First in a series on getting your law firm’s data into Foundation—and what to do once it’s there.
Firms have heard the integration promise before. A vendor says the data will move cleanly into Foundation. It doesn’t. Six months later, the project is still “in progress,” and the firm has quietly stopped believing any vendor can actually deliver on this. That skepticism is earned. We’re asking you to reconsider it anyway, because we didn’t study this problem from a deck. We spun up our own Foundation instance, hit the same wall every firm hit, and worked through it. Now, we’re ready to bring customers across the Foundation finish line.
Your Data is Clean; What’s Next?
Clean, structured, and connected data is embedded in CI’s philosophy; it’s the reason firms come to us in the first place. We work with partners like Lexis, Bloomberg, Docket Alarm, and Lex Machina to make sure the data itself is accurate, current, and matched correctly to your matters. That was never where firms got stuck.
The real question is sharper: once your data is clean, can it get where it needs to go?
When the place in question is Foundation, for most firms, the honest answer is no. At least not without manual entry.
Clean Data, Nowhere to Go
Here’s what that gap actually looks like in practice. CI hands back clean, enriched data export. And then — nothing. It’s on the firm to get that data into Foundation, and that’s exactly where things stall. Here are some common roadblocks we’ve come across:
- Time Constraints: Mapping and importing takes a lot of manual labor that most teams don’t have time for.
- Specialist Need: Matching your data fields to Foundation’s structure isn’t a checkbox. It’s specialized work.
- Unique Foundation Instances: No two Foundation instances are alike, so getting data into Foundation isn’t as easy as provisioning a connector. Custom work is required.
The Result? Data Sits Stranded. It’s accurate. It’s current. It’s exactly what the firm needs. And it’s stuck one handoff short of the system that would actually put it to work. Clean data that never reaches Foundation isn’t a data problem anymore. It’s a wasted investment.
We Closed the Gap
Closing that last mile is what the CI Connectors do now, and we’re bringing customers with us.
We’ve already done this work—successfully importing litigation matters, judges, and lawyers directly into Foundation, and adding Related Matter and Related Party connections to Company profiles through the same process.
How it Works
We treat every Foundation data import as a consulting engagement with technical support behind it, because “every instance is different” doesn’t mean every engagement has to start from zero. The engagement is built around knowledge transfer: we teach your team how to set up the CI Connector data export to your Foundation Hub, and we hand over the scripts to actually run the import. From there, your data updates on its own through a nightly sync. CI’s specialists stay available for ongoing support and questions, but by that point, your team has the technical knowledge in hand and the sync is already running on its own.
What we don’t do is take the process out of your hands. Your firm keeps full control of your Foundation Hub. You own the import. CI’s job is making sure you’re never solving that puzzle alone.
We’re not asking you to trust that we understand this problem. We’re showing up with the scars from solving it on our own Foundation instance first. More details to come in our subsequent blog post, addressing the actual mechanics and functionality.
The Bottom Line
Firms don’t need another vendor promising a clean handoff. They need one that’s already made the mistakes, fixed them, and built a repeatable way through.
That’s what CI brings to getting clean and connected data into Foundation: not a theory about how the import should work, but a process we’ve already run successfully multiple times, refined through our own trial and error, and now hand to firms who don’t have time to relearn it from scratch.
We made it to the other side of this gap. This series is about closing it for you, too.
Ready to see what this looks like for your Foundation instance? Watch a recorded demo here, and email our specialist at lco@courtroominsight.com for more.
