Migrate from The Plaintiff to Mailchimp

The Plaintiff Contact records map to Mailchimp contacts within a designated audience. Email address is the unique identifier used for deduplication. Each contact lands in the primary audience with their standard properties mapped to merge fields. FlitStack creates the audience in Mailchimp if it does not exist, using the client-provided audience name.

First name from The Plaintiff maps directly to Mailchimp's FNAME merge field. Used for email personalization tokens like *|FNAME|*. Blank first names result in empty merge field values with no error. The FNAME field is case-sensitive and respects capitalization from the source data.

Last name maps to Mailchimp LNAME merge field. Used for personalization and for building full-name display strings in templates. Handles null values gracefully. If last name is missing, the LNAME merge field is left blank without halting the import process, and full-name tokens fall back to first name only.

Email address is the primary key in Mailchimp — it drives deduplication logic. FlitStack matches on email and skips records with malformed addresses (missing @ or domain) before import. These skipped records are listed in a pre-migration error report for client correction in The Plaintiff.

Phone number from The Plaintiff maps to Mailchimp's PHONE merge field. Mailchimp does not use phone for SMS unless the client has SMS marketing enabled separately — phone is stored as a property either way. International phone formats are preserved as entered in The Plaintiff.

Company name maps to Mailchimp's COMPANY merge field. Used for firm or organization name personalization in legal client contexts. If a contact has no company value in The Plaintiff, the COMPANY merge field remains blank. The COMPANY field supports up to 255 characters in Mailchimp.

The Plaintiff address fields (street, city, state, zip, country) map to Mailchimp's structured ADDRESS merge field using the standard multi-part format (addr1, addr2, city, state, zip, country). Separate address lines collapse or map to addr2. Mailchimp requires the country field to be a valid ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code.

The Plaintiff Case records do not map to any Mailchimp object. Case number, case type, case status, court, and attorney assignment are extracted from linked contact-case relationships and mapped to a combination of Mailchimp tags and custom merge fields defined before import.

Case number is not a Mailchimp native field. We create a CASENUMBER custom merge field (text type) before migration. Value is populated by looking up the contact's linked case in The Plaintiff and extracting the case_number field. The CASENUMBER field accepts up to 255 characters.

Case type (e.g., Personal Injury, Employment, Contract) maps to both a CASETYPE merge field and a Mailchimp tag applied to the contact. Tagging enables audience segmentation by case type in Mailchimp's built-in segment builder. The CASETYPE merge field is a picklist field with predefined values matching The Plaintiff's case type options.

Case status (Active, Pending, Closed, Settled, Dismissed) migrates as a CASESTATUS merge field and a corresponding tag. Clients can build Mailchimp segments for 'Active Personal Injury Cases' by combining case_type tag + case_status tag. The CASESTATUS picklist values are synced with The Plaintiff's case status options.

Date-of-injury is a The Plaintiff-specific field with no Mailchimp equivalent. We create an INJURYDATE custom merge field (date type) and populate it from the linked case record. Mailchimp date fields display in MM/DD/YYYY format in emails. The INJURYDATE field is optional and left blank if the case record has no injury date.

Attorney name or ID from The Plaintiff maps to an ATTORNEY custom merge field. We preserve the display name for personalization use. Attorney email would require a separate field mapping if contact-level attorney email is needed. The ATTORNEY field is text type and can store either name or ID based on client preference.

The Plaintiff contact role flag (Plaintiff, Defendant, Co-Plaintiff) maps to PARTYTYPE or PARTYROLE custom merge field. This is a value-mapping scenario where the picklist values are preserved as-is into Mailchimp's custom field picklist. The PARTYTYPE field enables filtering contacts by their legal role in case-related email communications.

Original contact creation date from The Plaintiff is not used as Mailchimp's native CreatedDate (which is set at import time). We store the source-system creation timestamp as ORIGINAL_CREATEDATE custom merge field for reporting continuity. This preserves the historical record of when the contact was originally created in The Plaintiff.