Legacy Legal Case Data Consolidation on Databricks to Reduce Infrastructure Costs

Client & Challenge

As the biggest conveyancing law firm in the UK, Taylor Rose had accumulated over two decades of legal case management platforms, picked up through acquisitions and successive technology changes - some holding records going back to 2000. Now operating from a central Salesforce estate, legacy systems were no longer needed.

This created two problems. Firstly, licence fees, database servers and file servers across the legacy estate accrued millions of pounds a year, largely for data that was only ever being read. The second was access. As a legal firm it needs its history so the data had to stay reachable long after a case was closed. This single requirement was what kept the whole estate alive and the costs locked in.

Underneath both sat a third issue. Twenty years of case data spread across ten separate platforms is twenty years of data nobody can properly ask a question of.

Approach

The original brief was narrow but after leading a technical scoping exercise with Taylor Rose, across the legacy estate, we deliberately widened the scope once we understood how the data was actually being used. We mapped which platforms existed, what sat inside each, and how the data was structured.

To avoid leaving users stranded, we dived deeper into the estate to understand what each department needs and how often they need it. This gave us the ability to build a tranched plan rather than a big bang, sequenced by real operational redundancy, rather than by what looked easier to unplug.