If you’ve made a lateral move and found yourself weeks into the new job still unable to open your own client files, you’re not alone. The client file transfer is the part of a lateral move nobody plans for. You negotiated the compensation, you handled the ethics notices, you told your clients — and then you sat down at a new desk with no documents.
I’ve done this process hundreds of times. It gets complicated for a reason that has nothing to do with technology: you’ve just quit, and firms don’t always take that gracefully. Sometimes everyone on the other side is completely professional. Sometimes they aren’t. You can’t control which one you get, so control the parts you can.
I’m not an attorney, and I can’t advise you on the ethical side of a departure — ABA Formal Opinion 489 and your state bar are the places to start on that. What follows is the technical roadmap, plus two pieces of homework that will get you your documents weeks sooner and cost you less to import.
The Client File Transfer Timeline Nobody Explains to You
A client file transfer between two law firms takes weeks, sometimes months, and it moves through six stages in a fixed order. Knowing the order tells you where to push.
- Stage 1: Departure announcement – You formally notify your current firm. Nothing moves before this.
- Stage 2: Client notifications – You send letters to your clients informing them that you’re leaving to join or form a new firm, and ask them to write to your old firm requesting that their documents be released. These letters do double duty: they protect the relationship, and they start the file transfer clock.
- Stage 3: Client authorization requests – Your clients’ release letters land at your old firm. Your old firm cannot hand over a single document without them. The files belong to the client—not to you or the firm.
- Stage 4: Phased document releases – Your old firm starts exporting. Not all at once.
- Stage 5: Matter setup at the new firm – Your new firm creates client and matter numbers for every transferred client in its own system.
- Stage 6: DMS import – Your new firm imports the documents. This is the part everyone assumes is the hard part. It isn’t.
Batches Cost Money, So Consolidate Them
We don’t live in a perfect world, and Stage 4 is where that shows up. Your old firm releases documents as authorizations come in, so the export arrives in batches—first group, second group, third group—sometimes spread over a week or more.
Here’s the part nobody warns you about: we bill per batch, because a batch is roughly the same amount of work no matter how many matters are in it. Setting up an import run, validating the metadata, mapping it, running it, and checking the results takes about as long for eight matters as it does for eighty.
So the arithmetic is simple. Three batches cost roughly three times as much as one batch. We can absolutely import one matter at a time — you’ll just pay for one matter at a time.
If your old firm is willing to release in fewer, larger batches, ask them to. If they’re releasing on a client-by-client basis as authorizations trickle in, it’s usually worth letting a week’s worth pile up before we import.
Stage 5 Is the Real Bottleneck, Not the Import
Everyone braces for Stage 6. In practice, the import is the fastest part of the job — if the data is clean, it’s a batch process.
Stage 5 is where the weeks disappear. Your new firm has to map every client and every matter from your old firm’s numbering scheme to theirs, and that mapping requires you, your new firm’s administrative team, and usually their IT department to all be in the same conversation at the same time. Nobody can do it without you, because you’re the only person who knows that old client 0075 is the same Bluth Company that your new firm just opened as client 55.
Here’s the good news: Stage 5 is the one stage you can finish before anyone asks you to.
Forming a New Firm Is Easier Than Joining an Existing One
How much work Stage 5 actually is depends on which move you’re making, and it’s worth knowing before you start.
If you’re forming a new firm, you own the numbering scheme. Nobody is making you inherit anything, so you can carry your old client and matter numbers straight across and the mapping is close to one-to-one. Fill in the old columns, copy them to the new columns, done. Say so up front when you set up the new system — it’s much easier to decide this before the Cabinet is built than after.
If you’re joining an existing firm, you inherit their scheme, and every row in the table is a real decision someone has to make. This is the version that takes a few hours and the version that stalls migrations.
Take Control: Build Your Translation Tables Now
A translation table is the Rosetta Stone for your migration. It tells your new firm’s IT team where every document goes without a single phone call to you. There are two of them, and we can’t start an import without the first one.
Client and Matter Translation Table
This maps your old client and matter numbers to your new firm’s numbering scheme.
| Old Client # | Old Matter # | Client Name | Matter Description | New Client # | New Matter # |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0075 | 001 | Bluth Company | LLC Formation | 55 | 55-001 |
| 0075 | 002 | Bluth Company | Employment Suit | 55 | 55-002 |
Download our Client and Matter Translation Table
This is the gate, not a nice-to-have—we cannot import your documents until this table is filled out. It’s the single thing that holds up more lateral migrations than anything else on this page.
Fill in the old columns first – Start on the old client numbers, old matter numbers, client names, and matter descriptions the day you decide to leave. Add the new columns as soon as your new firm hands you their numbering scheme.
“I don’t know what I’m taking yet” – This is the objection I hear every single time, and no, you do. You know who’s coming with you. Fill it out. If a couple of clients end up staying behind, we delete those rows — that’s the entire cost of guessing wrong. The cost of waiting is measured in weeks without your files.
Document Type Translation Table
Your old firm and your new firm almost certainly use different names for the same things. This table maps one vocabulary onto the other.
| Old Doc Type | New Document Type |
|---|---|
| Correspondence | Correspondence |
| Emails | Correspondence |
| Pleadings | Pleadings |
| Attorney Notes | Notes |
Download our Document Type Translation Table
Why it matters – Doc Type drives search, Filters, and retention at your new firm. Imported documents with no Doc Type are documents you can’t filter, which defeats the point of having a DMS at all.
How to fill it in – Ask your new firm’s IT department or practice management team for their list of standard Doc Types, then map each of your old ones to the closest equivalent. Most rows are obvious. A few are judgment calls — whether “Email Correspondence” belongs under Correspondence or gets its own Email type, for instance — and those are yours to make, not IT’s.
The One Thing You Can’t Control: How Good Is Your Old Firm’s IT?
Everything above is homework you can do on your own. This part isn’t, and it’s the part that costs real money.
The question is whether the IT people at your old firm know how to properly export documents out of iManage, NetDocuments, OpenText eDOCS, or whatever DMS you’re leaving behind. A correct export doesn’t just copy files. It writes out the metadata alongside them:
- File path, file name, and extension – Where the document lived and what it is.
- Version number, version key, and version description – So your version history survives the move instead of collapsing into a single flat file.
- Created by and creation date – Who authored it and when.
- Last modified by and last modified date – The audit trail.
- Comments, author, and typist – The profile fields your old firm actually used.
Hand that metadata file to the receiving system, and the import will be almost automatic. That’s the cheap version of this project.
What we see instead, regularly, is an old firm’s IT department that has never run a data export before, dumping every document into a Windows folder tree and calling it done. No metadata file. Thousands of files in generic folders with nothing to tell a machine which client they belong to, what type of document they are, what version they are, or who should be allowed to see them.
Let me be direct: an export without a metadata file is not a DMS export. It’s a pile of files. It turns what should have been a clean DMS-to-DMS migration into a Windows folder migration with manual document review, and we have to charge more to do it — not because we want to, but because there’s more work and less information. In a previous post, I went through how long folder-based migrations actually take, and the numbers are not kind.
What a Proper Export Looks Like
Below are two sample metadata files showing exactly what your new firm should be receiving.
Download Sample iManage Metadata File
Download Sample NetDocuments Metadata File
Send these to whoever at your old firm is preparing the export and get them to confirm they’ll deliver a metadata file in this format. If they can’t confirm it, or the answer comes back vague, put me in touch with them directly. I have no agenda here — I’m not trying to make their life difficult; I’m trying to make this take less time for both sides and cost you less. Most of the time, a fifteen-minute conversation with their IT person is all it takes.
Catch this beforehand, and it’s one email. Catch it afterward, and you’re asking a firm you no longer work for to redo a job they didn’t want to do the first time. That request usually goes nowhere.
What to Do This Week
Whether your move is announced or you’re still thinking about it:
- Start the client and matter table—old columns only. It’s the highest-leverage hour you’ll spend on this whole transition.
- Ask your new firm for their Doc Type list—their IT team already has it in a spreadsheet.
- Find out who at your old firm is running the export—and get the metadata question answered before they start, not after.
- Push for fewer, bigger batches—every extra batch is another import run you’re paying for.
- Set your clients’ expectations honestly – Weeks, not days. They’d rather hear it now.
Need Help With Your Move?
If you’re thinking about leaving your firm, you’re looking at getting NetDocuments set up at the new one, or you’re already mid-move, and the document side has stalled, I’ll walk through your specific situation with you. We can size up the migration, spot the roadblocks while they’re still fixable, and get both firms’ IT teams working off the same translation tables.
Schedule a free consultation at go.oncehub.com/optconsult.
Optiable has guided over 550 law firms across the United States and Canada through NetDocuments implementations and migrations since 2010, specializing in firms with 10 to 150 users.
Your clients came with you because they trust you to keep things moving. Make sure your documents do too.