Planning an Import
The Umbria product began with the budgeting and planning modules as its focus. Subsequently, through industry and client analysis, we found that approximately 90% of legal firms do not have the data integrity within their time and billing systems required for effective budgeting, nor do they have a plan in place. To encompass use cases such as these, we added monitoring functionality. Monitoring within Umbria gives a 360-degree view of clients, matters, and teams, both for the current user and the entire firm.
When importing data, we typically ask firms to provide three to five years of their time and billing data. This gives enough data to identify trends for use when budgeting, and having more recent data improves the accuracy of reporting and monitoring.
Common Matter-Limiting Clauses
The following matters should be included in the import.
- All matters that are currently open
- All matters that were closed within the past five years and have time entries within the past five years
This would not include non-billable or pro bono matters (e.g., mprac<>'9999').
For an initial import, we typically begin with a test import of a smaller subset of data that still covers a wide range of matter types. Following this, we import the complete decided-upon set of data. Incremental imports will follow to keep the data in sync, preferably first against a static restored database for ease of validation before going against a moving Production target.
Questions to Ask Prior to Import
- What systems are we wanting to import from? Are there any external systems like HR, Conflicts, etc. to be importing from?
- Are the credentials provided to the Umbria service account able to read from these databases?
- What time frame and filters will be used to select the data for import? Is the data going to be clean?
- Who will be the end users? What data will they need to see?
- With the amount of matters, time entries, invoices, etc. in mind, will the systems have enough resources to handle the import? Are the disk I/O and network speed of sufficient quality?
- Are there any system or firm processes that can potentially impact the import? Examples might include full database backups that take over 15 minutes to complete, the security team shutting down or logging out accounts that appear inactive, or global users using Umbria while the incremental imports occur.
Import Process
Below is a visual diagram of the import process.
SSIS will connect to the T&B system, and then will pull data from it into the Umbria Staging tables. Then it will update some columns and foreign keys, and lastly will push the data to the Caliban tables.
