Smokeball Content Chronicle: Oct 2019

The Content team at Smokeball is responsible for adding to and maintaining over 15,000 Court and Authority Forms in the Forms & Templates library, any new or modifications to our Matter Types, and automating your firm’s templates. Our team is comprised of Attorneys and Paralegals with experience in many different areas of law. We understand the needs of your practice because we’ve been there. Our streamlined matter types and automated forms and templates allow you to work more efficiently, saving time and increasing the profitability of your firm.

Updates to the Forms & Templates Library 

The Content team is constantly working to ensure that our Court and Authority Forms stay up to date. This month we updated forms across a number of matter types.

If your looking for estate planning software, you’ll love our new Estate Planning cover sheet has been uploaded in the Forms & Templates library. You can find this in the Favorites folder for Estate Planning matter types. This will help users easily generate a form to get an overview of the case.

Dozens of new Juvenile Court forms have also been added to the Tennessee form suite, specifically for Memphis and Shelby county. Additionally, various local county forms in California have been updated, USCIS forms have been reviewed and updated, and IL Title Insurer forms have updated automation.

As part of your Smokeball subscription, you have access to Smokeball’s 15,000+ automated Court and Agency forms. If you find yourself manually creating the same court, agency, or other publicly-available forms over and over, our Content Team can automate these forms for you. For more information on our Forms & Templates library click here.

New and Improved Matter Types

We are also constantly improving our existing Matter Types and creating new ones to account for all different areas of law. We keep track of each and every Matter Type request to identify trends and improve the user experience. Because of this user feedback, we’ve added a few new layouts to our Personal Injury matter types for our personal injury software users. Making them more comprehensive than ever.

Health Insurance Details has been added as a sublayout under Plaintiff. We are also in the process of adding Wage Loss Details as a sublayout under Plaintiff. With this, you will easily be able to keep track of Plaintiff’s health insurer information as well as information about wages lost. Motor Vehicle Accident (Plaintiff and Defendant) now have a Vehicle Details tab on Insurance Policy Details. This tab allows you to keep track of the details about the vehicle at issue including make, model, year, VIN #, and more.

You can now track Counter-Petition filing details on Post Decree (Illinois), can now pull in Defendant’s address on Forcible Entry & Detailer (Illinois), and keep track of the statute of limitations date in General Litigation.

We’ve also added the following new matter types:

• Contact Dispute (ALL States)
• Partnership (GEN)
• Juvenile Dependency (WA)
• Hearing Coverage (FL)

Improved Automation

The Content team is responsible for the automation fields used in the automated Forms in the Court & Authority form library as well as your Firm’s documents. Our legal document automation software fields are merge fields that pull data from Smokeball into forms so you only have to enter the data once. We also have clever automation fields that determine whether to return “his/her” “he/she” “am/are” and more depending on the data you have entered into Smokeball. 

Our containers in Smokeball allow you to easily create a court caption for a case or send a letter to opposing counsel. You won’t have to manually type out any information, ensuring that everything is correct. The following fields have been added to the container automation panel:

• Attorney Responsible – Attorney Number
• Person Responsible – Attorney Number

Learn more about our industry-leading legal document drafting software. 

If you have any feedback regarding the above changes, please let us know! We’d love to hear from you.

Not using Smokeball legal practice management software? Schedule your demo and see why firms are seeing more productivity and profitability with Smokeball!