Once you’ve chosen the right legal technology, it’s time to start preparing for the day you migrate your entire firm over to the new technology. If you do it well, the following 3 steps should be easy.
Preparing to migrate
- What to move first?
You should move the least-critical matters, including all their records first. This way, you get the hang of the process and deal with unforeseeable issues while the stake is still low. Choose the least critical matters, associated documents, and records, and migrate those first.
- Is your team ready?
Your staff will need to know how the new technology and processes work. You’ll need to have your paralegals, associates, administrators all ready for the change ahead of time.
- Keep data backed-up
Trial lawyers understand how important the case file is. To make sure your practice can continue during the time of migration, keep all of your data backed up on external storage. Even if you don’t have access to the data on your new cloud solution, your practice can run the way it has (business continuity).
Migrating
If you have planned migration in advance and spent enough time planning, the entire migration process should go smoothly. Of course, there will be unexpected issues, but these will be minimized.
- How are you moving your data?
You should use different techniques for copying everything over, depending on the size of your database. If you have a small database to migrate, you can just copy the data over using your internet connection.This approach will not work if you have large databases. You might have to wait for a very long data transfer from the cloud vendor to migrate. To deal with this, you could compress the data before sending it or allow remote access to your dedicated machine, where a team of migration experts can move your data to the cloud in less time.
- Security during migration
If security is important while on the cloud, it should be just as important when sending all that information. If you are using any temporary storage for sensitive data, it should be just as secure as your end destination.
Checking everything went well
This is the last step in this cloud migration checklist. Once you have migrated, you’ll need to make sure everything is working. This might not be as simple as you think.
You will check important things like:
- Are all your specified matters migrated over? Are all of your matter records such as documents, contacts, tasks, and calendar entries present?
- Test access-control, do all users have access to the correct data?
- Your vendor will run their own tests to ensure your data is securely on the cloud, but you should still run these additional tests yourself. Always better to be safe than sorry!
