Migrate from The Legal Assistant to Nutshell

The Legal Assistant's billing and invoice data has no native home in Nutshell

The Legal Assistant accumulates charges and generates invoices as a core function. Nutshell's Deal object holds a single monetary amount and a pipeline stage but does not support line-item invoices, time entries, or billing history. We handle this by mapping invoice totals to Deal amounts and preserving invoice numbers, dates, and line-item descriptions as custom fields on the Deal. Any detailed billing narrative must be stored as a Note or a long-text custom field — your billing audit trail will survive, but Nutshell will not render invoices the way The Legal Assistant does. Review the custom field plan before migration commits so no billing reference is lost.

Nutshell's API rate-limits find() queries, requiring batched extraction from The Legal Assistant

Nutshell's JSON-RPC API rate-limits find() operations (getLead, findContacts) when stubResponses is false, which applies to full record fetches during migration. We work around this by batching record fetches, caching resolved foreign keys (Company IDs before Person creation), and respecting retry-after headers. The Legal Assistant's cloud export delivers data in bulk export files that we pre-process before hitting Nutshell's API, reducing the number of find() calls needed. For on-premise The Legal Assistant deployments, direct database reads bypass the API rate-limit concern entirely.

Opposing-counsel and multi-party role labels require custom fields in Nutshell

The Legal Assistant supports multiple contacts per case with distinct roles (plaintiff, defendant, opposing counsel, expert witness). Nutshell's Company-Person association model supports a primary Company per Person and optional secondary associations, but does not have a native role-label field on those associations. We create a custom pick-list field (Contact_Role__c) on the Person record and populate it from The Legal Assistant role data. A migration plan review before the full run lets your team confirm which roles map cleanly and which may need collapsing or manual tagging post-migration.

Statute of limitations and court-date alerts do not migrate as active reminders

The Legal Assistant's automated alerts (statute of limitation warnings, court appearance reminders) are workflow constructs that generate email notifications on a schedule. Nutshell has task due dates and sales automation triggers but no equivalent of a compliance-alert scheduler. Migrated Tasks carry their original due dates but will not trigger automated reminders unless you configure Nutshell's automation rules post-migration. We document every migrated deadline as a Task with a due date and flag statute-of-limitation records in a dedicated custom field so your team can rebuild the alert logic in Nutshell's automation engine.

On-premise The Legal Assistant deployments require database access coordination

The Legal Assistant can be deployed on-site at a law firm's office, storing data in a local database rather than a managed cloud environment. Migrating from an on-premise instance requires coordinating with your IT team to grant secure read-only database access. FlitStack AI requires the database host, port, credentials, and database name. Cloud-hosted The Legal Assistant instances use the vendor's managed export process, which may require scheduling with The Legal Assistant support. Both paths are supported, but the scoping call must confirm the deployment type before quoting.