Migrate from The Plaintiff to Nutshell

The Plaintiff matters have no direct deal-stage equivalent in Nutshell

The Plaintiff tracks case status as a flat pick-list (Open, Pending, Closed, Dismissed) without a sales-pipeline stage model. Nutshell's Deal object uses a stage field tied to the pipeline view. We map case statuses to Nutshell stage values but the firm's attorneys need to decide which Nutshell stage corresponds to each case status — particularly for matters that are 'Pending' awaiting court action versus 'Open' and actively being worked. Without this mapping, all matters land in a default stage and the pipeline board shows no meaningful progress. We deliver the mapping plan before migration and your firm confirms stage assignments per case type.

The Plaintiff's party-role model requires custom fields in Nutshell

The Plaintiff distinguishes between plaintiff parties, defendant parties, witnesses, and opposing counsel within a matter. Nutshell People have no native role field — the standard fields (name, email, phone) carry contact data but not legal role context. We create a custom 'Party Role' pick-list field on the Person object and set values during migration based on The Plaintiff's party_type field. Your Nutshell admin needs to add this custom field before the migration runs. If the field is missing, role data is lost — it cannot be retrofitted after bulk import without re-running affected records.

Billing and time-entry data requires a custom schema before migration

The Plaintiff time entries and billing records are structured around attorney hours and fee schedules — a model Nutshell does not support natively. Nutshell has no billing object, no time-tracking module, and no invoice generation at the Deal level. We carry hours, rates, and total fees into custom fields on the Deal and individual Activities, but Nutshell cannot perform billing calculations from these fields. Your firm should decide whether to use Nutshell's native integration with a billing tool (via Zapier or Make) or accept that fee reporting in Nutshell will be read-only reference data sourced from The Plaintiff's historical records.

Opposing counsel contact records may conflict with existing Nutshell data

Many firms already have opposing counsel contacts in Nutshell from prior business-development activities. The Plaintiff imports will create duplicate Person records for the same attorneys if email addresses match. Nutshell does not have a built-in deduplication engine for bulk imports. We perform a pre-migration audit comparing The Plaintiff party emails against existing Nutshell People and surface duplicates before the run. Your firm decides whether to merge (keeping activity history from both systems) or allow duplicates. If duplicates are allowed, Nutshell's reporting on attorney activity will split across two records.

Document and evidence file references cannot be migrated as attachments

The Plaintiff stores document references (file paths, DMS links, evidence exhibit IDs) that point to external systems. Nutshell's file attachment model supports uploads to Nutshell's own storage or linked files from cloud drives (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive). There is no native migration path for document references stored as text strings in The Plaintiff. We preserve document paths and URLs in Note records on the associated Deal, but your team must re-link documents in Nutshell's file management after migration or configure a DMS integration to surface the documents within Nutshell's interface.