A series of short posts rounding up product announcements from last week’s ABA Techshow

The practice management platform Smokeball released AutoTime, a feature that the company says will revolutionize how small law firms record their time and that will allow them to gain a better understanding of their profitability on a per-matter basis.

Smokeball users spend much of their workdays within the application, creating documents, sending and reading emails, performing tasks, and tracking meetings and court appearances. AutoTime tracks all of a user’s activity and completes a timesheet for each timekeeper each day.

While there are other software programs that can passively record time, AutoTime differs in that it knows the correct matter with which to associate the activity and it then automatically creates the time entry.

AutoTime includes a Profitability Tracker that provides firms with business intelligence about the time, cost and profitability of their matters. The tracker provides data on activities by the matter, by the timekeeper and by the client.

“We’re releasing firms from the monotony and often impossibility of tracking all their time and activity while allowing them to really understand how much time they’re spending versus what they’re billing on every matter,” Jane Oxley, president of Smokeball, said in a statement announcing the new feature.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.