Best Practice - Estate Administration

The Estate Administration matters in Smokeball have been carefully built to help record the information needed to run your Estate Administration 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 Estate Administration 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 probate forms, and HM Revenue & Customs inheritance tax forms.

Personal Representative

The client on the matter is the Personal Representative, being the Executor or Administrator of the estate. All Executors should be entered as Personal Representatives on the matter, even those who may not be your client.

Add additional Personal Representative(s)

As in all Smokeball matters, you can add an additional party by right-clicking on the contact card and selecting 'Add Personal Representative'.

Alternatively, if there are Personal Representatives at the same address, you can save time and avoid duplicate data entry by opening the first contact and selecting 'Add another Personal Representative at same address'.
In estate administration matters, each personal representative will have their own details sub-item to record the unique information for that individual.

What if I do not represent one of the Personal Representatives?

To indicate that a particular Personal Representative is not your client, right-click on the contact card and select 'I do not represent this Personal Representative':

The Personal Representative will then appear with a Solicitor sub-item to enter their solicitor details:

Deceased

The deceased is entered as a contact on the matter, giving you access to all the information that you would usually find for a person contact card. To get the most out of our automated Probate forms, be sure to enter:

• Name
• Address
• Gender
• Previous name(s)
• Marital Status
• Occupation
• Date of Birth
• Death Details (Date, Place, Country)
• National Insurance Number

Note that some of the above details are located in the 'Additional Details' tab of the contact card:

Personal Representative Details

In Probate matters, use Personal Representative Details sub-item to record the information about each personal representative, including the type and status (active, renounced, etc.), relationship to the deceased, and their name in Will/Codicil if different from legal name. This sits below each Personal Representative, allowing you to enter the unique details for each individual.

Estate Details

Use Estate Details to enter additional information required for the estate administration process, including the application details, domicile, will/codicil information, and survivor details.

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.

See more on how to create and use workflows, or contact our friendly team for additional help on setting up workflows to suit your Estate Administration practice needs.

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 Administration matters that you can download at the following links:

• Probate

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 Administration 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 Administration 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 Administration matters opened within a particular period date range, including a simple summary of the fee estimate and billed amount. 
• Client Account Statements will show all funds in and out of the client account. This is helpful when distributing the estate if assets have been held in this account.

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 Estate Administration 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 Probate matters:

• Additional details on the type of application:
  • Probate
  • Letters of Administration
  • Letters of Administration with Will annexed
  • Inheritance Tax
• Status or critical information:
  • Contested
  • Uncontested
  • Grant received 
  • Distributed
• Differentiate between circumstances or process within a matter:
  • Codicil
  • Legitum Fund
  • Unknown Heirs
  • Assets under £325,000
  • IHT schedules (a tag could be created for each IHT schedule) 

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 Administration 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 Estate Administration activity codes include:
  • Fixed fee for grant of representation (IHT 205 only)
  • Probate Application fee
  • Post in London Gazette
  • Post in Local Newspaper
• 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.