Migrate from The Legal Assistant to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

The Legal Assistant stores client name, phone, email, address, and firm affiliation per contact. These map directly to Dynamics 365 Contact fields. Primary attorney assignment in The Legal Assistant becomes the Contact's OwnerId, resolved by email match against Dynamics 365 users. Clients without an email receive a generated placeholder for manual linking.

The Legal Assistant's case is a multi-purpose container with practice-area type, status, assigned attorney, opposing counsel, and court. It maps to Dynamics 365 Opportunity with practice-area type stored as a custom picklist field (new_PracticeArea). Case status (Active, Pending, Closed) maps to Opportunity Stage values. Court and opposing counsel data migrate as custom text fields since Dynamics 365 has no native litigation fields.

For firms with complex case metadata (bond amounts, insurance carriers, sentencing dates), The Legal Assistant cases migrate to a custom Dataverse Case table instead of Opportunity. This avoids cramming litigation-specific fields into the sales-oriented Opportunity object. The custom table uses a many-to-one relationship to Contact and supports all practice-area custom columns.

The Legal Assistant calendar stores court dates, client appointments, and deadline reminders. These migrate as Dynamics 365 Appointments with original start/end times preserved. Statute-of-limitations deadlines migrate as custom datetime fields (new_SOLDate) on the Case record — Dynamics 365 has no native SOL tracking, so a Power Automate flow can generate alerts at 30-day and 7-day intervals post-migration.

The Legal Assistant tasks (sign a letter by Friday, file motion by date) map directly to Dynamics 365 Tasks with original due dates and owners preserved. Task status (Open, Completed) maps to StatusCode. Tasks without a parent case link to the primary Contact as a fallback in Dynamics 365.

The Legal Assistant case notes migrate as Dataverse Annotation records linked to the appropriate Contact or Opportunity/Case entry, preserving original creation timestamps, author attribution, and any embedded formatting. Attachments referenced in the note (e.g., inline images) are extracted and stored as separate Annotation attachments, while the note body retains its rich-text markup for consistent rendering after migration.

The Legal Assistant stores documents and letter templates per case. These re-upload to SharePoint via Dynamics 365's SharePoint integration. The Legal Assistant letter templates (merged with client data) require reconfiguration in Word with Dynamics 365 field bindings post-migration. We deliver a document-mapping manifest listing each source file and its target SharePoint folder.

The Legal Assistant auto-accumulates charges and generates invoices — this is core functionality with no Dynamics 365 Sales equivalent. We migrate invoice headers and line items as a custom Dataverse BillingRecord table for historical reference. True invoicing must be handled by connecting Dynamics 365 to an ERP such as Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Each practice-area module (Personal Injury, Criminal, Family Law) contains unique fields such as new_InsuranceCarrier, new_BondAmount, new_CustodyArrangement. We extract every unique custom field from The Legal Assistant's module schema, create corresponding Dataverse columns with the new_ prefix, and build a field-mapping row per practice-area field group. The mapping plan is delivered before migration runs so Dataverse schema is ready.

The Legal Assistant staff records (attorneys, paralegals, admins) map to Dynamics 365 SystemUser by email resolution. The Legal Assistant role per module (e.g., Personal Injury Attorney) maps to Dataverse security roles — the firm's admin assigns the correct Dynamics 365 security role to each migrated user post-migration based on our role-mapping manifest.

The Legal Assistant stores opposing counsel as a contact record with firm name and bar number. These migrate as Dynamics 365 Contact records with a custom type field (new_ContactType = 'OpposingCounsel') for filtering. This keeps opposing counsel visible in the case context without cluttering the primary client Contact list.

If The Legal Assistant tracks whether a client has portal access, this flag migrates as a custom Dataverse bit field for reference. Dynamics 365 Sales has no native client portal flag — firms using Customer Service Hub or a custom Power Apps portal should use that flag as a provisioning trigger post-migration.