Part One: Migrating the rest of your information into Matters

If you’re reading this guide, Smokeball has already transferred your contacts and core data during the migration process. However, there’s likely additional information you’ll want to see in Smokeball. This guide will help you review, adjust, and manually import any remaining data to ensure your matters are fully optimized.

Pro Tip: Smokeball’s powerful automation and billing tools go far beyond most case management systems, so completing a few final setup steps will help you take full advantage of everything Smokeball can do.

Enter Matter Info

The Matter Details section of Smokeball is the area you will input most matter data.  You should begin by filling out the Matter Info window. 

Click on Info to open this window and input the following details:

1. Originating Attorney
   • Along with Attorney Responsible and Person Assisting, this field is important for reporting purposes. If things like Referrals or Income Allocation are important for calculating bonuses, you will want to complete this field. 
   • You can later you have originating attorneys on every file by running the Full Matter List report and grouping by Originating Attorney.  The report will reveal what matters have an originating attorney and those that do not. 
2. Referral Source and Referrer 
   • Your billboards, existing clients, Facebook, marketing efforts on Google, or the person that referred someone to your firm are examples of referral sources and referrers. 
   • Smokeball has Referral and Referral Fees reports you can run to verify this information.
3. Matter Billing Rates & Rate Sets 
   • Your onboarding specialist helped you configure your default matter billing rate under Smokeball Settings. However, billing rates can change at any time and may need to be overridden on an individual file. 
     • For example, if you bring on a new staff member to the firm, or a new attorney is assigned the file, they may not bill at the same rate. If this happens, you can override the default rate for each of those attorneys.
       
   • We highly recommend you book a billing Q&A training session for an in-depth explanation of these steps. Alternatively, you can watch a pre-recorded webinar on rolling out rate changes.

Enter Case Details & Sub Layout information

 Click on Case Details to open this window. 

Depending on your legacy system data integrity, Smokeball likely transferred your Client, Opposing Party information, and additional Matter Contacts into your migrated matters, However, your court details were not migrated. Input this information into Case Details to generate forms and captions as soon as possible.

1. Court Caption Related Information 
   • Fill out the Courtroom Number, District, Division, Parish (Louisiana Firms), County, Judge, Case Number, and any other court related fields necessary for pleadings. To test if you have all the necessary fields populated, exit out of the case details section, and generate a caption by hitting the Caption button right above the Matter Details section.
2. Trial Dates
   • Enter upcoming trial dates to set up future workflows.
3. Filing Dates
   • Fill in file and completed service dates in. You can also create workflows incorporating these dates. 

Note: The type of information you can enter into Case Details will change depending on the matter type.

 
You can add or remove matter details fields to suit your needs:  

1. Select the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of your matter to open the Matter Settings window and then select Parties and Data.  
2. Select the fields you want to see and uncheck any that are not relevant to your matter.

Matter Permissions 

By default, every Smokeball user has access to the entire system. However, you can enable staff permissions on a matter-by-matter basis by selecting the Permissions tab under matter settings.

You can also control staff permissions on a more global level in Smokeball settings, including:

• Who can access Smokeball Billing, edit time, or view trust balances. 
• Who can edit templates in the document form and templates library.

Note: Only firm owners can access Firm Insights. 

For more information on matter permissions, book a session with a trainer or watch this webinar. 

Next Step

Learn how to migrate contact details into Smokeball.