Legal Perspective: How Smokeball Can Help Attorneys Sleep Better at Night

Attorneys are made to be pessimists — in fact, pessimism is considered a virtue in our profession. By always preparing for the worst, we’re ready to jump in and protect our clients’ interests at a moment’s notice during a catastrophe.

However, when you’re always fearing the worse, the stresses of being attorney grow and compound over time with every new client and complex matter. Attorneys are always worried that they’re missing something, and practicing law becomes a curation of what ifs. What if I missed a deadline? What if I didn’t bill enough hours this month? What if I made a major mistake on a document I just filed with the court?

Thanks to this stress and pessimism, most attorneys have little peace of mind. We can hardly sleep at night. That’s why Smokeball designed our legal practice management software for attorney peace of mind. Here are a few ways we can help:

Quality Assurance

Smokeball Workflows extinguish the what ifs that often cause attorneys to wake up in the middle of the night. With Workflows, attorneys create a series of tasks with deadlines — essentially a checklist — to ensure no to do’s are not missed. You may be thinking, “That’s great, but what happens if I forget to apply a Workflow?” Great news: You can set up Smokeball to auto-generate Workflows. Are you feeling a little less stressed now?

Automated Billing

Attorneys who bill monthly are stressed because they suspect they could be billing more hours. Generally, this is due to poor billing habits — trying to recapture time at month’s end instead of properly recording their time daily. As such, attorneys cannot capture large swathes of their time — after all, no one has a photographic memory.

Smokeball’s automatic time tracking essentially gives attorneys that superpower. Integrations with the Microsoft Office products you’re already using means Smokeball records every minute you spend in Word or Outlook, automatically adding them to client invoices. Smokeball clients report capturing 20% to 30% more billable time through AutoTime, creating greater peace of mind through increased revenue.

Document Automation

Manual processes can lead to costly or embarrassing errors in your case filings and documents, like incorrectly entering client or judge names into the public record. But because Smokeball stores all the information for every matter in one place, our document automation feature seamlessly flows the details into every form. Gone are the days of attorneys or paralegals opening a Notice of Motion from another matter and copying and pasting in the court caption and judge’s name. And with our library of 18,000 automated public forms, the updated documents you need are immediately accessible with a few clicks.

Peace of mind is the antidote of stress. Thanks to features like quality assurance, automatic time tracking and document automation, Smokeball not only takes manual tasks off your plate, it builds your peace of mind. Contact us today to see how Smokeball can improve your sleep.

Mark Petrolis serves as senior account manager and in-house counsel at Smokeball. He earned his J.D. at The John Marshall Law School at University of Illinois Chicago.