Coyer spoke to industry experts including Sean Monahan, senior director in the strategy and transformation practice at Harbor, leading the data modernization specialist team. Monahan said it’s not too late for firms to migrate to the cloud, especially as the market for generative AI is still relatively new and likely to become more mature in upcoming months.
“Where we are with AI right now is still so early in the process that I think most firms and corporate legal departments are realizing that they have a little bit of time to really get ready before these tools are going to substantially change the way that legal services are delivered,” Monahan said. He added, “What you do in this gap period is what’s going to differentiate you in a year or two.”
Getting “cloud ready” is a significant project, Monahan explained, especially as legal applications have become increasingly interconnected. Moving some applications to the cloud means breaking those integrations and having to rewrite and leverage new integration protocols.
“When we talk about those migrations, we counsel people, especially for tools that we know are eventually going to go to the cloud, be cloud ready, even if you aren’t going to go to the cloud right now,” he said. “But for a lot of cases, especially for legacy tools and legacy technologies, it’s going to be a challenge to really unwind a lot of what has been essentially reliant on those capabilities in the back end for a long time.”
This article was originally published on Legaltech News.