You have signed with Clio and someone has to make sure every contact, matter, note, document, time entry and trust balance arrives intact. This is the checklist we work from. It applies to any source; the pair-specific quirks are on pages like PracticePanther to Clio and Filevine to Clio, and the overview of every pair is at migrations.
Decide what does not move
Before exporting anything, decide what stays behind. Closed matters older than your retention policy can be archived as PDF and a spreadsheet instead of migrated as live records. Contacts with no matters and no activity in five years are usually noise. Custom fields created for one case in 2017 and never used again die here.
Make three lists: migrate as live data, migrate as archive (a read-only export you keep), and drop. This decision alone removes most of the garbage that would otherwise greet your team in the new system.
Freeze schema changes in the old system from this point. No new custom fields, no renamed matter types, no new users.
Export everything, then count it
Export each record type separately, in CSV where possible, and record the row count of each file in a reconciliation sheet. The record types for a Clio migration are: contacts (people and companies, with relationships), matters (with status, responsible attorney, practice area, open and close dates), matter-level and contact-level custom fields, calendar events (including recurrences and reminders), tasks (with assignee, due date and status), notes (matter and contact), documents (with folder structure and the matter they belong to), communications and emails if your old system stored them, time entries and expenses (billed and unbilled), invoices and payments, and trust ledger transactions per client and matter.
Documents export as a folder tree, not a CSV; export the index alongside so each file can be tied back to a matter. Calendar recurrences often export as a single row that loses the repeat pattern; check yours.
Also capture things that do not export: the user list and roles, the matter numbering scheme, billing rates per user and per matter, invoice templates, and any workflow or automation rules. These get rebuilt by hand in Clio.
Map your fields to Clio's objects
Clio's structure is Contacts (Person or Company), Matters, Activities (time and expense entries), Calendar Entries, Tasks, Notes, Documents, Bills and Trust transactions, plus Custom Fields at the contact and matter level. Build a mapping sheet with one row per source field: source object, source field name, destination object, destination field, data type, transformation rule, and a note on anything lossy.
Custom fields are where mapping takes time. Clio custom fields have types (text, number, date, checkbox, picklist, contact, URL, currency, and so on), and a source picklist with values the destination does not have will need either new values or a text field. Matter-level fields also need a practice area assignment in Clio, so group them by the practice areas that actually use them.
Contacts need a person-versus-company decision and a relationship model. If your old system stored "opposing counsel" as free text on the matter, plan to create Contact records and relate them. Status values, matter stages and task categories need explicit value maps. If you are migrating trust balances, trust accounting data migration has its own page because it is the one area where a small mapping error is a compliance problem.
Run the test migration into a throwaway account
Never import into your production Clio account first. Use a trial or sandbox account and load a representative sample: fifty matters across every practice area, with their contacts, notes, documents, calendar and billing history.
Then have the people who will use the system open those matters and look. Do the notes show the right author and date, or does everything say "imported by admin on cutover day"? Did the calendar recurrence come through or did it produce one event? Are documents in the right matter and folder? Do custom picklists show values or codes?
Fix the mapping and run the sample again; two or three passes are normal. Only when the sample is clean do you run the full load, and you run it into the same test account first so the counts can be checked at full scale.
Reconcile before you cut over
Reconciliation is counts and sums. For each record type, source count equals destination count, and if it does not, the gap is explained row by row. For billing, the total of unbilled time by matter matches, the total of open invoice balances matches, and the trust balance for every client matches to the cent. For documents, file count and total bytes match per matter.
Cutover itself is best done over a weekend. Friday afternoon: stop entering data in the old system, export the delta (everything changed since the full export), load it, reconcile again. Saturday: users log into Clio and check their own matters. Monday: the old system is read-only. Plan around court deadlines; how long a migration takes is mostly a function of how many reconciliation passes you need.
Keep the old system accessible read-only for at least ninety days. Something will be missed, and the source turns that into a ten-minute lookup instead of a crisis. Once the data is settled, the productive next step is Clio workflow automation, because the tasks and document templates you rebuilt by hand are the natural place to start.
Questions we get
Can we just use Clio's built-in import?
For contacts and matters from clean CSV files, yes, and it works well for small, simple datasets. For notes with authors and dates, documents in folders, calendar recurrences, billing history and trust ledgers, you will typically need the migration handled through Clio's data migration team or a third party working with the API.
What breaks most often?
Note authorship and timestamps, calendar recurrences, documents landing in the wrong matter because the export index used a different matter identifier, and custom picklist values arriving as free text. Trust balances that are correct in total but wrong per client are the dangerous one, because the total hides the error.
Should we migrate billing history or start fresh?
Migrate open invoices, unbilled time and trust balances at minimum; you need them to operate. Paid invoice history is a judgment call. Many firms bring three years and archive the rest as PDF, which keeps Clio's reports meaningful.
If you would like us to review your export before you commit to a cutover date, tell us what you are working with.