The Challenge
A large urban public defender represents clients across criminal, family, and immigration defense. Each practice had grown up with its own case management system, so the office was running several systems at once, each with its own data, conventions, and reports.
That fragmentation made the basics hard. Collecting consistent data, keeping it accurate, and reporting across the organization ranged from inconsistent to impossible. And because the work involves some of the most sensitive information there is, any new system had to protect it with care.
The office needed to:
- Bring every practice onto one modern case management platform.
- Migrate legacy case data completely and accurately, without disrupting active defense work.
- Restrict access so only a client’s own defense team can see their records.
- Report across the organization from a single, trusted source.
The Approach
BRIO rolled out Litify one practice at a time. Each deployment had its own discovery, data mapping, testing, and go-live, which kept disruption low and let attorneys reach legacy records while they moved their daily work into the new system. Lessons from each rollout shaped the next.
Data migration was treated as its own discipline. Every legacy table was mapped to Litify and custom objects, then loaded in stages, with an initial load, a user acceptance testing load, and a final go-live load, and record counts checked at every step.
The Solution
Phased Rollouts by Practice: Criminal, family, and immigration defense each moved onto Litify in their own deployment, configured for the way that practice works.
Complete Legacy Migrations: Migrations covered intakes, matters, parties and aliases, court appearances and next court dates, filings and orders, case conferences, notes, and the practice-specific history attorneys rely on. Testing feedback drove targeted fixes, from preserving note formatting to converting legacy codes into readable values.
Need-to-Know Access by Defense Team: For the most sensitive practice, BRIO built a custom sharing model so that users can see and edit a client’s matters, intakes, notes, and related records only when they are on that client’s team. Access recalculates automatically when team membership changes, and bulk recalculation runs after every data load.
A Repeatable Migration Pipeline: When the office took on the case data of another defender organization, BRIO built a cloud data pipeline that extracted the legacy data, translated it to the office’s Litify configuration, and loaded it into the existing org, following a documented go-live runbook with automation pauses, bulk sharing recalculation, and count reconciliation.
Ongoing Support: BRIO continues to support the office with enhancements and integrations as its needs evolve.
Technical foundation
- Litify on Salesforce, configured by practice area
- Custom Apex sharing model with automated and batch recalculation
- Staged data loads with record-count reconciliation
- Azure Data Factory pipeline for legacy system migration
- Documented go-live runbooks for each deployment
The Impact
The office now works from one system instead of several:
- Every practice on a single case management platform.
- Attorneys can manage caseloads proactively and track case activity in real time.
- Leadership can produce organization-wide reports from one source.
- Sensitive records protected by access tied to each client’s defense team.
For an organization whose clients depend on it at the hardest moments of their lives, good technology is not about features. It is about giving attorneys accurate information quickly and protecting it carefully.
