The spreadsheet isn't the problem. Being the only copy is.
Most small practices run on some version of the same arrangement: a folder per client on a shared drive, a master spreadsheet somebody maintains, and a calendar that works as long as everyone remembers to update it.
This gets criticised more than it deserves. It's cheap, everyone already knows how to use it, and it survived the move to working from home. If it's holding your firm together, it's doing real work.
But it fails in specific, predictable ways — and they're worth naming, because they're the things a system has to actually fix.
Where it breaks
Two people, one file. Someone has the spreadsheet open. Someone else opens it read-only, makes changes anyway, saves a copy to the desktop, and now there are two versions. Nobody finds out for a fortnight.
Nobody can tell what changed. A date is wrong. Was it always wrong, or did someone change it? A spreadsheet has no memory. The honest answer is usually "we don't know", and in a practice where the file is a chronology, that's worse than an inconvenience.
The knowledge is in one person's head. The spreadsheet has a column whose meaning only Sandra knows, and a colour code that means something to her. When Sandra is on holiday, the firm slows down.
Finding a note means remembering where it was. Documents are in folders, notes are in documents, and searching means opening files one at a time.
Nothing tells you anything. A deadline in a spreadsheet cell is inert. It never comes and finds you — you have to remember to go and look.
What replacing it actually involves
The fear is a six-week implementation and a consultant. For a practice of two to twenty, it shouldn't be, and here it isn't:
Your fields, not a vendor's. The record carries the fields your practice uses — dates, amounts, dropdowns, references — under the names you already say. Columns that only made sense in a spreadsheet get to keep making sense. See customization.
Your existing data goes in from the spreadsheet you already have. Export to CSV, map the columns, and import. The import checks every row against your own rules first and shows you what's wrong before writing anything — and it's all-or-nothing, so a bad file can't leave you half-migrated. See importing your data.
The colour code becomes a dropdown. The thing only Sandra knew becomes a field with defined values that everyone picks from — visible, consistent, and filterable.
What you get that a spreadsheet can't give you
Two people can work at once. Open a record and it's locked while you're in it; a colleague sees it's in use and by whom, rather than silently overwriting you. The list refreshes as other people make changes.
Everything is recorded. Every change keeps the field, the old value, the new value, who and when — and every document has its own history too. "Who changed the hearing date?" becomes a question with an answer. See the audit trail.
Notes are searchable across every matter, by their full text — so you can find what was agreed without remembering which file it was in.
Dates come and find you. Flag something as an important date and upcoming and recent ones appear on the record list, rather than waiting in a cell for someone to look.
Not everyone sees everything. Access is per person — full, read-only, or only the matters they own — and individual fields can be hidden by role.
What to keep
Don't throw the shared drive away. Documents that belong to a matter live in BeornNotes, attached where they belong; that doesn't mean every file the firm has ever produced needs to move on day one.
The sensible migration is: bring the client and matter list across, attach documents to matters as they come up in the ordinary course of work, and let the old folders age out. Nobody needs to spend a weekend on it.
Try it with your actual spreadsheet. Start a free trial, import it, and see whether the records look like your practice. That's a better test than any demo.