How It Works

Universal Migrator is software that your Migration Consultant will run on whatever computer (the "Migration Workstation") you want. This can be a computer in their office, your office, a data center, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or any other location. Data is copied directly from the source to the Migration Workstation and then transferred from the Migration Workstation to its final destination. Your firm's data never goes to/through Universal Migrator's computers/servers/networks. This keeps your data safe in transit and allows your Migration Consultant to comply with whatever security policies your organization requires.

The amount of time that every migration takes varies based on the app you're coming from, the app you're going to, the computer you're using, and how fast your internet connection is. (Obviously, if you're on dialup, the migration will take a while.) That said, when our recommended processes are followed, once the Migration Consultant starts the final migration, most organizations are live in their new system in less than 8 hours.

The best time is one that will give your team time to warmup into their new app in a relaxed, low-pressure environment.  

Because most migrations can be completed in 8 hours or less, the best time for most organizations to start their migration is at 3PM on a Thursday. This gives your Migration Consultant plenty of time to kick off the migration and let everything transfer so the migration is complete by 8AM on Friday morning.  

A Friday-morning go-live is ideal for most organizations because: 

• At most firms, Fridays are slower days and Mondays are crazy days 

• At most firms, there are high-achievers who will be using software over the weekend 

• Regardless of how much training your team has had, most people will still need hands-on experience to get comfortable with your new app. 

• By going live on a Friday morning, Friday and the weekend are essentially "Warm-Up" days so that when Monday comes around, your staff is already proficient and is not trying to adopt new software on the busiest day of their week. 

Of course every organization is different, but the above guidance will help you pick the time that works best for you. 

When your Migration Consultant follows our recommended processes, you will never be unable to work.

By default, the Universal Migrator software will transfer documents so they match what you see from your source system. This means: 

• Documents will be linked to the same client/matter 

• Documents will maintain their folder structure 

• Documents will have the same name they originally did 

• Documents will have their version-history stack rebuilt 

• Documents will have important metadata preserved
  

You might also want your Migration Consultant to do a bit of mass-cleanup.  For example:

• If a document is an Email, but not in a folder, put it in a \Emails\ folder 

• If there are folders named \Email\, \E-Mail\ and \Correspondence\ standardize them to simply \Emails\ 

• If a document has "MOT" in the file name but has no document type, assign the "Motions" document type. 

Your Migration Consultant can implement custom mappings and custom cleanups quite easily with just a little bit of SQL.

Universal Migrator allows your Migration Consultant to specify Slice-and-Dice rules that can exclude data however you want. You don't have to transfer everything. 

That said, unless there are compliance reasons as to why you legally cannot transfer everything (ie, a firm split), it is usually best practice to transfer everything. 

Sometimes, firms think it is cheaper to only migrate some data (for example, "Only migrate Open Matters"). This is usually not the case because most Migration Consultants bill based on their time involvement on a project; not the amount of data transferred. When you give your Migration Consultant Slice-and-Dice rules, you might be reducing the amount of time a computer spends moving electricity, but you're increasing the number of hours your Migration Consultant spends implementing the rules. 

Often times Slice-and-Dice rules can get overly complex. 

For example, a firm might start out with instructions like: 

• Transfer only Open Matters 

But after reviewing that list, they come up with an evolving set of complex rules like: 

• Transfer only Open Matters 

• ... and transfer ABC.001 and ABC.002 

• ... and transfer all of our PI cases 

• ... and transfer all of the cases where John Smith is the lead attorney 

• ... and transfer WMT.007 and WMT.009 because John Smith wasn't actually marked as the lead attorney but they're for one of his clients. 

• ... and transfer everything related to clients XYZ and XQR. 

In most situations, after thousands of dollars are spent on complex Slice-and-Dice rules, the firm has basically realized they want all their data transferred.

We generally advise firms that if they don't want something migrated, they should delete it, and if they don't want to delete it, that is a good indication it should be migrated. 

Universal Migrator will leave your source system perfectly in-tact.  Universal Migrator safely copies data from one app to another - everything in your old app will be exactly as you left it.  Have More Questions? Book a Meeting