Bandwidth is one of those things nobody thinks about until it is the reason a hearing dropped or a document upload failed. Getting it right is less about a magic number and more about understanding your firm's real workload profile and buying deliberate headroom against it.
Video is the new baseline load
Court appearances, depositions, client meetings and internal collaboration are all video now. That is a constant, not a burst — and it deserves to be sized as one. Firms treating video as an exceptional load consistently under-provision the daily reality of their own practice.
Cloud practice systems are chatty
iManage, NetDocuments, ProLaw, Aderant and Elite all move meaningful traffic every day, and the volume grows as more firm content moves to cloud tiers. Add Copilot or Gemini into the mix, and the pattern shifts again — usually upward.
Backup and DR use more than you think
Continuous cloud backup, DR replication and endpoint sync collectively account for a surprising share of daily traffic. Plan for them explicitly rather than treating them as background noise, or you will discover their cost in the form of degraded interactive performance.
Buy headroom on purpose
Bandwidth is cheap compared to a bad tenant experience. Sizing for 40–50% average utilization is a reasonable rule of thumb for a modern firm, and it leaves room for the video-heavy trial weeks that would otherwise saturate a tighter design.
Symmetric or plan to regret it
Asymmetric circuits look like a bargain until the first large discovery upload or backup cycle. For a firm running any meaningful cloud footprint, symmetric bandwidth is the correct default.
Instrument before and after
Firms that measure utilization for two weeks before a bandwidth change and two weeks after get much better decisions than firms that reason from vendor brochures. Real data almost always overrides intuition here.
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Elena Ruiz
Legal Tech Editor
