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Moving on from legacy document automation?
The migration playbook from dozens of law firm switches on how to move platforms without disrupting the lawyers who depend on them.
The migration playbook from dozens of law firm switches on how to move platforms without disrupting the lawyers who depend on them.
Summary
Nobody leaves a document automation platform because of the licence fee. They leave because one person builds every template and everything queues behind them. Because the integrations were custom-coded by someone who has since left. Because the infrastructure needs maintaining. Because the whole environment was designed before anyone expected AI to come near drafting. The real cost sits in the people and the middleware around the platform, in one firm's case, over £100,000 a year in middleware alone.
Migration is where firms hesitate, and reasonably so. This guide is the playbook built from dozens of moves off first-generation tools: what to audit, what to move first, how long to run both systems side by side, and what your lawyers will and won't notice on the day the switch happens.
What's inside
Why firms are switching now. The costs that never appear on the licence: maintenance headcount, external consultants, middleware, and the single-specialist bottleneck that slows every practice group behind it.
Planning the transition. The 80/20 template audit, who belongs in the room, what to move first and what to move last, and why a two-to-four month parallel run beats a hard cutover.
What actually changes for your lawyers. Every artefact you're moving, line by line: what the lawyer sees afterwards and what the template team gains. Rebuild, don't lift-and-shift.
Driving adoption. Why technology is the easy part, how to prove value inside the first 30 days, and the two-tier training model that separates most lawyers from template owners.
A worked timeline. Audit complete by day 30, the revenue-critical wave live by day 100, ROI visible by month six, your own team maintaining it independently by month twelve.
Where to start
Start with the template audit, before you talk to any vendor, us included. Pull your usage data and find the 20% of templates carrying the volume. Most firms find far less genuine dependency than they feared, and the migration becomes useful political cover for retiring the rest.
If you've already decided to move and what worries you is the lawyers rather than the technology, go straight to the adoption section. User resistance, not technical failure, is what sinks most of these projects.
Firms that migrate well don't move everything all at once. They move the templates that earn, prove it inside a quarter, and let the rest follow.
Summary
Nobody leaves a document automation platform because of the licence fee. They leave because one person builds every template and everything queues behind them. Because the integrations were custom-coded by someone who has since left. Because the infrastructure needs maintaining. Because the whole environment was designed before anyone expected AI to come near drafting. The real cost sits in the people and the middleware around the platform, in one firm's case, over £100,000 a year in middleware alone.
Migration is where firms hesitate, and reasonably so. This guide is the playbook built from dozens of moves off first-generation tools: what to audit, what to move first, how long to run both systems side by side, and what your lawyers will and won't notice on the day the switch happens.
What's inside
Why firms are switching now. The costs that never appear on the licence: maintenance headcount, external consultants, middleware, and the single-specialist bottleneck that slows every practice group behind it.
Planning the transition. The 80/20 template audit, who belongs in the room, what to move first and what to move last, and why a two-to-four month parallel run beats a hard cutover.
What actually changes for your lawyers. Every artefact you're moving, line by line: what the lawyer sees afterwards and what the template team gains. Rebuild, don't lift-and-shift.
Driving adoption. Why technology is the easy part, how to prove value inside the first 30 days, and the two-tier training model that separates most lawyers from template owners.
A worked timeline. Audit complete by day 30, the revenue-critical wave live by day 100, ROI visible by month six, your own team maintaining it independently by month twelve.
Where to start
Start with the template audit, before you talk to any vendor, us included. Pull your usage data and find the 20% of templates carrying the volume. Most firms find far less genuine dependency than they feared, and the migration becomes useful political cover for retiring the rest.
If you've already decided to move and what worries you is the lawyers rather than the technology, go straight to the adoption section. User resistance, not technical failure, is what sinks most of these projects.
Firms that migrate well don't move everything all at once. They move the templates that earn, prove it inside a quarter, and let the rest follow.
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