You have been on MyCase for years, and the reasons to move to Clio have become specific: an integration only Clio has, a merger with a firm already on Clio, or billing needs that outgrew what you have. The practical question is what comes with you, what does not, and how to avoid a month of paralegals asking where their notes went.
This page is the MyCase-specific companion to our general Clio data migration checklist. The two systems are more alike than most pairs, easier than CasePeer to Clio, but the differences are where things get lost. Every pair we handle is listed at migrations.
What firms expect to keep, and what they usually forget
What is forgotten until week two is the layer under the obvious clients, cases, documents and calendar. MyCase workflows (the task sequences that fire when a case opens or changes stage) do not transfer as workflows; they get rebuilt. Intake forms and client portal history do not come across as-is; portal messages need a decision on whether to export as PDF per case.
Custom fields and their values do move, but firms accumulate dozens per practice area and most no longer matter. Take the export, sort by how many cases have a non-empty value, and cut anything under a handful. Rates, invoice templates and user permissions are recreated by hand; write them down before you lose access.
What MyCase lets you take with you
MyCase provides exports for the core record types, generally as CSV for structured data and a bulk download for documents. Confirm with their support in writing what your account can export, because the answer sets the timeline. Expect, at a minimum, to obtain: contacts (clients, leads, companies and other parties), cases with status, practice area, dates and staff assignments, custom field values, calendar events and tasks, notes, time entries and expenses, invoices with payment history, and trust account transactions.
For each export, record the row count on the day you pull it. That is the first entry in your reconciliation sheet. Pull documents as a folder tree per case and check that folder names carry the case number, since that is how files tie back to matters.
Also export the things nobody thinks of as data (case stages, task templates, standard email and text templates, monthly reports); they are the specification for rebuilding your process in Clio.
Translating MyCase cases and contacts into Clio
A MyCase case becomes a Clio matter. The direct fields map one to one: name, status (open or closed), practice area, open and close dates, responsible attorney. MyCase case stages need a value map to Clio's own matter stage list, and the destination stages must exist in Clio before the load, so choose the names before rather than after.
MyCase distinguishes clients from leads and from companies; Clio distinguishes Person from Company and uses matter relationships for roles. Leads with no case go to Clio Grow or get dropped; decide before the load. Parties attached to a case as other contacts should become Clio contacts related to the matter with a relationship type.
Notes are the item that most often arrives wrong. A MyCase note has an author and a timestamp; when loaded through a generic import, both are replaced by the importing user and the import date. Insist that the test load shows original author and date on notes before approving a full load. Recurring calendar events and task due dates need the same check; dates sometimes shift by a day across time zones.
Billing history, invoices and the trust ledger
Time entries and expenses migrate into Clio as activities with a matter, a user, a date, a duration, a rate and a billed flag. Unbilled entries must come across as unbilled, or you will lose the ability to invoice them. Rates in MyCase that were set per case rather than per user need a matter-level rate in Clio, and that is easy to miss.
Invoices are a judgment call. Open invoices with balances have to move, because you need to collect them. Paid history is optional; a common approach is to migrate the last two or three years as invoice records with their payments and to keep older invoices as PDFs attached to the matter. Whatever you choose, the sum of open balances in MyCase must equal the sum in Clio before cutover.
Trust is the part that cannot be approximate. MyCase tracks trust balances per client and matter; Clio does too, but the transaction history is what makes a balance defensible. Migrate transactions, not just balances, reconcile per client to the cent, and have the bookkeeper sign off. We treat this as its own workstream, and trust accounting data migration explains why.
The cutover weekend
Set the date around the firm's calendar: not trial week, not month-end billing, not the last week of the year. Two weeks before, run the full test load into a Clio trial account and have each attorney open ten of their own matters.
Friday at noon, freeze MyCase: no new entries. Export the delta (records changed since the full export), load it, run the reconciliation counts one more time. Saturday, staff log into Clio and confirm their calendars and open tasks. Monday, MyCase becomes read-only, and it stays that way for at least ninety days. That overlap is cheap compared with a missing document and no source to check; what a case management migration costs breaks down where the money actually goes. After go-live, Clio consulting on setup and automation is the natural next step.
Questions we get
How long does MyCase to Clio take?
For a small firm with clean data, a few weeks from export to cutover, most of it spent on mapping and test loads. Firms with large trust ledgers or many custom fields should plan for longer, because reconciliation, not loading, is the slow part.
Will our clients notice?
They will notice the portal changes, if you use one, and the invoice format. Send a plain notice a week ahead with the new login steps. Beyond that, a well-run migration is invisible to clients.
Can we run both systems for a while?
Read-only overlap, yes, and we recommend it. Entering data in both is a bad idea; the ledgers diverge within days and reconciling them is harder than the migration. Pick the cutover date and move everything at once.
If you want a candid look at your MyCase export before you set a date, tell us what you are working with.