Ready on day one: migrating so your data works, not just so it arrives

Moving between practice management systems is far more than copying records. The data you bring across has to fit the new system's structure, feed its workflows and fill its precedents. Get that wrong and the system works perfectly in the demonstration and badly on your own matters.

Know what you rely on

Before you choose a system, list what your current one does for you that you would miss: workflows, custom data screens, precedents and the merge codes and macros inside them, reports, integrations and the workarounds people have built around its gaps. Firms leaving long-established, heavily workflowed systems are often surprised by how much they have automated. Some newer products have little or no workflow and limited custom data, so this inventory can rule systems in or out before the first demonstration.

Design the destination first

The most common mistake is mapping the old system field for field into the new one. Instead, decide how the new system will be set up for each type of work: matter types, custom data, workflows, precedents and reports. Then map the old data into that design, cleaning and retiring as you go. Otherwise you recreate the old system, workarounds included, at a new price.

The pieces that have to arrive together

• Core records: clients, contacts, matters and their relationships, with duplicates resolved.
• Custom data: in the right fields, so workflows and precedents can use it.
• Precedents: merge codes mapped to the new fields, macros replaced, each one tested on migrated matters.
• Live matters: where each one is in its process, so work carries on rather than restarting.
• Key dates: every critical date brought across with an owner, and checked.
• Money: client balances, unpaid bills and work in progress, reconciled to the penny, whether you migrate full history or opening balances.
• Documents and email: linked to the right matters, with access controls intact.

Rehearse, then rehearse again

1. Run at least one trial migration, and a full dress rehearsal with the cut-over timetable.
2. Have fee earners and support staff check their own matters, not a sample chosen by the vendor.
3. Generate real precedents and run real workflows on migrated matters.
4. Reconcile the accounts at transaction or balance level, and have the COFA sign it off.
5. Agree written go-live criteria in advance, and do not go live until they are met.

Who owns it

Vendors migrate data; only the firm can say whether it is right. Someone on the firm's side needs to own the data design, the precedent bank and the sign-off, with the time to do it. That is where many projects are thinnest, and where independent project management makes the biggest difference.

We help firms plan migrations around how they will work on day one, manage the vendor through trial migrations and testing, and make sure the firm signs off on evidence, independently of any vendor.