'We're All In On The Cloud'

For over two decades, Thomson Reuters Elite has been an industry leader in financial and practice management, thanks to its popular platforms like Enterprise® and 3E®. As technology in general, and legal software in particular, is increasingly moving to the cloud, Elite is striving to stay at the forefront of innovation by adapting its flagship products to capitalize on the advancements that the cloud offers.

We recently sat down with Eric Sugden, Chief Technology Officer for the Legal Enterprise Solutions division at Thomson Reuters, to discuss Elite’s current cloud strategies and why the cloud is the future of legal technology.

What prompted Elite to make the shift to the cloud?
Our approach is really centered around the enterprise shift in software to the cloud in general. The shift is being felt in corporations large and small. They feel they have to outsource their data center operations, because they can’t really afford to keep it up on-premises. But that’s not their strength, so they’re ready to let the cloud providers do it. Law firms tend to be behind the curve on large shifts in technology, but in this case I think law firms are feeling the heat, partly because of cost pressures, but also because an even bigger pressure now revolves around security.

They’re feeling the cyber attacks that are happening all the time, including at law firms, so it’s directly hitting home. It’s driving some to move to the cloud more quickly than they may have thought they would. A lot of minds have really been changed over the last 2–3 years, and the past 18 months in particular. So we just really felt we needed to be ahead of this game and have offerings in the cloud.

When can we expect to see cloud-based products from Elite?
We already have some cloud software, like our eBillingHub® software platform, which was already in the cloud as an application, but is moving more toward a pure native cloud model rolling out this year. The first product to transition will be our business development platform, which is going over to the cloud this quarter. One of our biggest focuses is 3E, our financial management platform for law firms. 3E is a unique product in that it was always an on-premises software installation and typically it’s heavily customized. So it poses a particular challenge and is an important one to get into the cloud because it’s our flagship product. Our plan is to take most of our products to the cloud.

What challenges are involved in moving a product like 3E to the cloud?
One of the challenges is that it’s often a heavily customized product, so we’re developing it or migrating it to the cloud in a way that we retain that flexibility to allow customization. And, obviously, security is really important in our move to the cloud. Until now, 3E was a behind-the-firm’s-firewall sort of product, so we’re focusing a lot on security.

How do you ensure data security?
A big part of it is being in the Microsoft® cloud. Their Azure® cloud offering has probably the broadest security portfolio of any provider. We’re also doing a lot of work internally for the application to make sure it’s secure, such as encrypting all data in transit, all the way from the browser to the app server and into the database. All communications within the cloud are also encrypted, and we’re also encrypting all data at rest — sometimes at multiple levels. Another big part of it is managing security keys, so that the law firm security keys are kept in a secure vault that only we have access to. The cloud provider doesn’t have access to it. That gives law firms more comfort in the fact that someone going rogue at the cloud provider can’t get access to the data or the encryption keys.

What are some advantages of moving to the cloud?
The biggest advantage of us going to the cloud, and the thing we’re most excited about, is the innovation we can pursue. We’ve already done some work with voice recognition, being able to communicate with the computer in different ways. One of our applications uses Amazon’s® Alexa® to enter time and do matter inquiries. We want to take more advantage of that.

Natural language processing and natural language queries are other big ones that are much more available in the cloud. Rather than typing in queries, you can just speak them or you can type in more general queries to get the results you could only previously get through very specific, drilled-down searches. We want to use machine learning to be able to use the data that’s in the system to predict future scenarios. All those innovative capabilities come much more easily to us when we’re in the cloud.

What should we expect to see from Elite in the near future in terms of cloud technology?
We’re all in on the cloud. We want to continue to support our on-premises products as well. We’re not turning our back on them — that will be part of our future for a long time. We don’t want to see any impact on the user with the shift to the cloud, but we do appreciate there are always some reservations about newness in general. But the resistance seems to be lessening. We want to make it seem like there’s no difference, whether the software’s in the cloud or on-premises.

We want to see all of our applications working on the cloud and working well together in an ecosystem. We want full integration between all our products. And like I said earlier, much of our future revolves around the new technologies that are open to us. For example, there’s machine learning — not only being able to show you a report of what happened in the past 6 months or year, but looking at all the data we have in the system over the last 10 years and predicting where you’re going to be next year, based on what we know, the patterns we’ve seen, and the risk factors in the market. Combining a lot of data sources that are available and using machine learning to give you a more predictive analysis of where things are going.

The future is the cloud. Elite wants to be on the forefront of that move and provide cloud options for our clients, and we want to be able to take full advantage of the innovation opportunities that are available in the cloud.