FilePro is closing on 31 December 2026: what Australian firms need to do

FilePro is reported to close on 31 December 2026. From that date, compliance updates stop and the Electronic File Purchase portal closes permanently. Every Australian firm still on FilePro needs to choose a replacement, extract its matter, document and trust records, and confirm the date directly with Actionstep. If you have not started, the constraint is time rather than options.

That is the short answer. The rest of this article is the detail, including one thing about the date itself that we think you should know before you plan around it.

Where this date comes from, and why we are telling you

We sell practice management software. Actionstep is a competitor. So you should not take our word about their plans, and we would rather hand you the sourcing than ask you to trust us.

Here is what we found. The 31 December 2026 date is widely repeated online, but we could not find it stated publicly by Actionstep anywhere. Every trail we followed led back to the same publisher: Law Support Australia, whose comparison content is written by someone who spent 27 years in FilePro roles and who now resells a competing product.

That is not a reason to disbelieve it. They are close to this market, firms report being notified directly by Actionstep, and nothing we found contradicts the date. It is a reason to say plainly which claims are load-bearing and which are second-hand:

What to do with this: ask your Actionstep account manager to confirm the close date in writing, and ask two follow-up questions while you have them. How long do you keep read access after the date, and what happens to data you have not extracted by then. Those answers change your plan more than the date does.

How FilePro got here

FilePro is a Perth business with a long history in Australian practice, particularly in conveyancing. Actionstep, a New Zealand company, acquired it on 31 August 2023. That followed the acquisition of LawMaster on 13 September 2022, which had close to 4,000 daily subscribers at the time.

At the FilePro acquisition, Actionstep said it would "accelerate the availability of cloud technology for FilePro customers". At the LawMaster acquisition a year earlier, it said the businesses would "continue to operate as separate businesses".

Three years on, both products are reported to be winding down and both customer bases are being pointed at Actionstep's own platform. We are not going to characterise that as anything other than what it is: an ordinary software consolidation, which is what usually happens after this kind of acquisition. Firms should plan against what is happening rather than against what was said in the press release, but there is no scandal here.

What actually stops working

Three things, and they are not equally serious.

Compliance updates stop. This is the one that matters. A trust accounting system that no longer receives regulatory updates is a system that will drift out of alignment with your obligations, quietly, and you will not get a warning. This is why "just keep running it read-only" is a much weaker answer for practice management software than it is for most business software.

The Electronic File Purchase portal closes permanently. If you use it, plan for its absence separately. Portal closures rarely come with an export.

Support ends. Ordinary and survivable if you have already moved.

The part most migration plans miss

Ask a firm what it is migrating and you will hear about matters, documents and contacts. Ask what it is doing about seven years of trust ledger history and the conversation usually stops.

Under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, section 147, trust records must be kept for seven years after the last transaction entry in the record, or after the matter is finalised, whichever is later. The Uniform General Rules 2015, rule 47, require a trust account ledger with a separate ledger account for each person, in each matter for which trust money was received.

The obligation attaches to the records, not to the software holding them. Your vendor switching off its product does not discharge it. Neither does moving to a new one.

So the question you have to answer, before you choose anything, is: where will seven years of transaction-level trust ledger live, and will your external examiner accept it in that form?

There are usually three workable answers. A full migration of trust history into the new system. A static archive your examiner has agreed to accept. Or a hybrid, where recent matters migrate and older ones are archived. All three are fine. Discovering in November that you assumed the first and got none of them is not.

Worth doing this week: ring your external examiner and ask what they will accept. It is a ten minute call, the answer constrains every option you have, and almost nobody makes it early.

The Uniform Law applies in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. Other states and territories have their own legislation with broadly similar obligations. Confirm your position with your own regulator rather than with any software vendor, including us. None of this is legal advice.

What to get out while FilePro is still running

Extraction happens once, and it happens while the old system still works. A gap found in February 2027 cannot be filled.

• The full trust ledger, per matter, at transaction level. Not closing balances and not a summary report.
• Trust reconciliations and external examination records. These often live in a reporting module rather than in an export, which is exactly why they get missed.
• Matter records with parties, key dates and status, including the archive. Firms migrate open files and later discover the archive was the part carrying the retention obligation.
• Documents with their matter association intact. A folder of 400,000 files with no link back to the matter is technically an export and practically a loss. Test this on a sample before you accept the extract.
• Precedents and templates. Usually the most refined asset a long-standing firm owns, and the one no migration package rebuilds for you.
• Time, work in progress and billing history. Unbilled WIP especially. It sits between systems, so it is the item most often left behind, and it is money.
• A written statement of what the export does not include. Ask for this specifically. The useful answer is the list of things that do not come out, and no vendor volunteers it unprompted.

How long this actually takes

For a small firm, plan on three to six months from decision to live: extraction, mapping, a parallel run, and training. Larger or more complex practices take longer.

Firms that compress the timeline almost always do it by dropping the parallel run. That is understandable and it is the wrong cut. The parallel period is where you find out that a report is missing, a ledger does not reconcile, or a document set lost its matter association, at a point when the old system is still there to check against.

If your timeline no longer has room for a parallel run, that is worth treating as information about the timeline rather than about the parallel run.

Questions to ask every vendor, including us

On contract terms specifically, published pricing is thin in this market. Smokeball publishes four plans at $49, $99, $189 and $239 per user per month excluding GST, on 36 month terms, with AutoTime a further $39 per month below the top tier. LEAP, Clio and Actionstep do not publish pricing. We are not going to guess at numbers we cannot point at, which is also why we do not publish competitor pricing comparisons we cannot source. Figures checked 28 July 2026.

Do you have to move to Actionstep?

No. Actionstep owns FilePro and is the default path, which is convenient rather than compulsory. Convenience is a real advantage when the calendar is tight, and for some firms it will be the right call. It is worth knowing it is a choice.

The practical constraint on choosing something else is time, not permission. A firm starting a genuine evaluation now, with a December deadline, is running a compressed process. That is doable. It is not comfortable.

Where MatterFirst honestly fits, and where it does not

MatterFirst is a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, built by NorthCape Technology, covering matters, documents, trust accounting, billing and a client portal, with data hosted in the AWS region the firm chooses.

For a firm leaving FilePro, here is the honest position.

What imports today: contacts, matters and documents, from CSV with a staged review before anything commits. Time entries, invoices and billing codes. Lead records. Matter workflows are rebuilt in the visual builder, which is design work rather than a data import.

What is still in build: the importer for historical trust ledger data. MatterFirst has full trust accounting today, but the import path for prior trust transactions has not shipped yet. It is in active development and targeted to land ahead of the December close date. PEXA and InfoTrack are also set up with us rather than switched on by the firm, so start that conversation early rather than late.

We are drawing that line deliberately rather than blurring it. "Coming soon" on a marketing page is worth nothing to a firm planning a cutover. If trust history has to come with you, ask us where the importer is up to and we will tell you what is actually done and what is not. That is a fair question to put to every vendor on your shortlist, and you should ask all of them, because the answers vary more than the marketing does.

We have written the same guidance up as a standing page at /migrate/filepro, with the extraction checklist and the vendor questions in a form you can work through.

Frequently asked questions

When does FilePro shut down? FilePro is reported to close on 31 December 2026, with compliance updates stopping and the Electronic File Purchase portal closing permanently on that date. We could not find the date stated publicly by Actionstep, so confirm it with them in writing.

Do I have to migrate to Actionstep? No. Actionstep owns FilePro and is the default migration path, but Australian firms leaving FilePro can choose any platform. The practical constraint is the calendar rather than permission.

What happens to my trust account records when FilePro closes? The obligation to keep them does not end when the software does. Under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, trust records must be kept for seven years after the last transaction entry or the finalisation of the matter, whichever is later. You need those records somewhere you can produce them from, in a form your external examiner will accept.

How long does a practice management migration take? Three to six months from decision to live for a small firm, including extraction, mapping, a parallel run and training. Larger practices take longer.

Is it too late to start a FilePro migration? It is late, not impossible. A firm starting now is running a compressed process rather than an impossible one, and what usually decides it is how much trust ledger history has to move and in what form. Talk to vendors this month rather than next, and get your external examiner's position early, because it can make the whole project substantially smaller.

Can I keep running FilePro after the close date? Compliance updates are reported to stop at close, which makes running it as a live trust accounting system a risk rather than a fallback. Ask Actionstep specifically what read access survives the date.

Sources

• Actionstep, "Actionstep Acquires Australian Legal Software Company FilePro" (the company concerned)
• Actionstep, "Actionstep Acquires Legal Software Company LawMaster" (the company concerned)
• Law Support Australia, "FilePro Sunset 2026" (a vendor that sells a competing product)
• Legal Profession Uniform Law, section 147 (legislation)
• Legal Profession Uniform General Rules 2015, rule 47 (legislation)
• Smokeball published pricing (the company concerned)

Facts checked 29 July 2026. If you find something here that is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it.