What to Clean Up Before Your Firm Changes Practice Management or Accounting Software

If your firm is moving off PCLaw, QuickBooks, an older practice management system or a collection of spreadsheets, and onto Clio, CosmoLex or Actionstep, the move itself is the easy part. What decides whether the new software works is the state of the data you bring into it.

A law firm software migration moves your data as it is

Most migrations, whether they're handled by the software company's migration team, a third-party service or a consultant, take what's in your old system and map it into the new one. They're good at that. What they don't do is decide which of your four records for the same client is the right one, whether a matter that hasn't seen activity since 2019 is really still open, or why the trust ledger on a closed file still shows $14.20.

None of that means a firm has been doing anything wrong. It's what builds up in any practice over years of busy days, staff changes and quick fixes that made sense at the time. I see some version of it in nearly every firm I work with, of every size. A move to new software is simply the best chance you'll get to tidy it up, because you have to look at all of it anyway.

It's also far easier to do before the move than after. The old system is still the one everyone knows, and you can still trace where a number came from. After go-live, the team is learning new screens, the old system is read-only or gone, and a question that would have taken ten minutes now takes an afternoon.

There's a second reason to do it first. Everything the new software does well runs on the data underneath it: the automated workflows, the reporting, the client portal, and the AI features every platform is now building in. Duplicate contacts produce duplicate emails. Matters opened three different ways produce reports that are hard to rely on. Clean data is what you're really paying the new software to work on.

Clean data is what you're really paying the new software to work on.

Start with your trust account

If you clean up only one thing, make it this. Every month up to the cut-over should be reconciled and signed off, with three figures agreeing: the reconciled bank balance for the trust account, the balance in your trust journal, and the total of your client trust ledgers. That's the monthly three-way reconciliation every Canadian law society requires, and it's the foundation the new system's trust records will be built on.

Reconciliation tells you the totals agree. Cleanup goes a level deeper, into the individual client ledgers. When a firm prepares to move, the same few items tend to come up. There are cheques that were issued but never cashed and are now stale-dated. There are deposits that arrived without a clear client attached. There are small balances sitting on matters that finished some time ago. Occasionally there's a client ledger showing a negative balance, which needs to be corrected, and its cause understood, before anything else.

Each has a fix. Stale-dated cheques need to be cancelled and either reissued or otherwise resolved. Unidentified deposits need to be traced to a client or returned. Small leftover balances can go back to the client or be applied to a bill where that's appropriate. Where the client genuinely can't be located after reasonable efforts, the balance is paid out under your province's unclaimed trust funds rules. In Ontario, that means the Law Society of Ontario's Unclaimed Trust Fund. Leaving these items in place means carrying the same open questions into new software, where the history behind them is harder to see.

Then set your cut-over date: a month-end, after that month has been reconciled. The opening trust balances in the new system should come straight from the reconciled client ledgers on that date. Outstanding cheques and deposits in transit should come across individually, each with its cheque number, payee and date, not as a single lump sum, so each one can be cleared in the new system when it reaches the bank. The first reconciliation in the new system should then tie back to the last one in the old. If those two don't meet, you want to find out in the first month, not at your next law society audit.

Close out receivables and unbilled time

The rest of your accounting deserves the same attention, starting with what clients owe you.

It's worth going through your aged receivables and deciding, account by account, what you'll pursue and what you'll write off. A two-year-old balance that nobody expects to collect will otherwise sit on every receivables report in your new system until someone finally deals with it. While you're there, look for payments that were recorded but never applied to an invoice, and credits that were never used. Match them and clear them.

Do the same with unbilled time. Bill what can be billed before the cut-over and write off what won't be. Unbilled time can usually be migrated, but it's cleaner to bill it from the system where it was recorded, with the context still around it.

If your accounting is moving too, this is a good moment to simplify your chart of accounts, which in most firms has grown one account at a time over the years. Bring your accountant in early. The opening trial balance in the new system should be one they've agreed to, and they should know the cut-over date in advance so the GST/HST return for that period draws on both systems correctly. If Clio Accounting is where you're headed, I've covered the Clio-specific details in a separate article.

A migration can happen at any time of year. Some firms like to time it to their fiscal year-end for a clean break, and others move as soon as they're ready. Either works. What matters is a clear cut-over date that everyone knows: the day the old system stops taking new entries and the new one takes over.

Merge duplicate contacts

Contacts pile up in every firm. The same client gets entered once with a middle initial, once without, and once under an old email address. A company and its owner end up in each other's records. Standardize how names, companies and addresses are entered, pick the record to keep, and merge the rest.

Merge in the old system, before the data is exported, so each contact's history comes across attached to one record. Do it after the trust and receivables work, and check the client's balances after each merge, because a contact with trust or billing history carries that history with it.

Close what's finished

Most firms have matters that stayed open after the work ended, usually because closing them was never anyone's job. Now is the time. Closing a matter properly means its trust balance is zero, its time is billed or written off and its invoices are paid or resolved. That's why this step comes after the accounting work, not before.

While you're going through them, make the matters themselves consistent: practice area, responsible lawyer, matter descriptions and numbering. The new software's reports group and filter by exactly these fields, so the more consistent they are going in, the more useful the reports will be coming out.

Decide how much history comes with you

There are broadly three choices. You can bring everything: every closed matter, time entry and invoice. It's the most complete option, but also the slowest and most expensive, and it brings every old inconsistency along with it. You can bring only open matters, contacts and current balances, leaving closed matters in the old system or an archive. That gives the cleanest start. Or you can take a middle path, with open matters in full and closed matters as a lighter record.

Whatever you choose, before you lose access to the old system, export and save the reports you may need later: the final trust reconciliations, client trust ledger histories, the receivables listing, and the general ledger and trial balance at cut-over. Law societies require trust records to be kept for years, and an old system you've stopped paying for is a poor place to keep them.

Don't migrate your workarounds

The same thinking applies to documents and templates. A shared drive with fifteen years of folders doesn't need to be rebuilt folder for folder. Decide on a structure first, then move what fits it. Templates are worth a review before you rebuild them too. A surprising number exist only to work around something the old system couldn't do.

The same goes for workflows. If staff built a spreadsheet to track something the old software didn't handle, check whether the new software does before carrying the spreadsheet forward. The best time to ask "why do we do it this way?" is before you rebuild it somewhere new.

A sensible order

Start with the trust account, because everything else depends on it. Then clear receivables and unbilled time, so matters can be closed. Then merge contacts and close matters. Then make the decisions about history, documents and templates. In the final month, reconcile, freeze changes in the old system, export your reports and cut over at month-end. In the first month on the new system, reconcile again and compare the results against your closing figures.

None of this is glamorous, and it's the part of a migration most often skipped, because the new software is the exciting part. But the migrations that go smoothly almost always have this work done first. The ones that struggle usually spend their first months on the new system fixing what came across from the old one.

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