Automation FAQ

Our team can make automation revisions on your behalf. However, you should also feel empowered to make minor alterations on your own, such as:

• Formatting text in bold, underline, or italics
• Adding or removing paragraphs
• Adjusting margins or paragraph spacing

To make changes on your own, right-click on the template title in the Forms & Templates Library and select Modify. You must then select Save & Close from the Smokeball ribbon in Word to make the changes permanent. Learn more about modifying templates. 

Note: Proprietary forms will remain yours even after they are added to the Smokeball library. 

 If the font, line spacing, margins, etc. are off in your template, the following reasons might be the cause:

• The Normal Style in Word is not set to your preferences.
• The template has a container attached and the Normal Style of the template differs from the Normal Style of the container. The Normal Style settings of the container overrides formatting on the template itself. 

Note: You can modify the Normal Style from the Styles ribbon in Microsoft Word. 

The automation for an If/Then/Else statement has three parts. For the statement to work, all three parts must be present in this document.

An example of these parts:

<<IF (Client/Person/Gender) Equal (Female) THEN>>True<<ELSE>>False<<END IF>>

If one or more of these three automation parts is missing, then the above error will occur.

It can be easy to accidentally delete an automation part when modifying a template. The recommended practice is to only modify a template with Show/Hides on. To do so, navigate to the Paragraph ribbon in Microsoft Word and then select the paragraph symbol. You can then view all formatting symbols in your document as well as those related to automation.

You should check the following:

• Has the information been entered into the matter?
  • If you are using a template that contains pronouns (he/she/they etc.), but the pronouns are either not appearing in the automated template correctly, or not appearing at all, check your Contact Card to make sure the gender of the contact has been set. 
• Are you in the correct matter type?
  • Smokeball has many matter types, and there are automation fields that are specific to those matter types. Depending on the type of case, some matters have Petitioners and Respondents, whereas others have Plaintiffs and Defendants. If you are using a template that is automated with Plaintiff fields but are in a matter type where the party type is Petitioner, the Plaintiff automation fields will not return any information because Plaintiff and Petitioner are not equivalent fields. 

You can copy and paste automation fields. Any field that is available on the Field tab in the automation panel can be copied from one location or template and pasted into another.

You can also copy and paste an If/Then/Else statement so long as it is built from one of the fields available on the Field tab in the automation panel. 

You cannot copy and paste Asks or If/Then Else statements built from Asks. Asks are document-specific and cannot be copied from one template to another. If you need to have the same Ask in multiple templates, you will need to re-create it for each template. Note: You can copy and paste an Ask into different locations from within the same template.

Likewise, the document-specific nature of Asks means that any If/Then/Else statement built from an Ask cannot be copied from one template and pasted into another.