Most firms compare practice management systems the same way: a demo, a feature list, and a price per user per month. That’s a reasonable way to choose a product. It’s a poor way to budget for a move, because the subscription is the smallest and most predictable part of the cost.

We help firms through these moves, to Clio, MyCase, Litify and others, often from a mix of billing software, a file share and a lot of spreadsheets. The firms that do well aren’t the ones that picked the best product. They’re the ones that knew where the time would go before they started.

Before go-live: the cleanup nobody budgets for

A migration moves your data exactly as it is. Every duplicate contact, every matter with three slightly different names and every closed matter still marked open comes across too, and now it’s in a system that’s supposed to be the single source of truth.

The work before go-live is mostly decisions:

• Which matters move. All of them, open matters only, or open matters plus anything closed in the last few years. Each choice changes the size and the price of the migration.
• How matters and contacts are structured. Matter numbering, practice areas, responsible attorneys, related parties. Getting this right once is far cheaper than restructuring later.
• Where documents live. If documents are moving too, from a file server, Egnyte, Dropbox or a document management system, someone has to decide how folders map to matters, and what happens to files that don’t belong to any matter at all.
• Billing history. Whether historical time entries and invoices come across in full or as opening balances. Your accountant should be in this conversation, not hear about it afterwards.

This is partner and staff time, not vendor time, and it’s the part most often underestimated.

Go-live: pick the date for billing, not for convenience

The safest go-live date is the one that lines up with your billing cycle, so you don’t close a month with time split across two systems. Moving mid-cycle means reconciling two sets of records for the same period, and it’s usually the bookkeeper who pays for it.

Expect a parallel period where some people are still working in the old system, whether you planned one or not. Decide in advance how long it lasts and what date the old system becomes read-only. Without that date, it never quite happens.

After go-live: the part that decides whether it worked

• Training that matches the job. Attorneys, paralegals and billing staff use the system differently. One general training session for everyone is the most common reason a firm ends up using a fraction of what it’s paying for.
• Integrations. Email, calendar, accounting, e-signature and document assembly. Each one needs configuring and testing, and each one has a person at the firm who’ll notice first when it isn’t working.
• Sign-in and security. A new system that holds every matter and client in the firm should sit behind the same single sign-on and multi-factor authentication as the rest of your Microsoft 365. It’s also a new vendor your clients’ security questionnaires will ask about.
• Retiring the old systems. Old data still has to be kept and findable for as long as your retention obligations require. Plan where it will live and who can get to it before you cancel the old subscriptions.

Where your IT provider fits

A practice management vendor migrates data into its own product. It doesn’t usually clean up your file server, map your folders, set up single sign-on, retire your old servers or answer your clients’ questions about the new vendor. That work falls in between, and in between is where migrations slip.

If you’re comparing systems now, it’s worth asking every vendor the same three questions: what exactly is included in the migration, what format do they need the data in, and who on their side owns the project until the old system is switched off.