Legal and professional services firms often struggle with fragmented data, duplicate entries, and time-consuming manual efforts to keep multiple systems up to date. These inefficiencies not only disrupt existing workflows but also often jeopardize data accuracy and compliance. Common Data Services (CDS) steps in to transform the entire game by acting as a centralized hub that synchronizes, standardizes, and streamlines critical data across the entire Intapp ecosystem.
Whether you are onboarding new clients, integrating new modules, or managing compliance with data regulations, CDS ensures that your data is consistent, accessible, and ready to scale when needed. Intapp Common Data Services maintains data integrity and ensures that all teams within your legal firm use the same data to make informed decisions.
Explore what CDS is, its key benefits, its role in maintaining data integrity, and some everyday use cases of integration to accelerate the whole process.
What is CDS?
Intapp Common Data Services (CDS) serves as a centralized hub for sharing core data, including clients, Matters, Users, People, and reference data such as practice areas and Offices across the entire Intapp ecosystem. The purpose of CDS is to offer a unified point of entry for managing this foundational information.
Firms can streamline integration across Intapp products and the ecosystem by mapping and loading common data in CDS once. For instance, any data uploaded in Intapp Risk is immediately available for other solutions, such as Intapp Experience, eliminating the need for manual updates or mapping duplicate data.
This shared and standard data model accelerates the process of adding new Intapp products into the system while maintaining clean and accurate data across multiple systems.
Benefits of Common Data Services in Intapp
Common Data Services is the foundational component of the Intapp ecosystem. By centralizing key information, such as clients, matters, and users, CDS ensures data consistency, facilitates quick product deployment, and enables seamless integration across systems. Here is how CDS helps legal firms in terms of data sharing and management:
1. Unified Management of Core Firm Data
For firm data, such as clients, Matters, Users, and Offices, CDS acts as a centralized hub, maintaining data consistency across the ecosystem. It eliminates the dependency on manual efforts, reduces the chances of data duplication, and provides an authoritative source of truth. It ensures that all updates made in one place are reflected across all Intapp products.
2. Accelerated Deployment of New Intapp Products
Legal firms can leverage the pre-loaded common data from CDS to implement new Intapp modules, such as Risk, Experience, or Time. This reduces the need for repeated data mapping and accelerates the implementation process with less overhead.
3. Data Flow Across Intapp Applications
When you store data in CDS, it becomes immediately accessible to any Intapp product connected in the ecosystem. This data availability and cross-product data sharing enhance team collaboration and ensure continuity across workflows.
4. Consistent and Error-Free Data
By implementing standardized data formats and validation rules across the Intapp ecosystem, Intapp reduces inconsistencies and errors between systems. It supports a clean data environment that improves operational reliability, minimizes data discrepancies, and fosters trust in the information used across departments.
5. Scalable Architecture
Whether your legal firm is adding new practice areas, expanding offices, or onboarding additional Intapp modules, CDS is built to scale with demand. It ensures flexible configuration and the addition of new data points without affecting the ongoing operations.
6. Compliance and Data Governance
By enforcing structured data governance and maintaining audit-ready records, CDS supports firm-wide compliance. The centralized structure enables easy monitoring of data flows, compliance with regulatory obligations, and the mitigation of data-related risks across all business units.
7. Reduced Maintenance
CDS eliminates the need for separate data ingestion/sync from each Intapp product, thereby lightening the burden on the IT team. Legal firms can save time and resources that would often be spent on custom scripts, ongoing data reconciliation, and product-specific support.
8. Better Insights Through Unified Reporting
Data flowing from a central source makes reporting more accurate and insightful. CDS helps firms generate comprehensive dashboards and analytics that provide a complete business picture, supporting smarter and faster decision-making.
Role of CDS in Data Integrity
Data integrity is essential for all legal and professional services, as their firms strive for operational excellence, client trust, and regulatory compliance. Intapp CDS plays a foundational role in ensuring that all systems within the firm communicate seamlessly, using consistent, validated, and real-time data.
Here is how CDS maintains Data Integrity in the Intapp ecosystem:
1. Centralized Source of Truth
CDS unifies all critical data (clients, matters, and users) into a single, authoritative repository. It eliminates fragmentation caused by disconnected systems or departmental databases. When all Intapp modules draw data from the common source, it enhances data accuracy, ensures instant updates, and eliminates version conflicts. The single source of truth ensures that every application within the firm reflects the same, reliable dataset.
2. Automated Synchronization Across Products
Any updates made in CDS are automatically pushed across all connected Intapp applications and products. These real-time data updates ensure that all teams, from intake to finance, are working with the same latest information. This automation eliminates manual dependency and provides consistent data delivery across all departments.
3. Enforced Data Validation and Governance
CDS integrates organizations’ rules and governance frameworks into every data interaction. Whether it’s client records, matter statuses, or user roles, all the data entering CDS is checked against predefined rules for internal standards and compliance regulations. This enforcement reduces human errors, prevents malformed data from being saved, and supports industry standards such as GDPR and HIPAA.
4. Elimination of Redundancies and Duplicates
Duplicate records lead to inefficiencies and increase reputational risks. CDS prevents such issues by maintaining master records for each data entity. It consolidates data creation and update into a single location to ensure new entries are cross-verified, thereby eliminating the risk of conflicts across systems.
5. Consistent Data Structures for Reporting
Inconsistent formats and structures are a significant challenge in data reporting. By standardizing the schema used across all Intapp applications, CDS confirms that every field, relationship, and data object complies with a unified model. This data consistency across systems simplifies the process of generating firm-wide reports, identifying trends, and extracting insights, without requiring hours of reconciliation between systems.
6. Enhanced Auditability and Traceability
All data interaction in CDS is recorded, allowing legal firms to track changes. This audit trail helps in compliance audits, internal investigations, and transparency across operations. Legal organizations can have clarity and evidence of who made the changes, when they were made, and what values were altered, required for both operational assurance and regulatory review.
Common Scenario of CDS Integration for Pre-built Integration Solution
Common Data Services is the backbone of integration among Intapp applications. To accelerate the implementation process for diverse client environments, several integration packs have been developed to address specific data flow requirements between external systems and CDS.
Here are a few standard Intapp integration packs and library:
1. PMS to CDS Inbound Library Template
This reusable template is designed for data synchronization from the Practice Management System into CDS, supporting core data entities such as reference data, persons/users, and clients/matters through both full and incremental load processes.
The template is specifically designed for SQL Server but can be used on other databases. It is an ideal solution for all firms seeking to quickly enable data flow from their PMS with flexibility for customization.
2. DealCloud to CDS Inbound Integration (Library + Integration Pack)
DealCloud to CDS inbound integration includes both a Library Template and a dynamic Integration Pack. The library has base components while the pack dynamically generates DealCloud-specific connectors, maps, and processes using cross-references.
This pack and library reduce the dependency on manual component creation and support data ingestion into CDS for reference data, users, and clients/matters, offering both full and incremental capabilities.
3. 3E to CDS Inbound Integration Pack
3E to CDS inbound integration pack facilitates integration from 3E (on-prem or cloud) to CDS using OData APIs. The pre-configured queries simplify the implementation process, while extensive cross-reference tables enable implementers to tailor the mapping based on their requirements.
This integration pack supports both full and incremental synchronization for all the core entities. As a legal firm, if you are already using 3E and want to leverage CDS for unified data alignment across the Intapp ecosystem, this Intapp integration pack will accelerate the whole process.
4. CDS Audit Integration Pack
The CDS Audit Integration Pack is a no-code troubleshooting tool that identifies missing data between CDS and products such as Risk and Time. It generates audit reports with missing or orphaned entities to maintain data integrity.
This Intapp integration pack is crucial for post-deployment validation and should be run ad hoc in production environments.
The pack is critical for post-deployment validation and is meant to be run ad hoc, particularly in production environments. It uses CDS Keys and entity IDs for comparison and supports message customization through cross-reference tables.
CDS for Risk Implementation
The integration of Intapp Risk products with the Common Data Service depends on your existing system setup. While Risk Cloud products have CDS by default, they do not automatically consume CDS data – requires manual configuration for the following scenarios:
Scenario 1: Risk Products Are the First to Use CDS
Begin by mapping and loading common data (Clients, Matters, Users) into CDS. Configure the shared custom fields and ensure data relevance by applying filters. After validating the data, enable data flow into Risk, followed by loading Risk-specific fields and configurations, such as Past Conflicts Searches and custom workflows.
Scenario 2: Adding Risk to Existing CDS-Connected Products
If your law firm is already using other Intapp cloud solutions with CDS, first review the existing data and set up Risk-specific fields within CDS. Filter out irrelevant information, validate mappings, and then activate the data flow into Risk. Finalize this by configuring workflows and Risk-specific setups.
Scenario 4: CDS Enabled After Risk is Already Live
In your system, if risk data exists before CDS activation, begin by thoroughly mapping the CDS data and reconciling the existing information. Load or update Risk-specific attributes as per requirements, enable CDS data flow, and validate the data alignment between systems to maintain integrity.
Under all scenarios, proper validation, configuration of workflows, forms, and term templates are critical to ensuring a smooth and scalable CDS-Risk integration.
Conclusion
With the evolving technology landscape, the need to maintain, govern, and scale data is also increasing. Intapp CDS simplifies data synchronization across the ecosystem, future-proofing your infrastructure for growth, compliance, and operational excellence.
From rapid product deployment to real-time audit validation, CDS provides a seamless, secure, and scalable approach to centralizing core business data. Whether your firm plans to integrate Risk, Experience, or other modules, leveraging CDS through standard integration packs ensures faster time-to-value, cleaner data, and reduced IT overhead. Embracing CDS isn’t just about connecting systems—it’s about enabling more intelligent decisions, greater agility, and firm-wide innovation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do I manage data consistency across different Intapp modules?
Leverage the Intapp Integration Services and centralized data governance policies to ensure data consistency across different Intapp modules like Intake, Time, Risk, and conflicts. Law firms can utilize the Data Quality Management tools and APIs to define, enforce validation rules, and automate synchronization between modules.
2. What is the best approach to handle duplicate client or matter data during onboarding?
As an Intapp partner, the best approach is to embed validation and duplicate check logic during the Intake process using Intapp Intake or Conflicts. All these modules validate the data against existing records to flag potential duplicates in real-time. Additionally, the Intapp Conflicts module helps identify existing relationships, which is crucial for maintaining clean and conflict-free data.
3. How do I migrate legacy data from older systems into Intapp?
Data migration from legacy systems to Intapp involves extracting, cleansing, mapping, and transforming data using Intapp Integration Services. First, we identify the critical data sets—clients, matters, billing, or risk profiles — and align them with Intapp’s data model. Then we clean the data to remove duplicate entries and define field mappings based on Intapp’s schema. If you are still unsure about where to begin, connecting with our Intapp experts.
4. How do I ensure data privacy and compliance (GDPR, HIPAA) within Intapp workflows?
Intapp offers configurable workflows that enforce data access controls, consent management, audit logging, and data retention policies to comply with GDPR, HIPAA, and other relevant privacy laws. Role-based access ensures that only authorized users have access to view or edit sensitive information. When paired with proper training and internal policy enforcement, these capabilities create a secure environment for data.
5. How can we maintain data quality and avoid duplicates across multiple systems?
To maintain data quality, it is essential to focus on a combination of integration, validation, and governance. Intapp Integration Services (IIS) synchronize data among different systems, such as CRM, DMS, or ERP, in real-time. By creating specific rules, ensuring consistent naming conventions, and validation checkpoints during data entry, legal firms can avoid data duplication. Regular audits and data profiling help to identify and resolve anomalies proactively.