Cloud-based legal technology has spent roughly the last five years highlighting its benefits and pushing back against the notion that it's an ethical or security liability. Now, as more legal professionals shift to substantially working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, more legal tech companies are likely jumping on the cloud bandwagon.

"What you will probably find working in the time of corona, more people will become more used to [working remotely] and more comfortable using it, it won't go away," said Hogan Lovells head of innovation and digital Stephen Allen. "The trend we have seen in the last three or four years of being cloud accessible will be nudged along the line more."

For legal tech companies, now could be the worst time to release an on-premise-only legal tech tool. Luckily, the expectation is many will go a different direction.

"Because of the coronavirus, they will all move online, and in legal tech if you are not able to provide a cloud-based solution with remote access … then lawyers simply aren't going to want to use them," said Allison Daly, marketing vice president of cloud-based legal tech platform LEAP Legal Software. "What good is a practice management system that you have to go in the office to use and you can't get to the office?"

LEAP is one legal tech provider that recently added cloud-based features in response to a growing need for remote access to combat the COVID-19 outbreak. Last week, the legal practice management platform announced users can purchase, train and install its cloud software remotely.

Daly said the new feature wasn't a client demand, but a business decision to allow law firms to run their business smoothly without risking their safety.

Still, although LEAP's latest features were inspired by the coronavirus, Daly said she doesn't think the development and adoption of cloud-based legal tech solutions will wane after the coronavirus outbreak ends.

"I think this has made it crystal clear that all industries need to have the ability to work remotely at any given time," she explained. "None of us could have seen this coming. It is an emergency situation, and because of that they have to have remote laptops and remote solutions for their law firm and business. After a crisis, people will know they will need this."

Developing cloud-based services is part of a larger push to provide the additional services people need, said Kimball Parker, president of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati's software developer subsidiary SixFifty.

Parker noted SixFifty's GDPR and CCPA compliance platforms were designed on the cloud to work in an evolving workforce, though not necessarily for working through a disaster. "We didn't anticipate a COVID pandemic, but we did anticipate people would want to access this from not just their desktop."

He added, "Just building this on premise wasn't an option. It cuts out a signification portion of the market."

Still, Nicole Black, lawyer and legal tech evangelist for case management platform MyCase, noted that it's not just legal tech companies without cloud platforms that may feel the need to change their technology during this outbreak.

While on-premise software companies will have to spend valuable time building a cloud infrastructure, cloud-based legal tech companies may have to develop tools to solve new obstacles faced by their clients, such as gaps in their cloud or remote services, she said.