Which cloud infrastructure a legal tech company’s software sits on starts off as a standard question asked by all law firms and corporate legal departments. But for a client base that’s just recently started to embrace the cloud, a vendor leveraging a little-known cloud provider could be a deal-killer.

“I think that if you’ve got a piece of legal technology and you want to get it into the legal marketplace and you’re running it on the cloud as a software as a service, you’re likely going to put it on the leading cloud infrastructures. Because your clients, law firms and corporate legal departments, are likely to have security or infrastructure preferences that reflect what’s common in the marketplace,” said Howard “Bud” Phillips, chief information officer of Elevate, an alternative legal service provider that provides technology and consulting services to law firms and corporate legal departments.