Stop Overpaying for Law Firm Storage: Why Tiered Data Storage Matters
Most law firms make the same mistake when planning their storage: they treat all data like it’s equally important.
Everything ends up in one expensive bucket—active matters, closed cases, legacy files from a decade ago. It feels simple, but it’s usually a budget killer.
Unless you’re a brand-new firm, chances are you’ve got years (or decades) of data sitting on your servers or in the cloud. But here’s the problem: most of it isn’t being touched. So why are you paying premium rates to store it all?
The Real Cost of “One-Size-Fits-All” Storage
A lot of firms store every file at the same performance level and price point—regardless of how often it’s actually used. That’s how you end up with:
Bloated cloud storage bills
Overbuilt infrastructure
Expensive document management licenses
And top-tier pricing for files no one’s opened in years
The fix? Start asking a basic question: How often do we really need to access this data?
A Smarter Setup: Tiered Storage for Law Firms
Instead of lumping everything together, break it out into three storage tiers based on usage:
Tier 1: Active Matters
Current cases and day-to-day work. These need to be fast and easily accessible. This is where premium storage makes sense.
Tier 2: Semi-Active or Recently Closed
Long-term cases, closed-but-still-relevant matters, or anything you may need to reference soon. These don’t need top-tier performance, but should still be easy to retrieve.
Tier 3: Archived Matters
Old, closed files that are rarely accessed. This is the biggest opportunity to cut costs. These don’t need fast storage—they just need to be secure and compliant.
Where the Savings Happen
In many firms, 50–60% of data is old casework. If that’s sitting in your primary storage—especially in a high-performance cloud environment—you’re likely overspending.
By moving archived data out of:
Premium cloud tiers
High-performance servers
Your main DMS
…and into low-cost storage like NAS devices or archival cloud tiers (think Amazon Glacier or Azure Cold Storage), firms can cut infrastructure costs significantly.
We’ve seen storage spend drop by 50% or more just from this shift—no loss of access, no compliance issues.
Bottom Line
Not all data deserves the same price tag.
Tiering your storage based on how data is actually used lets you control costs, scale smarter, and stop paying top dollar for digital dead weight.
If your firm hasn’t reviewed its storage strategy recently, now’s the time. Tiered storage is one of the quickest wins out there.