Switching case management systems is one of the biggest technology decisions a firm makes. Your matters, contacts, notes, deadlines, and documents represent years of work, and they all need to arrive in Litify intact, connected, and usable.
This guide explains what moving to Litify involves, what to watch for depending on where you’re coming from, and how to plan a switch that keeps your firm running.
Why firms move to Litify
- They’ve outgrown a system built for smaller practices.
- Intake, case work, documents, and billing live in separate tools.
- Reporting takes too much manual work to trust.
- They want more automation and more control over their own workflows.
- They want a platform that can scale with the firm.
What moves in a migration
- Contacts and organizations, including clients, opposing parties, providers, and referral sources.
- Matters, with their case types, statuses, key dates, and custom fields.
- Relationships, meaning which people belong to which matters, and in what roles.
- Notes and activity history.
- Calendars, deadlines, and tasks that are still open.
- Documents, linked to the right matters.
- Financial data, where it’s in scope, such as expenses and trust or settlement information.
Not every piece of history has to move. Many firms migrate open matters plus a set period of closed ones, and archive the rest. Our law firm data migration checklist walks through those decisions.
What to watch for, by source system
Every system stores data a little differently, and every firm has customized its system over time. These are the patterns we commonly look for, but the details always depend on how your firm set things up.
Moving from Clio
Clio is cloud-based, so data is typically accessed through exports or its API rather than a database. Pay close attention to custom fields, how matters and contacts are related, and where documents are stored, since documents may live in Clio or in a connected storage service.
Moving from Filevine
Filevine is highly configurable, and firms often build their own project types and custom sections over the years. The core of the work is mapping those project types and sections to Litify matter types and fields, and deciding which custom data still matters.
Moving from Needles
Needles installations often hold many years of history, sometimes in on-premises databases. Expect to spend time on user-defined fields, free-text notes, and older data entered under different conventions, and plan secure access to the database early.
Moving from a custom system or spreadsheets
Homegrown databases and spreadsheets can hold valuable data with little documentation. The first step is understanding how the data is structured and what the undocumented rules are, usually with help from the people who use it every day.
How to plan the switch
- Inventory your current system, including customizations, integrations, and where documents live.
- Decide what moves and what gets archived.
- Map old data to Litify, field by field, and agree on the mapping before loading anything.
- Run test migrations into a sandbox and have your staff validate the results.
- Plan the cutover, including your data cutoff and how work continues during the move. Our guide to planning a data cutoff and freeze covers this step.
- Keep read-only access to the old system for a period after go-live, if you can.
How long does it take?
It depends on data volume, data quality, the number of source systems, and how customized your current setup is. Migration runs alongside configuration, so it fits within the overall project. Our Litify implementation timeline shows how the phases fit together.
BRIO has migrated firms from a range of systems, including Clio and custom SQL databases, and our team handles data and document migration in-house. Read how we moved every practice at a public defender’s office into one system, or learn about our data migrations.
Frequently asked questions
Can we move from Clio to Litify?
Yes. Firms regularly move from Clio to Litify. The migration typically covers contacts, matters, relationships, notes, open tasks and deadlines, and documents, with custom fields mapped to Litify.
Can Filevine data be migrated to Litify?
Yes. The main work is mapping Filevine project types and custom sections to Litify matter types and fields, then validating the results with firm staff.
Do we have to migrate all of our old cases?
No. Many firms migrate open matters plus closed matters from a recent period, and archive older records. Confirm your records retention obligations before deciding.
Will our documents move to Litify too?
Yes. Documents can be migrated and linked to the right matters as part of the project.
