Lexis’s new research shows small firms trending towards increasingly adopting cloud technology. Lexis surveyed firms of 1-20 attorneys, finding 39.4% of respondents are using cloud services for legal-related work today, with 72.4% of respondents believing law firms will be more likely to consider a could service in 2014. Lexis put together a handy infographic detailing the highlights of the survey here, and the whole survey is available here.

Smaller firms have been using cloud solutions for document storage/management (used by 60% of respondents) and backup/disaster recovery (used by 56.4%), both of which, essentially, are “big data” issues. From the sidelines, these particular solutions make a lot of sense for smaller firms as the cloud can economically fulfill needs that used to require IT personnel and hardware. But, small firms also reported having security and ethical concerns about implementing the cloud to satisfy these needs—logical concerns to outsourcing the storage and management of, presumably, sensitive data, including internal work product.

Cloud solutions are only going to continue to be adopted and with higher prevalency, according to the respondents: only 3.5% of respondents stated firms will be less likely to consider cloud services in 2014 (72.4% stated firms would be more likely, and 24% stated the likelihood will remain the same). And, firms predicting cloud-based products will surpass install-based solutions: 15.4% said this will occur in the next 3 years, 38.7% said this will happen in the next 3-5 years, and 34.1% said this will transpire after 5 years.