At Smokeball we understand that the business problems your firm faces can change, and we want to provide you with a product that delivers exactly what your firm needs. If you find that you no longer need many of the features exclusive to Prosper+, Smokeball provides an alternative desktop tier - Smokeball Grow - that will still help you successfully manage your firm.
This article will explain some of the main considerations you need to make before downgrading from Prosper+ to Grow. It will also explain how to downgrade and offer some guidance on what you will need to do after the process is complete.
Important Note
You can only downgrade during your renewal window.
Features Lost
Smokeball Grow includes core functions that you are used to, such as document automation, the Forms & Templates Library, Word and Outlook integration, Tasks, Messages, Events, Time & Fees, Expenses, Invoices, Transactions, and more. However, Smokeball Prosper+ includes many special features which are exclusive to that tier. Before downgrading, consider whether your firm relies on any of the following:
- Activity*
- AutoTime*
- Call Log Created
- Firm Insights
- LeadPro**
- Matter Insights
- MatterFlow**
- Matter Stages
- Matter Timeline
- PDF - OCR, Bates
- Time Finder
- Workflows
*You can still retain access to Activity tracking and AutoTime as a paid add-on.
**You can still retain access to MatterFlow and LeadPro as paid add-ons to your Grow subscription.
If your firm relies extensively on any of the aforementioned features, we recommend discussing your situation with an Account Manager before downgrading.
Initiate a downgrade
If you believe that changing to Smokeball Grow is in your firm's best interests, reach out to your Account Manager. Your Account Manager will walk you through the necessary steps to downgrade.
Recommended practices after downgrading
Tracking activity without AutoTime
If you do not keep AutoTime as a paid add-on, then Activity Codes are the best way to manually account for activities that would be tracked automatically. At a minimum, we recommend creating codes for phone calls, Court Hearing Attended on, Consultation Meeting, Document Prepared, Document Drafted, Email Reviewed, Email Sent, Records Ordered, "Action" related to completion, and any related Memo activities. You should also use the timer function to accurately track your hours.
To keep track of events that occurred, we also recommend looking at your Outlook calendar on a weekly basis and comparing it to the Time and Expenses Entries report to ensure all those events are entered.
You can also run the Event List report every week to ensure that all events are billed as time entries.
Accounting for court rule sets without Workflows
You can use LawToolBox as a substitute. Before you downgrade, write your workflows down as a set of procedures and export them from Smokeball desktop. You should also record which documents are associated with each task in the workflow.
Managing Intake without LeadPro or MatterFlow
The best solution would be to retain LeadPro and MatterFlow as paid add-ons. However, if you do not wish to keep LeadPro or MatterFlow, there are workarounds.
For matter intake, you can print out completed forms and put them in a Word document to send to your clients via email or the client portal.
For lead intake, you ask your website designer to restore your website's code to your old Contact Us page. Any links on the Contact Us page should also go to the destinations they used before incorporating Smokeball code.
You can also set cases as pending or open to delineate between cases that have a client agreement and those that do not distinguish active cases from potential new clients. Alternatively, you can use matter tags to make this distinction.
Replacing Matter Stages
The best workaround for matter stages would be using matter tags. However, you will need to add and remove tags as the case reaches each new stage.
You can also draft memos to state when a case has progressed to a new stage or list tasks completed with a previous stage.
If you used matter stages to automatically send client portal messages to your clients when a new stage was reached, you should save these emails to a Word document so that you can manually send them moving forward.
Automating Documents
If you have already reached your cap for automated documents, we recommend taking our Introduction to Automation course on the Smokeball Academy or booking a session with a training expert.
Note: Smokeball will, however, continue to update court forms for your jurisdiction.
Integrations available to Grow users
Many key third party integrations are restricted to the Prosper+ tier. However, some effective integrations are available on lower tiers, such as Zapier.
We recommend visiting the Smokeball Marketplace and applying the Grow filter to see the full list of integrations that will be available to you after downgrading.