Legal departments rarely set out to build a fragmented technology stack. It happens one decision at a time: a spend management tool here, a contract system there, each one chosen to solve a specific problem at a specific moment. Years later, those systems are still running, even after the vendors stop investing in them and the workarounds pile up around their limitations.
By the time a legal team decides to modernize, the new technology is usually the easy part to agree on. The hard part is everything that has to happen to the old systems first.
Why Replacing Legacy Legal Systems Is Harder Than Adding New Ones
Buying a new tool is additive. Replacing an old one is subtractive, and subtraction carries risk that addition doesn’t. Live matters, contracts, and historical data all depend on the system being retired. Teams have built years of muscle memory around its quirks. Every integration built on top of it has to be re-pointed or rebuilt.
That’s why legal technology debt accumulates quietly. No one decides to keep an outdated system on purpose. It stays in place because retiring it looks harder than tolerating it, until tolerating it becomes the bigger cost. Legacy systems built for a different era weren’t designed for how legal departments operate now, and the gap between what they can do and what the business needs keeps widening.
Retire First, Expand Second
Teams that modernize successfully tend to resist the urge to rebuild everything at once. Instead, they sequence the work: retire what’s broken, implement the core functionality the business depends on, stabilize the team on the new system, and only then expand into more advanced capabilities.
That sequencing decision extends to deployment strategy. A fully unified, single-instance rollout can be the right long-term goal, but it isn’t always the fastest or lowest-risk path to getting off a failing legacy system. Running parallel deployments on separate instances can let implementation teams move independently, which matters most when the legacy systems are actively degrading and timelines are tight.
Bringing every solution into one connected ecosystem is still the destination. It just doesn’t have to be the first step.
A Real-World Example: Medtronic
Medtronic, a global leader in healthcare technology, needed to retire legacy legal and contract management systems that had become outdated and difficult to maintain. Its long-standing vendors no longer met the organization’s operational needs, which introduced inefficiency, risk, and technical debt without a meaningful return on investment. With pressure to modernize quickly and control spend, Medtronic needed a flexible, cost-effective platform that could support both Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) while stabilizing current workflows and leaving room for future expansion.
“We were replacing long-standing existing systems that were basically in a state of disrepair. The blessing was getting modern technology (to replace them) …the curse was you’re really kind of starting at a lower point (in retiring technology debt first),” said a Senior Director of Legal Operations at Medtronic.
After benchmarking competing legal solutions, Medtronic selected Onit as its enterprise partner, launching dual implementations of ELM and CLM on separate, dedicated instances rather than pursuing a single unified instance from the start. That decision let parallel deployment teams move independently, reducing complexity and accelerating value delivery under an aggressive timeline. The rollout itself followed a minimum viable product approach: retire the legacy systems first, implement core functionality, stabilize users, and build a foundation for future expansion.
That foundation delivered:
- Technology consolidation: Aging legal systems replaced with a scalable, unified, modern platform.
- Strategic architecture: Separate-instance deployment let parallel teams retire legacy systems faster while preserving ecosystem benefits.
- Faster IT value delivery: Fewer tools in the legal tech stack, with the full team trained to manage Onit, freeing IT to focus on strategic support.
- Greater agility: Legal operations can now make post-launch adjustments without large-scale development work.
- Cost savings: A material reduction in licensing and support costs compared to the legacy tools.
“We appreciate having all capabilities integrated into a single, cohesive platform, which provides a streamlined and comprehensive solution. Additionally, the flexibility to make configuration changes post-implementation and adapt as needed has proved highly valuable for our team,” said a Senior Principal IT Project Lead at Medtronic.
What a Legacy Replacement Actually Requires
A few decisions tend to separate modernization projects that stay on track from ones that stall:
- Benchmark before committing. Comparing capabilities, licensing, and total cost to implement across vendors surfaces trade-offs that a single demo won’t.
- Decide sequencing deliberately. A unified single-instance approach and a parallel multi-instance approach both have a place. The right choice depends on how urgently the legacy systems need to come offline.
- Build for post-launch autonomy. A platform that lets the legal team configure and iterate workflows after go-live reduces the ongoing burden on IT.
- Measure the full cost of ownership, not just features. Licensing and support costs compound over years, and consolidating a fragmented stack often pays for itself in that line alone.
None of this is unique to one department or one pair of systems. The same questions come up whenever a team is deciding what modern ELM software actually needs to deliver or evaluating how contract lifecycle management fits into the broader legal tech stack.
See the Full Results
Medtronic’s legal operations team moved from reactive maintenance of failing systems to a modern, data-driven partner for the broader business. Read the full Medtronic customer story to see how the team sequenced its legacy replacement and what results followed.
