For firms leaving FilePro or LawMaster

Your trust ledger comes with you, reconciled to the cent.

FilePro is reported to close on 31 December 2026, and Actionstep's migration windows for September and October are reported to be filling. The part that decides your migration is not your contact list: it is seven years of trust records and an external examiner who will ask for them.

  • Encrypted at rest and in transit
  • Australian data residency
  • Hosted on AWS
  • No lock-in contracts
  • Guided setup available
  • Your data exportable on request
Analyse your export, free Read the FilePro guide first

The dates that matter

FilePro reported close
31 December 2026

145 days from today. We could not find this stated publicly by Actionstep: confirm it with them in writing.

Trust record retention
7 years

From the last transaction entry or the finalisation of the matter, whichever is later. The obligation does not end when the software does.

Typical migration
3 to 6 months

Decision to live, including the export, mapping, a parallel run and training. Firms that compress it usually skip the parallel run, which is the part that catches problems while they are cheap.

What happens to your trust ledger

Every trust transaction moves, per matter, not just closing balances. Your source receipt and payment numbers are preserved exactly, because your statutory register cites them and an examiner will look for them. Transaction dates are preserved exactly: no migrated trust transaction carries a date other than the one your old system recorded.

Then it is reconciled. Per trust account, per matter ledger and per transaction, source against migrated, to the cent. Every transaction in your export is accounted for as migrated, deliberately excluded with a reason, or unaccounted for. An unaccounted-for transaction stops the migration: it is not a warning you can click past.

  • - Source receipt and payment numbers preserved exactly, and every one of them findable in MatterFirst afterwards.
  • - Transaction dates preserved exactly. The reconciliation counts how many transactions carry a different date, and that figure has to be zero.
  • - Controlled money reconciled as its own account. Transit money kept out of the trust balances and recorded in its own register, because it is not trust ledger money.
  • - A reconciliation report showing every account and every matter ledger, both balances, the variance and the transaction counts, attached to your records under a legal hold.
  • - A bridging statement documenting the changeover, which is what an external examiner asks for.
  • - Your old system's export kept in staging, so a question about what FilePro said in 2019 is still answerable after FilePro is gone.

What this is not. It is not an audit opinion, and it does not replace the external examination your legislation requires. It is evidence that the ledger in MatterFirst is the ledger that was in your old system, prepared so your examiner can check it.

Priced per user. Costed per matter.

FilePro was priced per file, and its customers have told the market loudly what they think of being moved onto a per user model. We are not going to pretend a per user price is a per file price. What we can do is the thing the per file price was actually useful for: telling you what each matter costs.

Every matter carries its own AI cost

Document processing, agent runs and bulk review are charged from an AI balance in Australian dollars, and every charge records the matter it belongs to. So a matter shows what it cost to run, and you can export that as a statement formatted for a disbursements ledger.

  • - The seat price covers the system. The balance covers the volume.
  • - A closed matter costs nothing to keep. A firm with a large archive and a small caseload pays for the caseload.
  • - Published rates, fixed until 1 August 2028, on a page you can read today.

Queensland Law Society Guidance Statement No. 37 treats per user and lump sum AI licence fees as practice overhead, and says per matter charging fits the usual definition of a disbursement more easily. We give you the per matter record. Whether it is recoverable is between you, your costs agreement and your client.

The full rate card is on our pricing page , which is more than any other Australian practice management vendor publishes.

How it runs

We run it. This is a done-for-you migration, not a tool your firm drives: our team does the mapping, the staged import, the reconciliation and the cutover, and you make the decisions and sign off at each step. The one part you do yourself is the first one, and you can do it right now without talking to anyone.

  1. 1

    Upload your export and get the analysis

    The same engine that runs the migration reads your export and reports what will map, what needs a decision and how long it will take. Nothing is committed.

  2. 2

    Your data lands in staging first

    Exactly as exported, before anything is interpreted. A mapping corrected in November is re-run over data already here rather than needing a second export from a system that has been switched off.

  3. 3

    We work the issues with you, then import

    We send you the issue list, and each issue carries the source id you can look up in your old system while it still exists. The import is safe to re-run: anything already imported is skipped.

  4. 4

    Reconcile the trust ledger

    Per account and per matter, to the cent. Signed by the operator, countersigned by your principal, filed with your trust records.

  5. 5

    Run both systems in parallel

    Your old system stays authoritative while a delta import runs nightly and four figures are compared. We send you each night's comparison, so you watch the clean nights accumulate rather than taking our word for it.

  6. 6

    Cut over on a date you choose

    One dated action we run for you, and only once the reconciliation is clean, nothing is blocking and the checklist is done. Reversible up to that point.

Questions

Does my trust ledger history actually come across, at transaction level?
Yes. Every trust transaction per matter, with your source receipt and payment numbers and original dates preserved exactly, reconciled per account and per matter to the cent. You get a reconciliation report and a bridging statement for your examiner. This is the question where vendor answers differ most, so ask it of everyone on your list and ask what happens when the numbers do not agree.
What if the migration finds a problem with our trust ledger?
It stops. An unaccounted-for trust transaction or a non-zero variance blocks the migration rather than warning about it, and a blocker cannot be ignored, only fixed. That is the point: finding it now, while your old system is still running, is the cheapest moment it will ever be findable.
Can we go back if it does not work?
Up to cutover, yes. A rollback deletes exactly what the migration created, using the identity map, so your own work since going live is untouched. After cutover it is not reversible, because by then your old system is being switched off and calling it reversible would be untrue.
What does not come across?
Document templates and precedents have to be rebuilt against our fields, because merge fields are not portable between systems. Automated court forms we do not have. Historical email usually lives in your mail system rather than your practice management system. Reports are rebuilt. The full list, derived from the code rather than written by hand, is on the switching pages.
How much does the migration cost?
The automated import is included in onboarding, whatever the volume. What is quoted is the manual work: template rebuilds, custom field mapping, and anything on the list that does not move by itself. We quote after seeing your export, because a quote given before anyone has looked at the data only ever moves one way.
Is it too late to start?
It is late rather than impossible. What decides it is usually how much trust ledger history has to move and in what form, so start with the analysis and get your external examiner's position early: that answer can make the whole project substantially smaller.
Where is my data stored?
In the AWS region your firm chooses. Sydney (ap-southeast-2) is the default for Australian firms. Matter data, documents, extraction and matter questions all stay in that region. The one exception is the first step of Document AI, reading the document itself, which runs on Azure AI Document Intelligence in Azure's Australia East region. Both regions are in Australia.
How much does MatterFirst cost?
Pricing is per workspace rather than per seat, starting at $199 per month for Solo. Each plan includes a set number of users, a monthly AI balance in Australian dollars, the client portal and automations. Extra users are billed only past the included seats. Full plan inclusions are on the pricing page.
Can I get my data out if I leave?
Yes. Your matters, contacts, documents and time records are exportable on request, and there is no lock-in contract. We would rather you were able to leave and chose not to.
Is there a free trial?
Yes, a 14 day guided trial on Solo, Practice or Firm. It is guided rather than self-serve because a practice management system tells you very little until it has your real matters in it, and we would rather help you load them than leave you looking at an empty workspace.
Who builds MatterFirst?
NorthCape Technology, a Melbourne-based software company. MatterFirst is built in Australia for Australian legal practice, which is why trust accounting and Xero are first-class rather than regional add-ons, and why PEXA and InfoTrack are on the roadmap rather than absent from it.
Is MatterFirst suitable for a firm of my size?
It is designed for solo practitioners up to firms of roughly twenty seats. Below that, Solo carries the full platform for one user. Above it, the platform works but you should expect to talk to us about migration and rollout rather than signing up online.

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