The Challenge
A national law firm that grew from three attorneys into a leader in mass tort litigation had run its practice on a SQL-based system for more than 20 years. With a constant flow of new client inquiries, the firm needed a system that could streamline intake, handle its caseload, and give every office the same way of working.
The move to Salesforce came with real constraints:
- Twenty years of legacy data to clean, transform, and migrate, including roughly 959 GB of email and document data and more than 2.5 million files per office.
- Eight offices, each with its own habits and custom elements that had to be understood, standardized, or retired.
- About 2,500 users working in both the old and new systems throughout the migration, so the firm’s day-to-day work could never stop.
The Approach
BRIO treated the migration as an iterative program rather than a single cutover. The team started with one of the smaller offices, captured what it learned, and used those lessons to refine each migration that followed.
This was never a simple field-to-field copy. Working as an extension of the firm’s own team, BRIO analyzed and transformed the data together with the firm before anything was loaded, deciding which office-specific practices to carry forward and which to replace with a standard workflow. Because both systems stayed live, the team worked from backups of production data and planned every load carefully to avoid overwriting or duplicating records.
The Solution
A Reusable Migration Engine: BRIO built a custom SQL-based engine, using SQL and DB Amp, driven by configuration files that extract, transform, and load each object into Salesforce. Instead of writing a custom script for every object, the team could build consistent migrations quickly and repeat them for each office.
Email Moved Into the Matter: A custom application extracted email from Outlook files so correspondence could be migrated into Salesforce alongside the rest of each case.
One Office at a Time: Each office moved as its own release, with its data validated and its team fully off the legacy system before the next office began.
Technical foundation
- Custom SQL migration engine with DB Amp and configuration-driven extract, transform, and load
- Custom Outlook extraction application for email migration
- Salesforce as the new system of record
- Office-by-office iterative deployment with parallel systems in use
The Impact
- Migrated offices moved off legacy systems entirely and work only in Salesforce.
- Reporting and data consistency improved as each office joined the shared workflow.
- A single, consistent process across offices means less training and more efficiency.
- Staff can reach protected data from anywhere, without a VPN.
For a firm this size, the lesson was clear: large migrations succeed when each step makes the next one easier. Read our law firm data migration checklist for how we plan migrations today.
