Legal Technology Implementation Checklist

List the firm's current PMS (Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, Smokeball), DMS (NetDocuments, iManage, Worldox), billing, eDiscovery, and accounting tools. Note license counts, contract end dates, and integrations between systems — gaps here become migration-scope surprises later.

Run a short survey across attorneys, paralegals, and billing staff covering matter intake, time entry, conflict checks, document assembly, and trust accounting friction. The baseline measured here is what you will compare adoption against at sixty and ninety days post-launch.

Write down what the new system must handle (matters, time and billing, trust, document automation, intake) and what is explicitly out of scope. Set numeric criteria — e.g., time-entry compliance above 90%, monthly three-way reconciliation under 30 minutes. Capture implementation budget and ongoing license budget separately.

Score four to six vendors against the requirements list and cut to two or three finalists before scheduling demos. For mid-size firms common PMS shortlists include Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, Smokeball, Centerbase, and Filevine; for DMS, NetDocuments and iManage.

Insist demos walk through the firm's actual workflows — a litigation matter open with conflict check, an IOLTA disbursement, a pre-bill edit, an e-filing handoff. Generic sales demos hide gaps in trust accounting and document assembly that only surface at go-live.

Talk to two or three reference customers per finalist at firms of similar size and practice mix. Ask about the actual go-live experience, support response time on trust-account issues, and any features that did not work as demoed.

Record the chosen vendor and the key contract terms — license count, term length, data-portability obligations, and exit clauses. Save the executed contract in the firm's vendor folder for future renewal review.

Request the most recent SOC 2 Type II report (not Type I) and review the auditor's opinion, the testing period, and any noted exceptions. Type I attests to controls design only; Type II tests them over time, which is what Rule 1.6(c) reasonable safeguards expects.

Sign the DPA covering data residency, sub-processors, breach notification timing, and data return or deletion at contract end. Sensitive matter types (medical, immigration, family, criminal) may need rider language addressing additional confidentiality obligations.

Write a short memo describing the safeguards in place — encryption at rest and in transit, MFA, role-based access controls, audit logs, backup and recovery. This memo is the firm's defense if a client or bar inquiry asks how the firm meets Rule 1.6(c).

Build a field-by-field mapping from the legacy PMS to the new system: matter number, responsible attorney, fee structure, custom fields, related parties. Custom fields rarely have direct counterparts and require either consolidation or vendor configuration during the migration window.

IOLTA ledgers are the highest-risk data in the migration. Set an as-of cutover date, document opening balances per client matter, and obtain managing partner sign-off on the pre-migration balance set. Any post-migration discrepancy must reconcile back to this baseline.

Migrate a representative sample — open litigation, closed transactional, active trust, file-retention matters — into a sandbox tenant. Verify documents, time entries, client ledgers, and related-party links before scheduling production cutover.

Run the new system in production for two weeks with a single practice group — family law or transactional often work well because their matter volume is steady. Keep the legacy system writable in parallel only for the pilot group.

Run the monthly trust reconciliation in the new system: book balance, bank balance, and the sum of client ledgers must match to the penny. A penny off is a Rule 1.15 issue and blocks rollout.

Confirm the new system's filing integrations work with the courts the firm files in — PACER and CM/ECF for federal, NYSCEF, Texas eFile, or other state portals as relevant. Test a draft filing end-to-end before relying on the integration for a real deadline.

Document each tested workflow's pass/fail and any open issues. The managing partner and firm administrator both sign off before the firm-wide cutover is scheduled — pilot results drive whether to proceed, remediate, or extend.

Address every issue flagged in pilot sign-off before cutover — vendor configuration, data-mapping fixes, additional training, or in serious cases extending the pilot. Cutting over with known blockers is the most common cause of post-launch trust-account discrepancies.

Schedule the freeze for end-of-day Friday with cutover over the weekend. Communicate the freeze to all staff a week in advance — late time entries and trust transactions during the freeze must be queued and entered after cutover.

Run the production migration with the vendor's migration team on the line. Validate counts of matters, contacts, documents, time entries, and trust transactions at completion against the pre-migration extract before opening the system to staff.

Re-run the three-way reconciliation immediately after cutover, before any new transactions post. Post-migration balances must match the pre-migration baseline captured in the migration plan; any drift is investigated before staff resume trust activity.

Train attorneys, paralegals, and billing separately — they use different parts of the system. Cover time entry, conflict search, matter open, document assembly, pre-bill edit, and trust disbursement. Generic everyone-in-one-room training underserves all three groups.

Open a Teams or Slack channel staffed by the firm administrator and one paralegal champion for the first thirty days. Track recurring questions — these become the basis for follow-up training and the firm's internal knowledge base.

Run the third post-launch monthly trust reconciliation under managing-partner review. Three clean monthly reconciliations confirms the migration is fully settled and the new system is operating cleanly under Rule 1.15.

Run the same baseline survey used in assessment. Compare adoption metrics — time-entry compliance, conflict-check completion, pre-bill turnaround — against the success criteria set at the start of the project.