation, he revealed to me that he has a great deal of his data stored on floppies. Naturally, as an IT guy, I lost it on him, telling him that a one-dimensional storage strategy of floppies was unacceptable. If he lost those files, his clients would be enraged. Since I do not know much about online data storage for lawyers, I read a few articles I found on Google. A lot of people appear to recommend CoreVault, since a few bar associations, including Oklahoma, officially endorsed them. That is not enough for me. Do any Slashdotters have info on this topic? Do you have any companies you would recommend for online data storage specifically for lawyers? My relative is a lawyer with recognition in NJ, NY, CA, and DC; are there any rules and regulations you know of regarding such online storage he must comply with? I know IT and not law. I am aware this is not a forum for legal advice, but do any IT professionals who work for law firms know about such rules and regulations?"

Comments

A Few Helpful Lists

[eldavojohn]

Well, there's a list of online backup services on Wikipedia that's probably only half of what's available so if you feel you are lacking options and would like to help your friend out, you can do a thorough comparison matrix containing his priorities and rate each of them. You might be able to find viable options in the list of file hosting services as they use encryption.

As a lawyer with recognition in NJ, NY, CA, and DC, are there any rules and regulations you know of regarding such online storage he must comply with?

Ahahahahaha, you are asking Slashdot for advice on legal rules and standards to assist a lawyer?

Look, you're probably going above and beyond what a normal lawyer did back in the day: throw a piece of paper in a filing cabinet in his office. Subject to fire and theft, sure, but I doubt the law has changed enough to make that illegal. CoreVault looks good, you can also visit each of the state bar association pages you listed and find things like NY State Bar Association offering a discount at VENYU for offsite data storage which is probably as close as you'll get to an endorsement. Have you thought about calling each state bar association office and asking them what they use/recommend?

Re:A Few Helpful Lists

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAL and using any of these services is suicide.
Store your documents IN A FIREPROOF SAFE or VAULT ON PAPER.
Use a document scanner for retrieving them if you lose the electronic originals.
Disclosure to a 3rd party is suicide as your atty-client confidentiality could be lost (what happens if the 3rd party gets subpoenas?). Losing data is suicide because it shows a lack of due diligence.
Use paper. It works. or burn to 2X archival CDR and THEN use paper. whatever floats your boat.
   

Why online?

[captaindomon]

Why online storage? Why not just copy everything to a couple USB drives and then backup off-site occasionally with DVDs? It's not like we're talking about a lot of storage, they're probably just text documents mostly, right?

Re:Why online?

[TheRaven64]

I've worked with a couple of companies that had the same kind of requirements:

• They can't afford to lose the data.
• They can't take if off-site without some additional constraints (e.g. stored in a safe, encrypted).
• The users don't want to have to understand the technology.

A lot of these companies currently use a third-party warehouse with locked cages and transfer photocopies of court documents there for off-site storage, and want something a bit more high-tech.

The best solution I've come across is an on-site RAID-5 NAS with hourly snapshots. If they can store their data on floppies now, it is almost certainly less than 1GB. Put this on a three or four 250GB disks in a RAID-1 array (no point in RAID-5 when you've got that little data - go for the extra redundancy) which takes (volume-level) snapshots every hour (something like GEOM or ZFS snapshots). Every work night, burn the latest snapshot to a DVD and give it to the boss to take home and put in his safe. He should store the most recent 5 backups there and, n week-end backups. If you're not using ZFS on the server then make sure you're using something else to check for single-sector corruption.

Note: This is not legal advice. I know some law firms one accountancy firm who use this system, but I am probably not in your jurisdiction and you may have additional regulatory / legal requirements. Fortunately, if you are a law firm, you can probably consult a lawyer and get some legal advice cheaply...

Re:Why online?

[snowraver1]

Every work night, burn the latest snapshot to a DVD and give it to the boss to take home and put in his safe.

HAHAHA hahahahahahahahahaha ha ha, whew. That's funny. Who is loading the dvd drive?

Gather 'round boys and girls, it's story time. My dad was a lawyer for somewhere around 30 years. At the time, he and 4 other partners togeather made up their law firm. Because each of them were essentially seperate from each other, they tended to have their files stored either on their own comptuer, or on their secretary's computer.

My dad was smart enough to know that this probably wasn't the best setup, so he hired an "IT Professional" to fix this problem. The computer guy came in and set them up with a small server which would be a centeral repository for digital files. This server would then do daily (possibly weekly, can't recall) backups. The secretarys would then take the tape home with them over night.

Not a bad setup. This system was in place for several years. One day, one of the secretaries computer's HDD died. The office called the guy that had setup this system for them to have the HDD replaced. What happened next will require a new paragraph.

I get a call that day from my Dad. I was weeks away from graduating from Computer Engineering at a local technical school. My dad calls, clearly upset. Apperantly a while ago there was some problem that they had to call the "IT Guy" for. The "IT guy", in the process of fixing that problem, changed it so that the secretarys computers and I think 1-2 of the lawyer comptuer backed up to one of the secretary's comptuers, and not the server. Well, guess which computer died? You know it, the secretary's computer that was holding the backups it shouldn't have been.

No problem right? They were taking weekly backups and taking them off site. Well... Turns out that in the process of moving the backups to the secretary's computer, he was also preventing that data from being backed up. Essentially, the backups were only backing up 1/2 the data.

So, I'm just about to graduate, I get this call from my dad, and he tells me the story. I tell him what he already knows, no data should be on the comptuers, it should all be stored on the servers and backed up. The next day my dad's firm and the "IT Guy" had a meeting. This guy was scared shitless that he was going to get his pants sued off. Not all lawyers are bastards, my dad and the firm told him to send the HDD to a data recovery specialist and told the IT guy that he would be responsible for the bill. The data recovery was partially successful.

Losing that much data caused real problems at the office. Some lawyers were hit harder than others. My dad got through it just fine. My dad had a system where everything was done in triplicate. Document was saved on computer (1), printed and attached to the client file (2), I'm pretty sure that he also printed a third copy to send to Iron Mountain. When the data was lost, he still had the paper copies, the other lawyers wern't so lucky.

Having seen that, I would recommend printing and filing EVERYTHING. Most lawyers change outragous rates for printing anyways, so why not? So, I would say that you should definately take precautions against data loss, the hard copy should be your real backup.

TrueCrypt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come to think of it, I think we should store them in *actual* true crypts... ;-)

Re:Yes.

[gandhi_2]

With a big knife you could store them in a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Freezers. RAIF-0 supports striped lawyers.

Re:omfg...

[lymond01]

You know, I might put Slashdot above Oklahoma. Slashdot is the biggest tech site on the internet. Oklahoma has a musical named after it.

That gives me an idea...

Re:Yes.

[dgatwood]

I thought it was the Judicial Array of Inexpensive Lockers that held the striped lawyers....

Re:Yes.

[Red Flayer]

Meh. The operating costs of that are too high (refrigeration ain't cheap). I suggest RAID-0, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Dumpsters.

This does have an issue with degradation of the lawyers over time, but that's OK... it feeds into our COMP-Office Services Technology department.