Every platform migration — practice management, document management, email, financials — succeeds or fails on data migration. It is rarely the most exciting phase of the project, and it is almost always the highest-risk one. Firms that respect that reality plan differently, and consistently execute better.
Legacy data is messier than you think
Duplicate contacts, orphaned matters, inconsistent time-entry formats, mislinked documents, historical financial adjustments with no audit trail — the reality of the source system is almost always more chaotic than the migration diagrams suggest. Assume mess, plan for mess, and be pleasantly surprised only occasionally.
Cleansing is a business decision, not a technical one
What to bring, what to archive, what to leave behind — these are conversations with practice-group leadership, not just IT. Doing them late in the project is the number-one cause of scope explosion and the number-one cause of contentious go-live weekends.
Cutover is a rehearsal, not an event
Multiple full dry-runs, timed to the minute, with rollback plans. Anything less is hope dressed as a plan, and hope is not a migration methodology. Firms that treat cutover as a rehearsal execute cleanly; firms that treat it as an event improvise.
Reconciliation runs for months
Post-cutover reconciliation of financials, matter counts, document links, timekeeper history and billing schedules is where quiet issues surface. Plan for it explicitly, staff for it, and give it executive visibility for at least ninety days after go-live.
The communication cadence
Attorneys and staff need to know, weekly, what is happening with their data — and what to expect on cutover weekend. Silent migrations create anxious partners, and anxious partners create emergency exceptions that damage the migration.
The vendor coordination layer
Migrations that touch multiple vendors — source system, target system, integration tools, third-party reporting — require a single accountable coordinator who is not one of the vendors. Without that role, finger-pointing during a problem is the default, not the exception.
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