Migrate from eBrief Ready to Nutshell

Legal party types do not map to a single Nutshell object

eBrief Ready distinguishes individual parties (barristers, expert witnesses) from organisational parties (law firms, courts, opposing organisations) at the data model level. Nutshell separates People and Companies as two distinct objects. During migration, eBrief Ready organisational party records must be identified and created as Nutshell Companies before individual party records can link to them via a company association. Firms with hundreds of matters where every party is an individual will create a Nutshell database of People only, but mixed-practice firms will generate both Person and Company records, requiring careful de-duplication logic to prevent creating duplicate records for parties that appear across multiple matters.

eBrief Ready's matter-document-annotation hierarchy has no flat equivalent in Nutshell

eBrief Ready stores a three-layer hierarchy: a Matter contains Documents, and Documents contain Annotations (highlights, tags, date notes, commentary). Nutshell has no native document management object and no annotation concept. Documents migrate as file attachments on the linked Person or Company, but Nutshell does not support nested file containers or structured markup on files. Annotations require a manual workaround — FlitStack generates a summary report of all annotations per matter and attaches it as a PDF Note, but the structured per-page, per-highlight detail from eBrief Ready is not reproducible in Nutshell without a custom annotation rebuild.

eBrief Ready custom fields require manual re-creation in Nutshell before migration

Nutshell's custom field system requires fields to exist in the target account before data can be written to them. eBrief Ready's custom fields (bar registration numbers, jurisdiction tags, matter-type codes) are created by the Nutshell account administrator before FlitStack runs the migration. The migration plan includes a custom field creation guide specifying field name, type (text, date, choice), and any pick-list values to pre-configure in Nutshell. If custom fields are not pre-created, those eBrief Ready values are written to a generic notes field instead, which may affect downstream reporting.

Nutshell file attachment size limit may require URL-reference fallback for large documents

Nutshell's file upload limit is 25MB per attachment. eBrief Ready court bundles and large document collections can exceed this threshold significantly. FlitStack checks each document against the Nutshell limit during migration. Files at or below 25MB are uploaded directly to the relevant Person or Company record as Nutshell Files. Files exceeding 25MB are stored as external URL references in a custom URL field, allowing Nutshell users to click through to the original document in eBrief Ready's read-only archive. The external URL approach preserves document availability but does not centralise all files within Nutshell.

eBrief Ready's per-user pricing means seat-count changes affect annual TCO unpredictably

eBrief Ready charges per user per month, and pricing tiers are volume-dependent ($10/user/month down to $5/user/month at enterprise scale). Implementation fees of $1,000–$100,000 are additional and contract-specific. Nutshell's per-user pricing is published and consistent ($13–$79/user/month), making year-one TCO calculation straightforward. Teams migrating from eBrief Ready should treat Nutshell's base CRM pricing as a known constant and budget separately for any remaining eBrief Ready document-only seats if the platform is retained for litigation document workflows alongside Nutshell.