Best Practice - Estate Planning

The Estate Planning matters in Smokeball have been carefully built to help record the information needed to run your estate planning 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 our estate planning 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 Office of the Public Guardian forms.

Lasting Power of Attorney Details

In Lasting Power of Attorney matters, use LPA Details to record all details for each client's Health & Care and/or Financial lasting power of attorney(s). This sits below each client card, allowing you to enter the unique LPA details for each individual if you have more than one client in the same matter.

Will Details

In Will matters, use Will Details to record any Executors and their relationship to the client testator. This sits below each client card, allowing you to enter the unique Will details for each individual if you have more than one client in the same matter.

How to add a second client

When you are preparing an estate plan for a couple, it is optimal to include both parties on the same estate planning matter. Save time and avoid duplicate data entry when adding contacts at the same address by opening the first contact and selecting 'Add another Client at same address':

Alternatively, add an additional party by right-clicking on the client card and selecting 'Add Client':

The original party will be marked as Client 1 and the new party will be marked as Client 2 under Matter Details. In estate planning matters, each client will have their own details sub-item to record the unique estate planning details for that client.

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:

• Lasting Power of Attorney
• Will

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 Estate Planning matters that you can download at the following links:

• Lasting Power of Attorney
• Will

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 Estate Planning 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 Estate Planning matters. You can access these reports by navigating to the Reports page on the Smokeball Web App:

• Matter - Full List report can be filtered to any matter type combination. This can be a helpful report to see all your Estate Planning matters opened within a particular period date range, including a simple summary of the fee estimate and billed amount. 
• Firm Insights are 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 Estate Planning 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 Will matters:

• Status or critical information:
  • Will drafted
  • Drafts out for review
  • Signing scheduled
• Differentiate between circumstances or process within a matter:
  • Mirror Wills
  • Single
  • Married
  • Value of the Estate (this might be in brackets of estate value, and will further assist when finding previous similar examples)

Find out more about how to create and apply matter tags to your matters. If you are unsure what tags could be useful to your firm, reach out to our friendly team for additional help.

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 Estate Planning law practice:

• Configure your Estate Planning matters as fixed fee, saving admin time having to set the billing type on each matter. 
• Set up activity codes for commonly added fees, to save you non-billable admin time from having to enter the same entries over and over. Some examples of Estate Planning activity codes include:
  • Will preparation fixed fee
  • Lasting Power of Attorney preparation fixed fee
  • LPA Registration Fee
  • Capacity assessment fee
• AutoTime is a powerful feature for Estate Planning law firms because it helps you understand exactly how much time you are spending on your matters and in turn what is your profitability on each matter. Even if you are charging a fixed fee for the matter, it can also be helpful to send an invoice or invoice receipt that helps your client understand exactly everything you did along the way.