Filevine to PracticePanther
Firms leave Filevine for PracticePanther when the configuration overhead stopped being worth it for the work they now do. We triage which Filevine section data still matters, migrate projects into PracticePanther matters, and set up the billing and trust structure you did not have.
This move usually follows a change in the firm rather than a fault in Filevine. A practice that scaled back contingency work, lost the operations person who owned the configuration, or shifted toward hourly and flat fee matters no longer needs project types and deadline chains. What it needs is clean time entry, invoices that go out on schedule, and a trust ledger.
PracticePanther gives you that with far less to maintain. There are no sections to design, no phases to keep current, and no automation that breaks when someone renames a field. For a small firm where nobody has operations in their job description, that reduction in maintenance is the actual product being bought.
The losses are substantial, so go in with your eyes open. Phases, deadline chains, document automation, section-level reporting and Lead Docket all go away. A firm still doing volume litigation will feel this within a month, so the move makes sense when the practice has genuinely changed, not when Filevine has simply been implemented badly.
Filevine
A project-based case management platform that firms configure heavily around their own phases, sections and custom fields.
- Deep configurability per project type
- Phases and deadline chains drive the work
- Strong document automation and templates
- Lead Docket for intake and marketing attribution
- Reporting across the fields you configure
- Configuration-heavy to build and maintain
- Billing and trust accounting are lighter than general practice tools
- Needs an internal owner to stay clean
- Cost of change grows with the configuration
PracticePanther
A cloud practice management system aimed at solo and small general practice firms that bill for their time.
- Quick to learn and roll out
- Straightforward time entry and invoicing
- Built-in trust and operating ledgers
- Intake forms and integrated payments
- Zapier and a documented API for light automation
- Light on phase-driven litigation workflow
- No native medical treatment tracking
- Reporting is thin for high-volume caseloads
- Document automation is basic
What moves, and where it lands
How Filevine records map to PracticePanther. Every row is reviewed with your team before anything is imported.
| Filevine | PracticePanther | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Projects | →Matters | Keep the Filevine project number as a PracticePanther field for continuity. |
| Contacts and Org Contacts | →Contacts and Companies | Filevine roles held per project flatten into matter-level contact relationships. |
| Sections and Custom Fields | →Custom Fields or notes | Flat fields cannot hold repeating section rows, so those become notes. |
| Docs | →Documents | Expect the largest workstream; Filevine doc volume usually exceeds expectations. |
| Notes and Activity Feed | →Notes | System-generated feed entries are noise; migrate human-authored notes only. |
| Tasks | →Tasks | Open tasks only; deadline chains have no PracticePanther equivalent at all. |
| Calendar | →Events | Migrate future events, then verify every deadline by hand after loading. |
| Filevine time entries | →Time Entries | Check for unbilled time before you switch Filevine off for good. |
| Lead Docket Leads | →Intake Forms and Contacts | No lead pipeline exists here, so export lead history before canceling. |
What to watch for
- Repeating Filevine sections are the hard problem. A section holding twelve provider rows or a negotiation history with eight entries has no home in a flat PracticePanther custom field list. Decide per section whether it becomes a summary field, a note, or an exported PDF filed on the matter.
- Deadline chains disappear entirely. Every calculated Filevine deadline has to become a real calendar event before go live and then be maintained by hand. Produce a full open deadline report from Filevine and have someone verify it against PracticePanther after the load.
- Filevine document volume is usually the longest part of the project. Get a total file count and size before quoting anything, and plan for documents to load in batches over days rather than hours.
- Your Filevine document templates do not convert. If your team relies on generated demand letters, retainers and pleadings, those templates need rebuilding in PracticePanther or in Word with a merge process, and the result will be simpler than what you had.
- Lead Docket has no counterpart. PracticePanther intake forms capture a new inquiry but do not manage a pipeline, so export your Lead Docket history, source attribution and conversion reporting while you still have access.
- Do not migrate the activity feed wholesale. Filevine feeds mix human notes with system events, and loading all of it into PracticePanther notes buries the useful history. Filter to user-authored entries and keep the remainder as an exported archive.
Four to eight weeks for most firms, with document extraction and section triage taking the bulk of it. The variable that matters most is how much of your case knowledge sits in Filevine sections and the activity feed rather than in documents. Firms that accept a summarized version of that history move quickly; firms that want every field preserved should reconsider the move.
Questions about this move
Will we lose our case history?
What happens to our deadlines?
Can PracticePanther handle our contingency cases?
Should we keep Filevine running while we migrate?
Move from Filevine to PracticePanther.
Tell us how many matters, users, and documents are involved. We will come back with a plan, a field map, and a realistic timeline.