Running your Family matters in Smokeball will enable you to generate and manage all family Court forms, keep track of important dates, easily communicate with your clients and other parties, and save time by avoiding manual or duplicate data entry.
See below our suggestions for Best Practices within Smokeball Family matters.
The Family matters in Smokeball have been carefully built to help record the information needed to run your family law matters. Smokeball has contact cards and fields to help you keep track of important details and parties set up for each matter type.
Below are some examples of the key details you can keep track of within a few of our family law matter types. Once you enter the information in your matter, it will populate throughout the automated letters and Court & Authority forms found in the Forms & Precedents library, including HM Court & Tribunals Service forms.
Relationship Details
In Divorce and Dissolution (including Divorce Finance), Children, and Separation Agreement matters, use Relationship Details to keep track of the marriage type, marriage date/location, separation date, and divorce date (if applicable).
Case Details
In Divorce and Dissolution (including Divorce Finance), and Children matters, use Case Details to keep track of important court information, nature of application, and key dates.
Child Details
In Children matters, use the Child > Details subitem to record each child's relationship to the Applicant and Respondent.
Workflows
Workflows help eliminate extra admin work by allowing you to automatically designate tasks that happen for every matter, ensuring that nothing is missed and giving full transparency across the matter.
We have created sample workflows for the following matter flow patterns:
You can download our sample workflows and upload them into Smokeball.
Since every law firm is a little different, we encourage you to make these workflows your own based on your own preferences or requirements.
Matter Stages
Matter stages are a way to keep track of the progress of a matter. They provide a clear and organised overview of matter progress and help to keep clients informed and involved in the process. You can also sort your Home Page to group by matter stages to give full visibility of progress across all matters.
We have created sample Matter Stages for Family matters that you can download at the following links:
You can upload our sample Matter Stages and modify to suit your firm preferences.
Dashboard
The Smokeball Dashboard is an alternative entrance into Smokeball that places front and centre, everything you need to know to track and manage your work for the day more effectively. The Dashboard can be configured to your preferences, adding, resizing and configuring widgets to suit your needs.
See more on how to add and customise your dashboard widgets, or contact our friendly team for additional help on setting up dashboards to suit your Family practice needs.
Reports
Smokeball features many powerful reports which can be used to optimise your firm’s work routines, keep track of your deadlines, or maintain strong relationships with your clients.
Here are some of the helpful reports to help you manage Family matters. You can access these reports by navigating to the Reports page on the Smokeball Web App:
- Time and Cost Recovery Entries report will show all time and cost recovery entries, including detail on billable, non-billable, and written off time. You can run this report by matter or across all matters. This report is particularly helpful when preparing your statement of costs incurred forms.
- Event List report can be used to see all events for a particular staff member or all staff. Group by Matter to see all events in each matter.
- Income Allocation report can be used to track your firm’s collections.
Firm Insights is also available to firm owners to assist with managing and growing your law firm, by providing helpful insights and profitability estimates by matter and matter type. Find out more about Firm Insights and Reports.
Matter Tags
Matter tags allow you to further categorise and organise your Family matters. You can apply an unlimited amount of fully-editable tags to your matter, and even run custom reports based on your tags, allowing you to use them in any way to suit your needs.
Here are some example matter tags to implement for Divorce and Dissolution matters:
- Additional details on the type of application:
- Divorce
- Dissolution
- Judicial Separation
- Joint Application
- Divorce Finance
- Status or critical information:
- Conditional Order received
- Final Order received
- Differentiate between circumstances or process within a matter:
- No Children
- Finance
- Spousal Maintenance
- Child Maintenance
Most of the above tags can be useful for other Family matter types as well. If you are unsure what tags could be useful to your firm, reach out to our friendly team for additional help.
Find out more about how to create and apply matter tags to your matters.
Time and Billing
Smokeball makes it easy to keep track of your time for billing. Whether your matter is fixed fee, time based, contingency or something else entirely, Smokeball has robust settings to help your firm's billing and administration.
Here are some suggestions on how our Billing features can help your Family law practice:
- Configure different matter types as fixed fee or time-based billing, based on your standard process and billing type for different types of work. This saves admin time having to set the billing type on each matter, and can always be changed on any individual matter that doesn't fit the usual setup.
- Set up time and fee activity codes for commonly added time and fees, to save you non-billable admin time from having to enter the same types of entries over and over. Some examples of Family activity codes include:
- Divorce Fixed Fee
- Filing Fee (an activity might be created for each of the Family court filing fees)
- Service Fee
- Copying Expense
- Court Appearance
- Set up default fee entries to appear automatically when you open a matter. The feature is helpful to ensure you never forget to add charges to a matter and saves admin time having to add the same item to every matter.