Smokeball

The adoption of generative artificial intelligence in small law firms has almost doubled over the past year, with 53% of small firms and solo practitioners now integrating gen AI into their workflows, up from 27% in 2023, according to the 2025 State of Law Report released today by law practice management company Smokeball.…

Trust accounting remains one of the most dangerous pitfalls for unwary lawyers. Far too often, lawyers — particularly those in solo and small firms — still rely on manual methods for maintaining and reconciling their client funds accounts. As a result, trust account violations are a frequent source of professional disciplinary cases for lawyers, in…

As I noted yesterday, over the weekend, OpenAI released Deep Research, an AI agent capable of completing multi-step research tasks and synthesizing large amounts of online information. The company says Deep Research (not to be confused with the controversial Chinese AI product DeepSeek) can complete complex research tasks in minutes that might otherwise take hours…

Lawyers who are members of the Maryland State Bar Association can now get free access to trust accounting and billing software, through a partnership between the bar and the law practice management company Smokeball.

Under the partnership, all 18,000 members of the MSBA, which is a voluntary state bar, can sign up for…

“You can’t tell the players without a scorecard,” yelled the hawkers of olden days at major league baseball stadiums. In the modern days of law practice management, that may still be true.

As I wrote yesterday in part one of this four-part series, the law practice management market has undergone dramatic consolidation, from what…

Sixteen years ago marked the beginning of a sea change in law practice management technology for solo and small law firms. On March 1, 2008, a virtually unknown company out of Canada called Themis Solutions launched the first cloud-based software product for managing a law practice, called Clio. Coincidentally, just a week earlier,…

For some lawyers, tracking time is so tedious and onerous that they leave their law firms for jobs where hourly billing is not required, such as working inhouse at a corporation. Even apart from the tedium, time tracking is often incomplete and inaccurate, failing to record all billable hours and resulting in time leakage that can…

Every lawyer in Texas is now eligible for free access to trust accounting and billing software, thanks to an exclusive partnership announced today between the State Bar of Texas and the law practice management company Smokeball.

Under the partnership, all members of the State Bar of Texas — some 111,000 lawyers — can…

At the American Bar Association’s Techshow this week in Chicago, the law practice management platform Smokeball will unveil its plan to deploy generative artificial intelligence within its platform across the client lifecycle, from intaking new clients to handling their matters to billing them for the work.

It will launch the first set of…

Call me lucky. Every week, I get to sit down at the mic for my LawNext podcast and have a conversation with the leading “innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what’s next in law.”

For me, each and every one of these conversations is fun and fascinating. But I am equally fascinated to add up the…

I’ll be part of a webinar tomorrow that will cover the basics of AI and how it can be applied in the legal field.

The webinar, which is eligible for CLE credit in multiple jurisdictions, is Thursday, Aug. 10, at 2 p.m. ET, and registration is free.

My copanelist is Jordan Turk, attorney…

The majority of law firms use just five or fewer unique software products, according to a legal industry study published today by the law practice management company Smokeball.

The study, How Technology is Changing the Legal Industry in 2023, which surveyed law firms of 50 or fewer employees, finds that 77% of those firms…