Smokeball Content Chronicle: Sept 2019

By Sonica Jutla

Did you know Smokeball has a staff of over 20 former attorneys and paralegals creating, updating and developing content for Smokeball legal practice management software?

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.

Illinois 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 focused on updating our Illinois forms. Following a massive update by Cook County, all Probate forms have been updated by our Guardianship & Probate team.

Illinois Real Estate documents have also been updated. You may have previously noticed If/Then/Else statements in your forms. These have been replaced and the forms now open faster and will increase efficiency with use.

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 public legal Forms & Templates library.

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. Based on user feedback, we’ve added a place to keep track of Negotiations in Personal Injury cases. A Negotiations Details sublayout has been added to Personal Injury-Plaintiff and Motor Vehicle Accident-Plaintiff. With this, you will be able to keep track of up to five offers and demands from the other side. You will no longer have to look through your file to find this information.

Case details has been updated on Post Judgment Collection for Illinois and California. There is now a default interest rate, an interest accrued calculation, and a place to enter renewal judgment information.

We’ve also added the following new matter types:

• Foreclosure – Municipal Lien
• Easement (WA)
• Vulnerable Adult Protection Order (WA)

For more information on Smokeball’s legal matter management software visit our website.

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. Automation 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.

The following automation fields have been added to the automation panel:

Matter Info > Person Assisting > Attorney Number
This allows you to automate the Attorney number for two people on a case. This way if two Attorneys are working on a case, you can easily insert that into a document. Simply select the Attorney from the Person Assisting dropdown in Matter Info.

Alternative Words > Identify or Identifies
You can find this field on any contact card.

We have also improved our market-leading automated PDF functionality. “Asks”, which allow PDFs to be more fully automated, can now be used in PDFs in addition to automated Word documents for easy legal document automation.

If you have any feedback regarding the above changes, please let us know! We’d love to hear from you — just email the Smokeball content team at support @ smokeball.com