When procuring a new financial management system, law firms often focus on feature lists. But the quality of the data conversion can have an even greater impact on ROI, in the short term and for years to come.
A successful law firm data conversion allows you to fulfill recordkeeping obligations (like trust fund accounting), track financial trends over time, and retain critical data on clients, matters, and billing. With proper planning, the transition to your new financial management system can be seamless, greatly limiting any legal, ethical, reputational, and financial risks.
What Data Conversion Means for Law Firms
Data conversion, or data migration, is the process of moving your law firm’s financial, billing, matter, and client data from one legal software platform to another.
The date conversion process is complicated, because there’s tremendous variation in how legal software platforms structure and store data.
Data conversion teams usually include the legal software vendor’s conversion staff, liaisons from your law firm, and potentially members of your IT department. During data conversion, the conversion team will typically:
- Copy the data stored in the old software.
- Get the data into the correct format for the new system.
- Clean up any data problems that could cause conversion errors.
- Move the prepared data into the new software’s data storage structure.
- Test the new system and fix any problems.
Sometimes, there are pieces of data that can’t be transferred or can’t be transferred in a cost-effective way. When that happens, the conversion team works with your team and the old platform vendor to find a work-around.
Finally, legal software data migration includes post-migration support, both immediately following conversion and for the life of the new platform.
Why Data Conversion Is High-Risk Without a Plan
Poorly planned law firm financial system migrations can cost your firm in the form of lost revenue, cash flow interruptions, unhappy clients, and staff morale problems. Below are four major risks of converting data without a clear plan.
1. Lost Data
Without careful planning and skillful execution, you could lose access to critical data, like matter details, trust accounting records, and invoicing data. Those losses could put your firm at risk of lost clients, malpractice suits, and bar discipline. Missing historical financial data can also impair strategic planning and complicate compensation calculations.
2. Data Mapping Errors
Imagine moving records between two filing rooms. In one, the records are organized first by practice group, and then alphabetically by client name. In the other, records are organized alphabetically, with no reference to the practice group. To move records between rooms, the filing clerk must “map” the record from one organizational system to the other.
Moving digital data is similar (albeit much more complex), because each legal software platform has its own data architecture. The conversion team creates a “map” that allows it to move each piece of data from its current location to the new location. But if there’s a data mapping error, data can get lost or corrupted.
3. Reporting Gaps
Your law firm runs hundreds of reports quarterly, if not monthly. They drive billing, collections, trust accounting, productivity evaluations, compensation decisions, and much more. If you lose access to historical data, your reports become less accurate (or you can’t run them at all).
4. System Downtime
Data conversion mistakes can cause downtime in multiple ways.
- Downtime at initial conversion because the conversion doesn’t work right.
- More downtime while you wait for fixes to the initial conversion.
- Ongoing downtime, if you have to fix the same problem multiple times.
Preparing Your Firm for a Successful Data Conversion
By planning carefully, you can increase the chances of a successful law firm data conversion. Make sure to consider data cleanup, stakeholder involvement, and timeline alignment.
Clean Up Existing Data
Many law firms heading into data conversions have been using their existing systems for a decade or longer. Over time, small errors can add up. It’s also common to create workarounds to make up for missing features in your existing platform, and those may have produced data that isn’t conversion-ready.
It’s important to collaborate with your internal IT resources and the new software vendor when making decisions about what data cleaning needs to occur and who should do it: the vendor, your staff, or a mix.
Engage Stakeholders Early
Upgrading your legal software comes with huge benefits, and it also asks people to change their work habits. By working closely with internal stakeholders, you can ease the change, and even use their input to make better decisions about implementing the software. External stakeholders, like your clients, are also important change partners.
- Make sure all impacted internal groups are represented on relevant committees.
- Develop strategic internal change champions who can build relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
- Listen openly to concerns and build trust by sharing the reasoning behind your decisions (when appropriate).
Timeline Alignment
Coordinating the data conversion timeline with firm and practice group needs is also critical for success. In addition to avoiding busy times in the accounting function, like month-end and year-end, be mindful of busy seasons elsewhere in the firm.
For example, avoiding the end of your fiscal year, when collections and compensation work is especially heavy, may be helpful. Other times to plan around may include:.
- Last fiscal quarter, since planning and budget work may be heavy.
- Late summer months, when more people may be taking vacation.
- Winter holidays, or other holidays when calendars tend to fill up.
The Importance of Test Conversions and Validation
A test conversion is running the old platform and the new platform in parallel for a short time.
Test conversions allow the conversion team (including key members of your staff) to see real data within the new platform before it goes live for the whole firm. Everyone can validate that the conversion went as expected, without impacting live data. If there are problems, the team can fix them while work continues uninterrupted on the old system.
Skipping test conversion and validation can result in extra downtime, lost productivity, and unnecessary frustration for internal and external stakeholders.
Minimizing Downtime During System Transitions
In addition to careful technical planning and rigorous testing, legal software data migration teams need to plan for the non-technical aspects of data conversion.
Time the transition thoughtfully. It’s important to avoid month-end, year-end, and any other times when the accounting team at your firm is particularly busy. Also, consider how your billing cycles will be affected. For example, you may decide to temporarily shift invoicing time to avoid the need to invoice mid-conversion.
Communicate strategically. Law firms need internal and external communication plans during data conversion. Since your software is changing, clients need to know early about any changes needed on their end. Internally, attorneys and professional staff need to understand why the transition is happening, how it will change their work, and what will happen when.
Coordinate carefully. For a successful conversion, you’ll need to coordinate efforts between your team and the software vendor, and coordinate work within different parts of the firm. Early stakeholder involvement is key, as is an active and empowered law firm presence on the conversion team.
Why Experience Matters in Law Firm Data Conversion
A successful data conversion is mission-critical for your law firm. You need a team that understands law firms’ unique culture, business needs, and ethical obligations. The team should have a verifiable track record of successful data conversions. And it should offer a structured process with appropriate flexibility where your firm needs it.
Orion brings all of those qualities to the table.
- We work exclusively with law firms, delivering exceptional products informed by decades of experience helping enterprise law firms increase efficiency profitability.
- Our veteran conversion team has done hundreds of successful conversions, moving data from 50+ different platforms into our law firm financial management software.
- We work closely with your team to understand your needs and create a conversion plan that addresses them. A seasoned, dedicated project manager personally handles your conversion and is physically present in your office during major conversion events. And we invest in exceptional customer service before, during, and after conversion.
Contact us to discuss data conversion planning and system transitions.