Streamlining Legal Accounting: A Guide to Migrating to Clio

You may have heard that I've written a book and it's actually for attorneys and it's steps to help them to migrate to a more future-ready law firm. But this is a post about data migration because this is a step that as bookkeepers we're able to help our clients really get to that place of being a modern law firm. So there'll be a link in below in this post to If you'd like to order my book, it'll be out by the time this post drops. But I wanted to really talk about streamlining your legal accounting and helping that client really make that step to move from maybe a spreadsheet or maybe a software that's not working for their firm and moving into Clio. Though Clio's got its own little intricacies of what will make it a little bit more complex to move from point A to point B. It's really about, with data migration, it's really about what data are you moving? What date are you moving the data forward? When will the client start billing in the new software, Clio? When will they start tracking time? So that line in the sand, as we like to call it, is when do they start tracking time? They typically start tracking time a month before they do their billing. So for example, If a client is moving off of another software in December and they wanna start billing, doing their billing in January, they would need to start tracking their time in December to bill in January if that's their workflow. Some people do actually do the billing in the month of January and then they close off January and they bill January in February. So I mean, that's another way of looking at it. It depends on the law firm's workflow. It depends on their billing, depends on their type of billing, depends on when they do their billing. Some do it multiple times during the year. During the month and some of them do it, most of them do it at the end of the month. And they actually do the full month and they do the billing for the prior month in the beginning of the next month. So in that case, you need to nail that down with the client. So let's just say, for example, they're tracking everything on a spreadsheet and they want to make the leap to legal software. They're growing and they really want to have a more robust product and they want to move to Clio. Once you start to work with the data migration team, if the client floats this idea by you, make sure you step forward as a bookkeeper and you say, look, I'm gonna take control of this. I'm gonna help you through this process. I'm gonna be able to answer the questions for the client that they may have or they might not be able to answer because it's not part of what they do and help them through it. So if they're going to figure out what software they want and they do land in Clio, you wanna make sure that you are on every piece of correspondence on that migration. The client's gonna have to pay Clio for the data migration, but you want to be upfront and center and proactive for the client. A lot of times it'll get lost in the step that the client doesn't include you in the correspondence with the migration team, and then things can go really south from there. You want to be a part of how the data is mapped, how the data is presented, what it's going to look like. You want to ask the data migration team. I don't care if the firm's small. I want a sampling. I want this data to be a small sampling pulled out of the data that they're bringing it from. Say they're bringing it from CosmoLex or something like that. I want them pulling that data out. I want them to push in a few names, and I want the client to have eyes on it to see it's the way they want to see it presented. A lot of times what happens is they might be in XYZ software. That might say file name, file number. Maybe they're able to bill at the client level and they're able to bill at the matter level. They get into Clio, it's totally different. You want them to have that understanding of what it's going to look like. And then once you get there, any custom fields, that's the beauty of Clio. You've got custom fields and you've also got a lot of, it's an open API. So there's a lot of other sources that are, there's other software you can add and layer into it. Kind of like QuickBooks, we layer all these pieces on to make it specific to the firm. So you want to be front and center on all of those conversations. You want to understand what software they're adding in to make it more robust for the firm. Ask those questions, reach out to the folks at Clio, find out if there's some kind of software that can help your client and maybe automate other parts of what they do. It might not have anything to do with you, but you can actually get in front of those conversations and learn about— there's a lot of software that can— Mm-hmm. Work and integrate with Clio. That's the beauty of it. You really need to have a good understanding of how Clio works, making that connection, back coding it into the accounts. So when the light switch is turned on and Clio would start to become a working piece of your workflow that you're able to follow all of that. You want to get that data sampling, have the client approve it, and then have Clio bring it all over. It's different than LeanLaw. LeanLaw is a two-way sync. So once we make those connections, the data is read in the file and any opening balances are read by QuickBooks and read by LeanLaw. In Clio, it doesn't work that way. You actually have to go in and put those opening balances in. And I'll give you a little snippet or a picture of what that looks like in the article that's attached to this video. But you just want to get that opening balances in and then you want to reconcile QuickBooks to the bank, and then reconcile Clio. And all those pieces are gonna match the bank, QuickBooks, and Clio. There's your three-way reconciliation. Then you'll know you're ready to go forward with the work and using the product. Training is another piece. I find sometimes that if you are working with a bookkeeper, if you're in a mid— working with a mid-sized firm and there's a bookkeeper that's support staff to your firm, you want to have a good relationship with them and help them through the transition. They may be in something like time slips or some other software that's very old-fashioned and now you're bringing them into this beautiful product of Clio, but they might feel a little intimidated, offer to help them. Those are probably the best tips that I have. You really want to, once QuickBooks is, and once Clio is fully integrated and fully the migration is over, you want to validate that that data came in properly. That if you had, I don't know, 200 open matters on your list to be, imported into Clio, that they're all there at the end of the day and they all show. You want to make sure that none were missed. Make sure that that list that you give Clio is clean, that you don't have accounts on there that are similar or mistyped or named, but they're the same client. You wanna make sure it's clean data coming in. You also want to make sure that all those numbers are in. And if they did an import of work in process, you wanna make sure that that number validates back to what you had in the old software. So that line in the sand becomes done on this date, starting on this date with the same data so that it's a seamless integration. And this is stuff that we talk about in our Law Lab group, the Accountants Law Lab. If you're interested, please join us. It's a mastermind group and we have a lot of fun talking there. But I hope this article is helpful and can help you move forward with how to do data migration. It's really stepped through in the article, but if you, if you just follow all the tips in this video, you'll be on the right path.