What actually migrates when you change legal practice management software

When an Australian law firm changes practice management software, contacts, matters and documents usually migrate. Trust ledgers migrate properly only if the vendor reconciles them transaction by transaction. Precedents, workflows and reports get rebuilt, because merge fields are not portable. MatterFirst, a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, reconciles migrated trust records per matter to the cent.

Most migration advice concentrates on the wrong half of the problem. Contacts and matters are the easy part: they are rows, they export to CSV, and every vendor on your shortlist can load them. What decides whether your migration takes six weeks or six months is your trust records, your precedents and the workflows your staff built up over a decade.

This guide sets out what actually crosses over, what needs a human decision, what you will rebuild from scratch, and the questions that separate a vendor who has thought about this from one who has not.

Three buckets: moves, needs a decision, gets rebuilt

Every migration sorts your data into three buckets. Knowing which bucket a thing falls into before you start is most of the planning.

The rebuild column is not a failure of the software you chose. It is a property of the problem. A firm that budgets for it goes live on time. A firm that discovers it in week seven does not.

Trust records decide your timeline

If you take one thing from this guide, take this: your trust ledger is the constraint, and it is a legal constraint rather than a technical one.

Your obligation to produce trust records does not end when your software is switched off. Trust records must be retained for seven years from the last transaction entry or the finalisation of the matter, whichever is later, as set out on the MatterFirst migration page. Your external examiner will ask for them in that window whichever system you are running by then. Confirm the period with your own state regulator, because you carry the obligation, not your vendor.

That has four practical consequences.

Closing balances are not enough. A migration that brings across each matter's current trust balance leaves you unable to answer a question about a receipt in 2019. Ask every vendor whether trust history migrates at transaction level, and put the answer in writing.

Your source receipt and payment numbers have to survive. Your statutory trust register cites those numbers. If the new system renumbers them, your register points at nothing, and reconstructing the mapping later is expensive.

Transaction dates have to survive exactly. A migrated transaction that carries its import date instead of its original date is a defect, not a rounding error. The count of transactions carrying a changed date should be zero, and you should be shown that count.

Controlled money and transit money are separate problems. Controlled money reconciles as its own account. Transit money is not trust ledger money and should not sit in the trust balances.

The question that reveals the most is not "do you migrate trust records". Every vendor says yes. The question is: what happens when the source and the migrated ledger do not agree? A migration that reports a variance as a warning you can click past is a different product from one that stops.

What the vendors publish about migration

Each of these was checked against the vendor's own public material while writing this guide. Where a vendor does not publish a fact, the cell says so rather than guessing.

Two things are worth noting. A vendor that publishes its limits is giving you something useful: Smokeball stating that not all data migrates and that manual setup sits outside the migration scope helps you plan. And the split between customer-run and vendor-run migration drives what the project costs your firm in staff time, so decide which you want before you take a demo.

The FilePro and LawMaster question

If your firm runs FilePro or LawMaster, you are probably reading this because you have heard the platforms are closing.

Here is what is confirmed and what is not, as at the date of this article.

Actionstep publicly announced its acquisition of LawMaster and, later, its acquisition of FilePro. Those two announcements are on Actionstep's own newsroom and are not in dispute.

A close date of 31 December 2026 for FilePro is widely reported in the Australian legal technology market. We looked for that date stated publicly by Actionstep, on actionstep.com, on the Actionstep support site, and on filepro.com.au, and did not find it. MatterFirst's own migration page reaches the same conclusion and says so in the same terms. Both filepro.com.au and lawmaster.com.au were still live and actively marketing their products when this was written.

So the honest position is: treat the date as reported, not announced, and get your vendor's answer in writing. Ask for the last date the platform will be supported, the last date you can extract a full export, and what form that export takes. Those three answers, in an email, are worth more than any date circulating at a conference.

None of that argues for waiting. A migration takes three to six months from decision to live if you include a parallel run, so acting on a reported 2026 date is prudent rather than panicked. It argues for deciding on written facts.

A sequence that catches problems while they are cheap

The order matters more than the tooling.

1. Get your export early, while the old system still runs. Everything downstream is easier when you can look up a source record. An export you cannot obtain is the risk that ends firms' timelines, so test it first.
2. Land the raw export in staging before anything is interpreted. If a mapping decision changes in month three, you re-run it against data you already hold rather than begging a second export from a system that may be switched off.
3. Work the issue list against source identifiers. Every unresolved item should carry an id you can look up in the old system. Vague issue reports are unactionable.
4. Reconcile the trust ledger per account and per matter before anything else is signed off. Have it signed by whoever ran it and countersigned by your principal, then file it with your trust records.
5. Run both systems in parallel. The old system stays authoritative while the new one receives a delta. Clean nights accumulating is evidence. A vendor's assurance is not.
6. Cut over on a date you choose, once reconciliation is clean and the checklist is done, not on a date dictated by a renewal.
7. Keep the old export after cutover. A question about what the old system said in 2019 should still be answerable in 2030.

Firms that compress this almost always drop step five, and step five is the one that finds problems while they are still cheap to fix.

How MatterFirst handles this

MatterFirst is a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, built by North Cape Technology in Melbourne, and it publishes a specific migration path for firms leaving FilePro and LawMaster.

The migration is vendor-run rather than a tool your staff drive. It starts with a free analysis: you upload your export and the same engine that performs the migration reports what will map, what needs a decision and how long it will take, with nothing committed. Your data then lands in staging exactly as exported, before interpretation, so corrected mappings are re-run against data already held.

Trust handling is the part built to a stated standard. Every trust transaction migrates per matter, not as a closing balance. Source receipt and payment numbers are preserved exactly, transaction dates are preserved exactly, and controlled money reconciles as its own account with transit money kept out of trust balances. The reconciliation runs per account, per matter ledger and per transaction, source against migrated. An unaccounted-for transaction blocks the migration rather than warning about it. You receive a reconciliation report and a bridging statement documenting the changeover for your external examiner. This is evidence for your examiner, not an audit opinion, and it does not replace the external examination your legislation requires.

Around that sit the capabilities the migrated data lands in: matter management across all eight Australian jurisdictions, a trust compliance review workflow covering NSW, VIC, QLD and WA, document AI that extracts key terms from uploaded contracts, a document generation engine whose sections are deterministic by default, and finance and reporting. Data and AI processing run in the AWS region the firm chooses, Sydney by default, as set out on the security page.

Pricing is per workspace rather than per user, from $199 per month with users included, and every paid plan carries a monthly AI balance in Australian dollars that metered AI work draws down. Deterministic work, such as generating a document with no AI sections, draws down nothing. The rates are on the pricing and AI pricing pages. Detail on the two legacy paths sits at leaving FilePro and leaving LawMaster.

Who this suits, and who it does not

MatterFirst suits Australian firms of roughly two to twenty fee earners that need onshore hosting, state-based trust accounting and a documented migration off a legacy system, particularly firms with a long trust history they must be able to produce.

It suits you less well if your trust accounting sits in SA, TAS, ACT or NT and you specifically need the compliance review workflow, which covers NSW, VIC, QLD and WA. Matters can still be recorded in all eight jurisdictions. It also suits you less well today if a connector to PEXA, InfoTrack, MYOB or QuickBooks Online is a requirement on day one: those are listed as coming soon rather than available. The integrations connectable today are Xero, Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, plus a documented REST API with webhooks. Anyone whose conveyancing volume depends on a live PEXA connection should weigh that carefully, and the integrations page is the current list.

Frequently asked questions

Does my trust ledger history actually come across at transaction level, or just balances? It depends entirely on the vendor, which is why it is the first question to ask. MatterFirst migrates every trust transaction per matter with source receipt and payment numbers and original dates preserved, reconciled per account and per matter to the cent. Ask each vendor on your shortlist the same question and ask what happens when the numbers do not agree.

Is FilePro really closing on 31 December 2026? That date is widely reported but we could not find it stated publicly by Actionstep when checking actionstep.com, the Actionstep support site and filepro.com.au. Actionstep's acquisitions of FilePro and LawMaster are publicly announced. Ask Actionstep in writing for the supported-until date and the final export date.

How long does a practice management migration take? Three to six months from decision to live is realistic for a firm that includes a parallel run, and that is the range MatterFirst publishes. Firms that go faster usually skip the parallel run.

Will my document precedents come across? The text will. The automation will not. Merge fields are proprietary to each system, so precedents are rebuilt against the new system's fields. Budget for it explicitly, and treat it as an opportunity to retire the templates nobody uses.

Can we roll back if the migration goes wrong? With MatterFirst, up to cutover: a rollback removes exactly what the migration created, leaving your own work since go-live untouched. After cutover it is not reversible, because by then the old system is being switched off. Ask other vendors where their point of no return sits.

What should we ask a vendor that we would not think of? Ask what blocks a migration rather than warning about it, ask for a sample reconciliation report, and ask what happens to the export after cutover. The evaluation checklist has a fuller list.

The short version

Contacts, matters and documents move. Trust ledgers move properly only if the vendor reconciles them at transaction level and stops when the numbers disagree. Precedents, workflows and reports are rebuilt, and pretending otherwise is what blows up timelines.

If you are on FilePro or LawMaster, get the supported-until date and the final export date from Actionstep in writing rather than acting on a reported date, then start the export test now. The export is the one step that gets harder the longer you leave it.