Smokeball is law practice management software that has a tight integration with Microsoft Office. Now, with their Auto:Time feature, formerly their TimeScribe feature, Smokeball tracks time so you don’t have to, and you can get back to the business of making money by doing the law.
Details
Auto:Time tracks your time and activities seamlessly and automatically. When you add a new event in Smokeball, when you open a document, when you send an email— Auto:Time knows when you switch to a new matter and will assign the time accordingly. Each night, Auto:Time runs a detailed time report with the time you spent and your matter activity throughout the day and emails it to you. When you’re ready to bill, you will already have all your invoice information at your disposal without any more effort on your part.
Auto:Time isn’t just for time tracking, however. It can also help you assess the profitability of each matter type. You can set staff costs—not simply their hourly rate, but how much each staff member costs the firm in terms of salary, benefits, overhead and more. Smokeball will turn that into an hourly rate and then, thanks to Auto:Time, allow you to assess if you are spending too much staff time on a matter.
This profitability calculation is helpful for both hourly and flat fee attorneys. Lawyers who bill hourly can track more time instead of having to go back and try to calculate everything at the end of the day, week, or month. Fixed fee lawyers can keep track of the time they’re putting in on routine matters and decide if they should consider changing fee arrangements.
Soon, Smokeball will introduce Firm Insights. As a firm owner, you’ll be able to run reports to see how many matters have been created and break those down as far as a by-day calculation. This allows firms to assess when their high points and low points are throughout the year and adjust marketing accordingly.
How to Get It
Contact Smokeball for a free demo and to learn more about Auto:Time.
Excellent Email Integration
Extremely satisfied. Smokeball has an excellent layout, helpful support and the desktop elements makes it faster than web-based programs. Additionally, Smokeball allows you to link emails to matters directly in Outlook as well as to directly upload and save documents to/from matters. I don’t think any other practice management software offers this level of integration.
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Kept their promises
I have a not super complicated EP practice, and I went with Smokeball because of their promise to tightly integrate with Office 365 and provide excellent document assembly. It also has some automated timekeeping feature, where it tracks the emails, documents, and memo’s created out of Smokeball – making it easy to complete your timekeeping later in the day. I’ve been very, very happy.
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Magic
Started using it 18 months ago. I reclaimed 2-3 days per month that I used to spend doing the bills and managing the billing process. The auto-time tracking feature is the most remarkable development ever. If your fingers are on a keyboard, Smokeball is capturing your time. Most days, billing for me now means 3-5 minutes of editing the auto-time data. Billing and editing is easy to use. Also robust practice management features and cloud storage. My entire electronic pleading file is now on my phone.
It’s not perfect, it needs some more reporting tools. But it is the most amazing, flexible and robust solution I’ve encountered. I can’t recommend it enough.
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