Legacy legal contracts migration

[Gaurav Bajaj]

Your organization has made the decision to implement ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery (LSD) to enhance the management of legal services. As part of which, there are also legal contracts legal contracts are stored in legacy systems that needs to be migrated as well. The migration of these legacy contracts is a strategic choice that influences compliance, usability, and the long-term operations of the legal department. Any strategy you adopt should emphasize adherence to retention and audit standards, facilitate easy access and referencing of contracts for users, weigh the migration effort against the business value, and establish ServiceNow as a resilient system where new contracts can be managed, reported, and tracked from a unified source of truth. In this blog, we will talk about three approaches/options for managing legacy contracts within ServiceNow, helping you in determining the effective solution that suits your organization.

• External Cloud Storage

The recommended approach for managing both legacy and new contracts in ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery (LSD) is to leverage an external document management system such as OneDrive, or Google Drive.  These external systems provide scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready repositories for document storage. ServiceNow offers out-of-the-box integrations and connectors with these platforms, allowing organizations to manage contracts entirely from ServiceNow while the actual documents remain in their external storage location.

You can move contracts metadata into ServiceNow and actual contract document to be migrated and linked back to contract record in ServiceNow for the legacy contracts.

These integrations allow users to access, view, and edit documents directly from ServiceNow while respecting permissions and access controls in the external system. Contracts can be searched and retrieved quickly using metadata or keywords, and collaboration is supported with real-time editing and version control. ServiceNow continues to manage the full contract lifecycle, including approvals, expirations, renewals, and reporting, ensuring a seamless experience for users while keeping documents securely stored externally.

Key features of external document integration include:

• Document Linking and Access: Open and edit documents directly from ServiceNow.
• Search and Retrieval: Find contracts using metadata or keywords.
• Version Control: Real-time collaboration with full version history.

Official documentation from ServiceNow support only One Drive and Goole Drive from legal services perspective. You can also integrate with SharePoint and keep it as a choice for contract storage, but you may not be able to get support features of search or online revision capabilities.

• Use ServiceNow Native Storage

If file sizes are manageable, ServiceNow can serve as the primary storage for both historical and new contracts. This allows organizations to manage the full contract lifecycle and storage from one system itself keeping security and access in check. However, migrating legacy contracts may require custom integrations or ETL processes, which can add cost and planning effort. Despite this, storing contracts natively provides a unified solution where all documents and metadata are centralized, simplifying user access and reducing dependence on external platforms. When storage and migration considerations are acceptable, ServiceNow native storage can be an efficient and streamlined approach for managing all contracts.

The key consideration is ensuring that storage limits and performance requirements are compatible with your organization’s contract volume.

• Hybrid Approach

You can opt for a hybrid approach that utilizes ServiceNow (either its native storage or a cloud solution) to manage new contracts created through the contract lifecycle in ServiceNow, while retaining legacy contracts in their original system. Only the metadata and hyperlinks will be transferred to ServiceNow. This allows ServiceNow to manage the contract lifecycle while the actual documents remain in the legacy system. Hyperlinks or integrated features ensure that users can access the full contract when needed. This approach minimizes migration efforts and costs, while still enabling effective lifecycle management and reporting within ServiceNow.

The guiding principle for above approaches is to ensure that we provide seamless user experience to legal department while keeping ServiceNow performance, compliance in check.