Filevine Implementation & Support
Filevine Support for Law Firms: When the Problem Is the Configuration
Filevine's support team fixes the software. It does not build your firm's workflow inside it. If your firm is on Filevine and intake, case management and litigation still work the way they did before, the configuration is the thing to look at, not the platform.
Independent of Filevine. No partner status, no reseller relationship, no commission on your licences.
Book Your Free Legal Systems Health CheckWhat Filevine support covers, and what it does not
If you came here looking for Filevine’s support team, they are the right people for a genuine list of things. It is worth knowing where that list ends, because most firms who feel let down by Filevine have a configuration problem being routed to a support queue.
What Filevine support handles
- Software defects, when something does not behave the way it is documented to.
- Account, billing and access problems.
- How-to questions about what a feature does and where to find it.
This is a real service and it works. Firms should use it for exactly these things.
What nobody has been handling
- Whether your firm should be doing it that way at all.
- Who owns a step, and what happens the moment it is done.
- What the system should do on its own, without waiting for a person.
These are operational design questions. No platform's support desk is scoped to answer them, and that is not a criticism of the platform.
Support answers “how do I do this in Filevine”. It does not answer “should this firm be doing it this way, who owns it, and what happens next”. That second question is the one that decides whether the platform changes how the firm works.
Where firms get stuck: a configuration built for a firm that is not yours
Filevine arrives working. Nothing is broken, and everything sits roughly where a case management system would put it. What it does not contain is how your firm runs a case: who touches a matter at which point, what has to be true before it moves, what should happen without anyone deciding to do it.
So the firm adapts itself to the software instead of the other way round. Here is what that looks like from the inside.
- The same information gets entered twice, sometimes three times.
- The fields exist, but nobody defined which one is the source of truth, so every team keeps its own copy.
- Nobody fully trusts the reports.
- Reporting is only as good as what is entered consistently, and consistency was never designed in. So the report gets checked against a spreadsheet, which defeats the report.
- "Where is this case" is still answered by a person, not a screen.
- Status means something different to each team, so the record shows a stage without showing whether anything is actually moving.
- Real work still lives in inboxes, spreadsheets and someone's memory.
- The platform became the place work gets recorded after the fact, rather than the place work happens.
Where the configuration has to fit
The three teams a plaintiff’s firm runs, and the workflow each one needs
A personal injury firm does not run as one process. It runs as three, with different jobs, different urgency and different definitions of done. Filevine arrives configured for none of them in particular.
01
Intake
Turn an enquiry into a signed case.
What the system has to do
- The same qualifying questions asked the same way every time, so two intake staff reach the same answer.
- Speed, because the firm that responds first usually signs the case.
- Nothing lost between first contact and signature.
Handoff02
Case management
Run the case day to day. Treatment, records, liens, negotiation.
What the system has to do
- To know what is stalled and why, across a full caseload, without opening every file.
- Requests that chase themselves when a provider has gone quiet.
- A record complete enough that a demand can be built from it rather than assembled from scratch.
Handoff03
Litigation
Run the case that did not settle.
What the system has to do
- Deadlines the system enforces rather than suggests, because these are court dates now.
- Dates that cascade, so moving one moves everything downstream of it.
- Documents assembled from what the file already holds.
Leaving intake
Everything gathered at intake arrives with the case manager already in place. Nobody retypes it, and nobody has to ask the client twice.
Leaving case management
When a case does not settle, litigation inherits a file that is already complete, not one that has to be rebuilt.
Leaving litigation
The case closes with the record intact, so the firm can see what the matter actually cost it to run.
Each team gets its own workflow built into Filevine, and its own step-by-step process documented against that build. Not a generic manual. The process their team actually follows, which is also what the on-site training is delivered against.
Built in, not sold afterwards
What automations belong in a Filevine build
Most firms never get past using Filevine by hand. A workflow that has been documented properly has obvious places where the system should act on its own, and those get identified while it is being designed rather than sold back to you later.
- Date and deadline math
- One date is entered and everything downstream of it calculates itself. Move the anchor date and the chain moves with it.
- Status-change triggers
- A matter reaching a stage moves it to the next owner and tells them it is theirs, without anyone remembering to.
- Threshold alerts
- Anything sitting longer than it should surfaces on its own, so a stalled case is found by the system rather than by a client asking.
- Template merges
- Documents produced the same way every time are built from the record instead of retyped, which also removes a copy-paste error class.
Every one of these follows a rule somebody wrote, and produces the same result every time. That is what makes them dependable. Work that needs judgment rather than a rule is a different layer, covered on AI automations for law firms.
What an independent implementer does that a referral partner does not
There is a well-worn path here. The platform gives a firm a generic configuration. Making it match how the firm actually works is treated as a separate engagement, referred out, and priced accordingly, often into five figures. The firm ends up paying twice: once for the software, and again to make the software fit.
SourcePro Consultants does that work as the engagement itself. The workflow gets defined first, not the tool configured first, because the workflow is the deliverable and the platform is where it gets encoded. What can be automated is identified during the design. And it is built inside your firm, so changing a process later does not require buying another engagement.
SourcePro Consultants holds no Filevine partner or reseller status and takes no commission on your licences.
In person, at your firm
We come out and train your team
Not a recorded course, and not generic Filevine training. We come to your office and train each team on the configuration built for them, against the process documented for their team.
Adoption is where implementations die. A firm that has already been through one rollout nobody used knows exactly why that matters, which is why training is part of the work here rather than a line item at the end of it.
Moving onto Filevine, and what the migration actually involves
If you are coming from another case management system, the migration is where most of the risk sits. Not because moving records is hard, but because a migration exposes every assumption the old system was hiding.
01
The workflow gets written down first
Before a single record moves, we document how your firm runs a case step by step, and what each person does at each step. Loading data into a configuration nobody has agreed on is how a firm ends up rebuilding the same file twice.
02
The data does not arrive clean, and never has
Every firm has the same client entered three different ways, contacts with nothing attached to them, leads that expired years ago, test matters somebody made once, and templates nobody has used since the last system. That is normal. What matters is deciding what comes across before it comes across, rather than discovering it afterwards.
03
Documents are the part that surprises people
Files usually migrate. Whether they land attached to the matter your staff expect to find them under is a separate question. Most firms also have documents living in the old system, on a network drive, in cloud storage and in somebody's inbox at the same time, so part of this work is agreeing which copy is the real one.
04
Nothing gets discarded on convenience
Retention obligations and litigation holds decide what has to be preserved, and they apply to records whether or not those records are worth migrating. Anything not carried into Filevine still has to be kept somewhere it can be found.
05
Cutover runs on a weekend, with someone accountable for deadlines
We move at weekends so the switch lands between working days rather than during them, and a project manager tracks every live deadline through the transition. We do not ask a firm to run two systems side by side and enter everything twice, so the protection comes from planning the cutover and watching the calendar, not from duplicating the work.
How a legal operations consultant approaches a Filevine build
Five phases. The workflow before the configuration.
Every engagement runs through this model. The scope changes. The order does not.
- 01
Assess
Establish how the firm actually runs a case today, team by team, and where that diverges from what is configured.
- 02
Design
Define the workflow for intake, case management and litigation, and the handoffs between them, before touching a single setting.
- 03
Build
Configure Filevine to run the workflow that was designed, including the automations that belong in it.
- 04
Document
Write the step-by-step process for each team, against their own configuration rather than a generic manual.
- 05
Train
On site, in person, with the people who have to use it, against the process documented for their team.
What Filevine costs once configuration is included
The licence is not the cost. The cost is the licence, plus the work to make it fit how your firm runs cases, plus the internal time your people spend adopting it. A firm that budgets only the first is the firm that feels let down eighteen months later, and it is usually the second one nobody warned them about.
What that second number looks like depends on how many teams you run, how much of the current process is written down, and how much of the existing configuration is worth keeping. Those are the questions the Health Check answers before anyone quotes anything.
Why this takes case experience, not just platform experience
Knowing where every setting lives is the easy half. The harder half is knowing what a plaintiff’s firm actually does between signing a case and settling it, which teams touch it, and what breaks when one of them assumes another has handled something.
Teila Garraway spent 15+ years as a litigation paralegal and operations manager before founding SourcePro Consultants, then added software engineering. That is why the first question here is how your firm runs a case, not which settings to change.
Frequently asked questions
Find out whether it is Filevine or the configuration
A free 60-minute Legal Systems Health Check. We look at how intake, case management and litigation actually run in your firm, and where the configuration stopped matching them.