Tech firms like Cisco, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM urge us to compute in the cloud.

What cloud, you say?  The Internet, Blawgletter replies.

You can store vast amounts of information in the Internet cloud — millions of pages of your clients' documents, for instance.  The info resides, electronically, on a physical server somewhere.  You don't care where, because you can access it from anywhere, as long as you can connect to the Internet.

We worry some about storing confidential client info in the cloud, our work product especially.  While the cloud sounds unthreatening and safe, we wonder how well it protects against prying eyes.

Lawyers rightly expect that colleagues — including those who oppose our clients in lawsuits — would not stoop to hacking into our pieces of the cloud.  That would break rules of ethics.  

But why would others refrain?  The risk of discovery and criminal charges doesn't seem enough.  And who can say for sure that ethical bars will subdue the urge of even our fellow lawyers from using technology to probe our deepest thoughts about our cases?

We'd like to see lawyer-specific standards for security of the items we entrust to the cloud.  The notion of password protection doesn't seem to us quite enough.  We should understand what stands in the way of a stranger getting into our databases.  

A stitch in time saves nine.