CasePeer to SmartAdvocate
Injury firms move from CasePeer to SmartAdvocate for depth, reporting and the ability to handle mass tort volume. We map your CasePeer records onto SmartAdvocate native fields, keep user defined fields to a minimum, and migrate treatment, negotiation and document history intact.
This move is about headroom. CasePeer handles a standard injury practice well and then stops. Firms that have grown into multiple case types, higher intake volume, aggregate litigation or complex reporting requirements run into the edges of an opinionated system. SmartAdvocate is built for that scale, with deeper workflow, automation rules and a serious report writer.
The migration itself is comparatively favorable, because the two systems share vocabulary. Providers, treatments, negotiations, costs and liens exist natively in both, so structured data moves into structured data. That is unusual, and it means more of your history stays reportable than in most migrations.
What you take on is complexity. SmartAdvocate has a denser interface, a longer learning curve and more configuration decisions, and it expects someone in the firm to act as an administrator rather than only a user. Firms that move for the reporting and then never learn the report writer have paid for depth they do not use.
CasePeer
A cloud personal injury case management system with an opinionated workflow that most PI firms can adopt quickly.
- Purpose-built PI workflow out of the box
- Treatment and provider tracking included
- Negotiation, settlement and lien tracking
- Clean interface that staff adopt quickly
- Useful standard reporting with little setup
- Far less configurable than Filevine
- Limited hourly billing and trust accounting
- Not aimed at general practice matters
- Fewer integrations than Clio
SmartAdvocate
A plaintiff litigation case management system built specifically for personal injury and mass tort practices.
- Native medical provider and treatment tracking
- Deep case workflow and automation rules
- Strong negotiation and settlement tooling
- Extensive built-in reporting
- Cloud or on-premise deployment
- Dense interface with a real learning curve
- Billing is geared to contingency rather than hourly
- Deeper customization usually needs vendor or admin help
- Smaller integration marketplace than Clio
What moves, and where it lands
How CasePeer records map to SmartAdvocate. Every row is reviewed with your team before anything is imported.
| CasePeer | SmartAdvocate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Cases | →Cases | Map CasePeer case types onto SmartAdvocate case types, which are often more granular. |
| Clients, Contacts and Providers | →Contacts and Parties | SmartAdvocate requires a role per party, so extend the export with roles. |
| Providers and Treatments | →Providers and Treatment records | Maps natively; deduplicate provider records in the export before loading. |
| Negotiations and Settlements | →Negotiations and Settlements | Offer history moves as structured rows when dates and amounts are clean. |
| Costs and Liens | →Case costs and lien records | Keep the category detail; SmartAdvocate holds more than CasePeer did. |
| Documents | →Documents | Map CasePeer categories onto SmartAdvocate document categories during the load. |
| Case Notes, Tasks and Calendar | →Case Notes, Tasks and Appointments | Open items plus human notes; let SmartAdvocate rules generate new dates. |
| CasePeer intake | →SmartAdvocate intake | Preserve referral and campaign values or your cost per case reporting resets. |
What to watch for
- Resist the urge to create a user defined field for everything CasePeer held. SmartAdvocate has native fields for most injury data, and only native fields drive the built-in reports and automation you are buying, so audit before you build.
- SmartAdvocate case types are usually more granular than CasePeer case types. That is an advantage, but it means one CasePeer case type may split into several, and that decision affects field availability and workflow, so settle it before mapping anything.
- Provider records need deduplicating during the export. CasePeer provider lists accumulate near-duplicates over the years, and SmartAdvocate treatment reporting is only as good as the provider data underneath it.
- Automation is a project after go live, not part of the load. SmartAdvocate automation rules are powerful and numerous, so plan a phase after the migration to configure the rules your workflow depends on instead of attempting it during the cutover.
- Budget real training time. Staff coming from CasePeer find SmartAdvocate dense at first, and the usual failure pattern is people using it as a filing cabinet because nobody taught them the phase and task structure.
- Decide who owns reporting. The SmartAdvocate report writer is the main reason to make this move, and it needs a named person who learns it. Without that you end up exporting to spreadsheets again and wondering what you paid for.
Six to eleven weeks for most firms. The shared plaintiff vocabulary makes the mapping quicker than average, so the schedule is driven by case type design, provider cleanup, document volume and the field audit. Plan a separate phase after go live for automation rules and reporting, which is where the value of SmartAdvocate actually shows up.
Questions about this move
Does our treatment history move as real data?
How many user defined fields will we need?
Will SmartAdvocate be harder for our staff?
Can SmartAdvocate handle mass tort if we move into it later?
Move from CasePeer to SmartAdvocate.
Tell us how many matters, users, and documents are involved. We will come back with a plan, a field map, and a realistic timeline.