As your firm transitions from Legatics 1 to Legatics 2, it's important to transfer existing matters efficiently to maintain continuity and leverage the enhanced features of the new platform.
This guide outlines the steps required to migrate your matters, ensuring data integrity and minimizing disruptions to your workflow. Whether you're managing lists, documents, or participants, this article will help you prepare and execute the transfer seamlessly.
Step-by-step demonstration
In this video, we will show you how to transfer your matters from Legatics 1 to Legatics 2 ensuring a smooth transition.
Since we published our step-by-step demonstration, we have made some improvements to our Export tool. Users will now receive a download link in their inbox, as large matters can sometimes take a while to be prepared for export. Please note that the link is only valid for 24 hours.
In this article
💻 Step 1 - Freeze and download your matter from Legatics 1
Before you export your matter from Legatics 1, we recommend that you make a copy of the participants and remove their access from the matter. By freezing matter access until it is ready for use on Legatics 2, or permanently if you're only exporting and storing it in your Document Management System (DMS), you're ensuring that no new data or documents will be added until you have finished transferring it.
Go to ‘Manage matter’ > ‘Manage users’ to view all the users participating in your matter. From here you can take a screenshot or print the page to save a copy of the existing participants, and you can remove any participant by clicking on the right side dropdown menu next to their entry on the users list, and selecting ‘Remove user from matter’.
Once all users have been removed from the matter, you can go ahead and export the matter by following the below steps:
1. Login to Legatics 1 and from the homepage, next to each matter, you will see the option to 'Export and delete matter'. Clicking that button will give you the option to export every list into a word document, every file and the audit trail from the matter.
2. When the matter export is ready, you will receive an email with a link to download the matter. Depending on how large your matter is, this can take a while, however, the download link will be available to use for 24 hours. All you need to do is open the link once you receive it, and you'll be redirected to the export page where you can click to download. A zip folder will be downloaded to your computer.
If you are only looking to export and store your matter data, then this has been the last step of the process. If you are looking to transfer your matter data to Legatics 2, keep on reading the next steps from our guide.
3. Once you have exported the data, familiarise yourself with the folder structure of the download. You'll be using these files to re-create your list in Legatics using our Word table importer!
4. You're now ready to move onto the next step.
It used to be that matter administrators needed to add other matter administrators to make the export and delete option available. We have recently changed this so that any system administrator can add themselves or another user from the organisation to a matter as a matter administrator.
If you have any questions regarding how this works please contact support@legatics.com.
🏗️ Step 2 - Getting ready
Before recreating the matter in Legatics 2, there are a few steps that you need to take to get ready.
A - Create an account
This is the easiest part! Simply follow the instructions here.
If you're unsure of which URL to access please contact support@legatics.com.
Most customers can access Legatics using app.legatics.com, however, some firms have a private instance which means the URL will be different.
B - Make a copy of the data
If you are planning to import every version of each document into Legatics 2 we recommend making a copy of the folder you have just exported from Legatics 1.
This means that you can delete versions from the folder once you've uploaded them to Legatics 2. It will make it easier to track whether a document is in Legatics 2.
The reason we recommend making a copy is to ensure that all versions of your documents are retained somewhere safe!
C - Create "list templates"
This step should be done once for each module type on Legatics 1. The person creating these must be a template administrator.
If you're migrating multiple matters this step is really important and will help you save lots of time.
If only one or two matters are being migrated by the firm then you can skip this step.
We recommend creating a list template for each 'module' you've used on Legatics 1. For example, a CP Checklist template and a Documents list.
Creating a list template is super simple. Simply follow these instructions.
Within each list template you will need to:
Add/remove the columns needed to replicate structure on Legatics 1.
Order, size and rename your columns to match the structure on Legatics 1.
Our lists in Legatics 2 have flexible columns. To successfully import your list data, it's helpful to arrange our lists to replicate the structure from Legatics 1.
Set the statuses for your status column (don't worry if your statuses differ across matters, having something basic to start from is easier than starting from scratch every time)
Don't forget to publish your list template once complete so that all users from your organisation can use it!
♻️ Step 3 - Transferring your matters
A - Create a live matter
Creating a matter is super simple. Simply follow these instructions. When creating the matter you should:
Name: Give it a proper name
Demo/live: Mark it as a live matter. This is important because you cannot change the status once created.
Data: Fill in all the data in the matter creation pop-up accurately
B - Add roles and organisations
Unfortunately, you'll need to do this manually. We don't have a way to import this data from an Excel file.
A good way to do this would be to have the matter open in both Legatics 1 and 2 so that you can copy over the data easily and replicate the set-up.
Managing your participants in Legatics 2 is done all within one page.
To set-up your:
Roles: Follow these instructions
Organisations: Follow these instructions
C - Create your lists from your 'template' list
Simply create a list from your template using our "Template list" feature.
When you're creating your list:
It's a good time to set who can see the list (learn more here)
Make sure you bring across all the columns from the template
Now that your list is created, it's time to transfer data from your Word table into the list.
To import from:
Follow these instructions
OR
If you haven't created list templates because you're only migrating one or two matters, follow the below steps.
Create your list from a 'Word table'.
Note: All columns will be imported as free text columns.
You will need to:
Add a files columns to allow you to upload files to your list.
Add a status column if your matter is still ongoing. This will allow you to benefit from the status functionality and notifications.
D - Upload versions
Legatics doesn't have a "bulk upload" feature for files (our files live in rows, so bulk uploading is tricky to do).
But, don't worry, uploading documents is easy! We recommend "dragging and dropping" your versions into Legatics 2 (instead of manually selecting them in your file explorer).
When doing this, remember that:
Versions: Legatics supports versioning. To version a document, simply drag the new version over top of the existing version (don't upload it as a new document!).
Sidebar: We've got a sidebar, which has a bigger "drag zone" for files. To open the sidebar, click on the box at the far left of your list.
E - Apply permissions
Our lists support permissions in a number of places. Generally, we recommend keeping this simple and restricting access at the list level.
If you do need more granular control, keep in mind that you can set permissions inside a list as follows:
Sections
Rows
Columns
Cells (only when the column is a file, status or comments column)
F - Turn on email notifications
Legatics supports email notifications. These emails summarise, across a user's matters, the actions assigned to them since their last email (the frequency is set by the user).
To ensure that these notifications include information about the matter, you need to enable this.
G - Add users
Simply follow the instructions here!
Once you add a user to your matter, they'll get access to it. This is why we recommend doing this step once the matter is fully set-up and ready to be worked on.
You may want to add other internal users before this, so they can check the matter set-up.
❌ Transfer Limitations
There are some elements of your matter which cannot be transferred over to Legatics 2. These are detailed out below:
Excluded data | Explanation |
iManage links | These rely on an iManage connection, which can’t be transferred unless you upload these directly from iManage instead of from the download from Legatics 1 |
Audit trail | You can export this and upload it as a document to the matter |
Comments timestamp | Comments are dated when they are created and can’t be backdated |
Comments author | Will show the name of the user who did the migration |
Signature pages | Legatics 2 currently can’t store signature pages. They are not compatible with our new wet ink signing experience |
Automatic actions | These work differently on Legatics 2 |
Last activity | Date there was last activity in the matter. The date of last activity will be the date we complete the migration |
If you have any questions on the above please contact support@legatics.com.