You’re through Phase 1 and Phase 2. Now what? This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. Switching to a new practice management software platform for a firm is like moving into a new home. Both are big life changes, full of uncertainty, but also extremely exciting opportunities to improve your quality of life for the future.  How can Nakoa Technologies help? Well, you will be assigned an Implementation Consultant (IC) to help design your new home and help support you during the move.  

Phase 3 – Configure and Build  

Your old system worked fine as a starter home, but now you’re looking for an upgrade. Your assigned IC will help you learn how to design and configure Filevine so it’s tailored for your firm’s workflows and intake process. Filevine is one of the most advanced COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) platforms in the marketplace. This just means it is made for businesses to be launched quickly. Filevine can streamline your current operations, as well as be expanded to scale into future practice areas on the fly. During this phase, your IC will learn about your firm and train you to configure a launch build for Filevine. Your package comes with template(s) based on the package you’ve selected. Templates can be infinitely modified around your firm’s unique intake process.  

Pro Tip #1 - What firms constantly struggle with in this phase is the tendency to simply recreate the look, feel and functionality of their old homes primarily because of familiarity and convenience. Avoid this. Filevine is better and more feature-rich compared to any other practice management software platform you may be upgrading from. You’d be doing your firm a disservice in not taking full advantage of Filevine’s automations and upgrades.  

Phase 4 – Migration and Testing  

In this phase, your IC will partner with one of Nakoa’s Migration Technicians to help you move your precious belongings. Your case data and documents are like clothes and furniture. As many firms come to realize, this serves as an excellent point to decide what belongings are most important and will actually make it over to the new residence. Many customers do not need or want every piece of data, and many choose to archive closed cases like boxing up clothes they no longer wear. This phase requires equal effort from both IC and your firm. We need your help in mapping to create a crosswalk between data in your legacy system and where it will reside in Filevine. The firm oversees extracting your data from the old system and uploading it into a S3 bucket for Nakoa technicians. Don’t worry there are step-by-step instructions on how to do this. Extracting and mapping are similar to packing and labeling the moving boxes to ensure we know what’s in each box and where it should be put in Filevine. Nakoa’s job is to handle the transfer and transportation of the boxes from your old home into Filevine. The Nakoa team are driving the trucks and carefully placing the boxes in the correct rooms of your new Filevine home. This phase also requires testing by your firm. We will have 2 runs of data (like a dry-run practice move) so you can validate that data is appearing where it should in Filevine. This is both a collaborative and iterative process.  We work together to get things right.

Pro Tip #2 - The better and more thorough your firm’s testing, the better the subsequent data runs and tests will be. Before we schedule the final run of data all issues should be reported to ensure the final run or “move-in” day is flawless.  

Phase 5 – Training and Go Live 

Once we have completed and tested the migration, we can schedule your Go Live date. Next, your IC will get your signed acceptance and schedule a date to complete a firm-wide training. This online training can be recorded for future reference. Your IC or a designated trainer will cover all of Filevine’s most important foundational features and sections for your office, spending time specifically on your build and answering questions about your template. We would recommend inviting anyone you feel might need to get a training primer on Filevine. This training can be completed prior to the final data migration or on the first day that your firm is “live” using your launch build of Filevine. Usually, firms choose to run the final migration over a weekend to minimize any downtime. Once a firm is “live” with their newly migrated data, they can immediately use their launch build of Filevine to resume normal operations solely through Filevine. There should be no need to use the legacy system anymore.

Pro Tip #3 – EVERY firm will further custom Filevine post Go Live . Nakoa can help answer any questions you might have about desired changes through our phone support package. This gives you an extra option to pick up the phone and call us even after Go Live. Nakoa also has Managed Services packages where you can subscribe to pre-paid hours at a discount. Your firm can queue a request online and Nakoa will make those changes for you. Save time and let us do the heavy lifting! Click here for Managed Services.