"We have two thousand templates. This will take at least eighteen months."

That assumption is the thing most migrations start with.

It's also the thing that stops most migrations from starting at all.

"All templates migrated" is the wrong success measure to plan against. It's the right answer to a question nobody on the partner committee is asking “when they'll see lawyers drafting on the new platform on a live deal?” The answer to that is 100 days, not eighteen months.

Big-bang migrations almost always slip

Firms that try to move everything at once spread the QA team across two thousand templates simultaneously. Every problem competes for the same resource. When something goes wrong  and on a migration of any size, something always does, there's no focused capacity to fix it. Project momentum stalls. The original 18-month plan becomes 24, then 30. Sponsors lose patience. Practice groups lose interest.

The firms that succeed don't do less. They do it in phases.

Not because they have lower ambition. Because phases work and big bangs don't.

What 100 days looks like

A top-tier firm we worked with had 1,200 templates across two legacy platforms and a decade of automation, from one-page letters to facility agreements with hundreds of conditional branches. They needed the whole portfolio on Avvoka without disrupting the lawyers who used it every day.

The plan ran in waves.

Day 0–30: audit complete. The templates being kept are decided. The templates being consolidated are flagged. The templates being retired in place are agreed. Wave one is scoped — the priority cohort, roughly 350 templates: high transaction volume, top-revenue practice groups, the highest-risk integrations.

Day 30–100: priority wave live. Not in a staging environment. On real deals, with real fee earners using them. This is the proof that matters - internally and in the room where next year's budget gets agreed.

Month 4–6: first ROI visible. Time per deal dropping. Middleware starting to retire. Practice groups advocating internally. The remaining 850 templates in build, in rolling batches by complexity.

Month 6–12: full portfolio live. Old platform retired. Templates maintained by the firm's own team, not by a consultant on a day rate.

The full migration was 12 months. The 100-day milestone was the part that proved it was worth doing.

Start with the right thirty templates

Which thirty templates generate the most matter revenue?

Start there. That's the 100-day project. That's the proof point that earns everything else. The other 1,170 follow once the playbook is established and the practice groups have stopped asking whether this is going to work.

The 18-month assumption isn't wrong because the work is faster than that. It's wrong because it measures the wrong milestone.

The thing the partners want to see and the thing that pays for the project, happens in three months, not eighteen.

The guide includes the programme timeline and phased methodology firms have used to hit the 100-day milestone without compromising the rest of the rollout. Download it here