How Fairlie & Co. left spreadsheets in 11 days

Where we started

Until this year, Fairlie & Co. ran on spreadsheets and a shared drive. Matters lived in one workbook, time in another and the trust ledgers in a third that only our bookkeeper was allowed to touch. It worked for twelve lawyers because a few people knew where everything was.

It mostly worked. But every month end took three people two days, and nobody could see a matter’s full position without opening four files. We had looked at switching twice before and stopped both times, mostly because we could not see how to move the trust ledgers safely.

What finally moved us was a near miss. A conveyancing matter came within a day of missing a settlement date, because the date lived in one lawyer’s notebook and that lawyer was on leave. No client was affected, but it was the conversation that ended the spreadsheets.

How we chose

We looked at four systems. The demos all looked similar, so we stopped comparing features and asked each vendor three questions instead: how would our trust ledgers come across, who would do the migration work, and what would our first month end look like?

Filebird’s answer to the first question was a client-by-client check against the bank before go-live, done by their team. That was the answer our bookkeeper needed, and the rest of the decision followed from it.

We also asked to speak to a firm of our size that had already switched. That call, with a practice manager at a firm in another state, answered more of our questions than any of the demos.

The 11 days

Lukas and his team ran the migration. Spreadsheets need more mapping than a system export does, so the first few days were mostly decisions. My job was to answer every question within a day, so nothing waited on us.

• Days 1-3: we sent the workbooks and the shared drive structure, and agreed how our matter list mapped to practice-area templates.

• Days 4-5: the Filebird team cleaned and imported the data into a staging account.

• Days 6-8: every trust ledger was checked against our bank records, client by client. Two were out by small amounts, both traced to receipts entered against the wrong matter in 2023.

• Days 9-10: our conveyancers ran their upcoming settlements (closings, in the US) through staging, and we corrected three template dates.

• Day 11: the final import over the weekend, and everyone started in Filebird on the Monday.

The work on our side was lighter than I expected. I spent about an hour a day answering mapping questions, our bookkeeper spent most of two days on the trust check, and the conveyancers gave up one afternoon. Everyone else carried on as normal until the training sessions in the final week.

The trust check was the part I worried about most and the part that went most smoothly. Having every ledger compared against the bank, client by client, meant our bookkeeper could sign off knowing the balances were right rather than hoping they were.

What we kept, and what we did not

Nothing left the spreadsheets until I signed off, and we kept them read-only for a quarter. Our bookkeeper opened them once, to answer an auditor’s question about an old receipt.

We did not bring across eight years of closed matters in full detail. Closed files came over as summary records with their documents attached, which was enough for conflict checks. Open matters came across in full, with every document, time entry and invoice.

The first settlement I ran in Filebird already had every date set from the template. On spreadsheets, I kept those in my head and a notebook.

Olivia Grant, Conveyancer, Fairlie & Co.

We also left some things behind on purpose. Old precedents that had not been used in years, a contacts list nobody trusted and a time spreadsheet from before 2018 stayed in the archive. Deciding what not to bring was as useful as deciding what to bring.

The first month

The first week was busy. Most questions were about email filing and where to find things, and the Filebird team answered most of them within minutes. By the second week the questions were about doing things better rather than doing them at all.

Our first month-end reconciliation in Filebird took our bookkeeper most of a day, because she checked every daily reconciliation again before she trusted them. By the second month it took half a day, and that is where it has stayed.

The lawyers noticed the change most in the small things. Opening a matter took minutes instead of an afternoon, emails filed themselves to the right file and nobody had to ask the bookkeeper for a ledger balance before paying a search fee.

What I would do differently

I would have cleaned the shared drive earlier. We brought across a folder of old precedents that nobody used, and it took a month of people opening the wrong version before we archived it.

I would also have involved the partners in testing. They agreed to the move but did not log in to staging, so their questions arrived in the first week instead of before go-live. None of them were hard to answer, but they would have been easier to answer early.

Three things I would tell another firm

1. Clean your matter list before you send it. Every dead matter you remove is one less question during mapping.

2. Bring the bookkeeper in from day one. The trust check is the step that decides your go-live date.

3. Go live away from month end. We went live mid-month, so our first reconciliation in Filebird was an ordinary one.

Two months on, month end takes our bookkeeper half a day instead of three people two days. Every lawyer can see a matter’s full position on one screen, which was the reason we started.