In this video Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping walks viewers through the end‑to‑end data migration process for law firms, emphasizing why a team approach is essential given the variety of legacy platforms (PC Law, Thomson Reuters, Juris, MyCase, PracticePanther, Cosmolex). She explains how data is extracted—often as CSV, Excel, or PDF—and how the core data sets (client, vendor, employee lists) form the "bones" of the migration. A major focus is rebuilding and standardizing the chart of accounts using a pre‑designed, flexible structure that can be merged with each firm’s existing equity and bank accounts. The client list is highlighted as the most complex element, especially for multi‑year matters, and once migrated, the backend of each matter is reconstructed. Linda then details the three‑way bank reconciliation process, trust‑account alignment, and the importance of planning reporting and KPI needs early, including the use of additional apps for advanced reporting beyond QuickBooks. She concludes with the benefits of automation: reduced manual work, cost savings from moving off expensive desktop systems, streamlined workflows via Intuit Merchant Services or LawPay, and the ability to re‑allocate staff to higher‑value tasks. The video ends with a call to action to visit her website for more details and to reach out for migration assistance.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. Today's video is all about data migration, the questions we get asked, the steps that are involved, and how to navigate through the process because With law firms, this can tend to be a really big process. One of the questions Sarah and I get asked all the time, because I partnered with Sarah Prevost, she's from Vintage Labs, and we formulated a company called The Proper Trust. And it's truly a job that you want to have more than one person on and one more than one eye, a set of eyes, more than one brain, because with a lot of the different platforms that we've migrated people from different circumstances come up. For example, PC Law, that's a program that we have taken people off of. It's desktop. Thomson Reuters has its pluses and its minuses. It has its different ways of doing it. And we work with obviously QuickBooks and LeanLaw as our platform, our desired platform. And when we move people off of PC Law, it's got some reports that come out in CSV or Excel. Some reports are just flat out old school looking PDF. We— you could move it into Excel, but the way the pattern of the data comes out, it's very difficult to really manipulate it. And it really comes to manipulation of the data when you're doing that data migration. You get the client list out, you get the vendor list out, you get the employee list out. Those are the basic bones you use. We generally, with a lot of the law firms, We take their chart of accounts and then we will take our basic one and we just adapt it because we have a beautiful chart of accounts that will allow us to— and it works for all the law firms. And it's just, it's just, we've created it. It's laid out really well. It's got the subaccounts and then we just take it and we meld it into what the client has currently, you know, to their equity accounts, to their specifics, their bank accounts. And they then generally they adapt to our process. And most of the law firms, their chart of accounts— well, most clients that have ever done anything that have had to rebuild, I've always had to rebuild the chart of accounts because it's usually grown into kind of a hot mess. So we come from that place, start with the bones, and then we start to migrate. Now the migration, the biggest piece of the migration would tend to be the client list for sure, because there's a lot of details in these specialized programs like Juris or MyCase, PracticePanther, Cosmolex. We've done all of these as data migrations. And there's— the big piece of it is how does the data come out of the program that they're in now? And how do we get it into LeanLaw so that we can pull that data into QuickBooks? Those are the steps. Once we get the client list in, now we start to rebuild the backend of the matter. So a lot of these matters can— if it's estate planning, can go on for multiple, multiple years. And we have to rebuild that data back in. So we have a team behind us that helps us get the data in, we work to get the data in ourselves, we have to make sure everything aligns, the trust account has to match the bank account. And we'll get into that 3-way bank reconciliation, which I'll dive into a little bit more next week, and what's involved in that. But those are the key points, right? The key things. And then the ultimate key piece that is the pinnacle of the entire job that doesn't usually get to happen until the very end, but the forethought has to come when we start to put the package together is how do we want all the pieces laid out if the client has a need for reporting that beyond your typical reporting. So a lot of these bigger firms, they have different styles of compensation programs. So LeanLaw does have some of those reports inside of it, housed in it, but we have some other ones that are a little more tricky. And then also, how do you want to work with your KPIs or anything else like that, your key performance indicators? What does the client need to study or look at? And a lot of times that involves another app, and we get into more high-level reporting that more than what you can actually get out of QuickBooks. So there's apps, there's workflow, there's working with the client. This is a big undertaking. But the big part of that large undertaking is the fact that we get the end result is we have clients that are so happy that they don't have as many processes to get the same— to the same endgame. They have— we've had success where we've had clients that they've taken people off of jobs that were manual processes because a lot of these law firms still do things old-school style. They still have tons of paper. They still have very clunky workflows. And we get them in a more automated workflow. And a lot of times they can actually reduce their staff or reshift their staff. So it's been mostly people reshifting their staff, putting them on something that's more important than gathering up all the checks to put them in the bank. We put them into the Intuit Merchant Services so they can just automate that, or into LawPay. So there's a lot of pluses to this and there's a lot of points to this. If you are interested at all in hearing more about data migration, if you've been thinking about doing this and, you know, we're all home right now and we're sitting down and we're looking at processes and maybe even looking at really high cost to some of those older softwares. The PC Law or the Juris are really expensive to maintain. They're in the thousands and thousands of dollars. You can even shrink that cost down by moving to the cloud, automating, moving forward, staying current with the times and taking in and embracing technology in your law firm. So I hope that's helpful. It kind of gives you a little overlay. The blog will tell you a little bit more details. Come on to my website if you're interested. There's a page that kind of shows the workflow. We don't show everything, but it shows the basics of it. And you can watch the video about all the questions people ask: what's it going to cost? How long will it take? When's the best time? Anytime. Nothing like the present is the best time to do it. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful day. And if you have any questions, please reach out. If you have— if you're in the middle of doing a data migration and you need some assistance, reach out. Thanks for watching. Bye now. Bye.
