Earlier this year, we had a violent 24-minute derecho in Virginia — and lots of firms went down. (Derecho, from the Spanish word for “straight,” is a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms that move in a straight-line windstorm.) Lawyers, when their technology bellies up, panic. Immediately after the storm, firms started asking us about moving to the cloud.

As longtime cloud curmudgeons, it was not until we carefully considered the words of law practice management adviser Jim Calloway — director of the Oklahoma Bar Association’s Management Assistance Program — that we begin to change our minds. Calloway said, in his Oklahoma drawl, “I’m kinda thinking that cloud providers offer better security than the average solo or small-firm lawyer for client data.”