All too often I hear complaints from my friends in the legal world that their current software vendor is not listening to them. There have been no product enhancements in years, the vendor just does not understand the firm’s workflow, and the annual subscription costs just keep going up. And that’s not the worst of it.
What happens when a vendor stores all your data on their servers, like in a SaaS model, and you want to terminate the agreement? Does your vendor give you a hard time providing you with the data? Isn’t that data yours? You paid them to store the data, not to own it.
A few months ago, I had a conversation with a CIO from a very prominent firm. He shared with me that, after providing proper notice of termination of the contract, the vendor would not hand over the firm’s data they stored unless he paid an exorbitant fee for exporting the data in a format the firm could use with their new vendor. That sounds to me like retaliation, doesn’t it? The CIO said he would never do business with that vendor again and has shared that story with other colleagues and peers.
At last year’s ILTA conference in Nashville, I was the moderator of a panel discussion with industry leaders that shared their experiences and knowledge of best practices in supporting law firms with calendaring and docketing support as well as security concerns with “cloud” providers. One IT professional in the audience spoke of a similar story where the vendor gave him such a hard time with exporting the firm’s data from the cloud. It became a hot topic for discussion with the attendees. Turns out both stories relate to the same vendor.
Contrary to the consumer side of cloud options for data storage, when companies leverage a vendor that offers a SaaS or cloud storage option, there is a very clear definition of data ownership. The company always owns the data and not the vendor.
During my former career on the other side of the sales table, I made sure the vendors I dealt with knew I was in charge, and not them. So who’s in charge at your firm – you or your software vendor?
Chris Gierymski is the Director of Business Development at American LegalNet and can be reached at cgierymski@alncorp.com.
