AutoTime By Smokeball: Revolutionizing Time Entry For The Busy Lawyer

Let’s be honest — everyone hates keeping track of billable hours.  Ask any room of lawyers what their least favorite part of the job is, and 99% of them will say time entry without batting an eye.  Sure, we all know that billable hours are the lifeblood of every law firm. However, knowing that doesn’t make the tedious chore of entering those billable hours any better.

Even with huge technological advances in practice management software, time entry continues to be an arduous task.  For decades, attorneys have been asking the same question: Isn’t there a better way to do this?

Thanks to Smokeball, the answer is finally yes.  After years of perfecting their practice management tools, Smokeball finally solved the mystery of how to make time entry and billing painless, and it’s called AutoTime.  Take one test run of Smokeball with its new AutoTime feature, and you’ll never go back to traditional time entry again.

Software That Works How You Work

When it comes to cloud-based project management software, Smokeball leads the pack in offering a platform that’s customized to your individual practice.  While some diehards may never give up their trusty Redwelds, Smokeball is designed to be a comprehensive paperless file for each of your matters.

Every aspect of Smokeball is customizable for each unique case, with filters and tagging for different areas of law and even specific jurisdictions.  They offer a staggering number of automated legal forms — the current number is over 6,000, with the possibility of adding even more.  The forms are nuanced down to the county your case is in, and they automatically merge your client information into each and every one of them.

The depth of integration offered by Smokeball makes it a system that’s easy to rely on for everything you do from the time you walk in the office to the time you close your laptop for the night.  Practically the only thing Smokeball didn’t do was enter your time for you — until now.

Setting a New Standard for Capturing and Submitting Time

Simply put, AutoTime is a game changer. Because Smokeball is structured in such a way that every single activity you do is associated with a particular matter, they realized they were in a unique position to know how much time was spent on each matter each day for each staff member.  That realization revolutionized the time entry game for good.

Every day, overnight, AutoTime processes all of the work that a particular user did that day, correlates the time to the matter to which it was assigned, and generates a daily activity list.  The recorded time, complete with activity descriptions, is automatically entered as your billable time for invoicing purposes.

If you’re thinking this means you never have to manually enter your time again, you’re right. Before now, Smokeball was already tracking and managing all your activities.  Now AutoTime has taken the final step of reporting that data back in the form of a convenient billable hour report that’s ready to be invoiced.

The level to which AutoTime can keep track of your activity is truly impressive. For example, if you’re working in a Word document, AutoTime knows not only when you opened and closed that document, but also if you go idle for a period of time, and it deducts that idle time from the billing. The same goes for time spent reading or typing an email.  The result is a record of your time that’s shockingly accurate.

Of course, you always have the final say on what’s submitted to the client. You can edit the billed time up or down to account for work done offline or to write off time if necessary.  You can also revise the automatic descriptions to comply with each client’s individual invoicing demands.  The important thing is that the tedious part has already been done for you.

The other great thing AutoTime allows you to do is track your profitability in real time.  If you enter the annual cost — salary, benefits, etc. — of any particular employee into AutoTime, it will analyze the fees billed vs. the time spent for that employee on each individual matter, and generate a report.

At a glance, you’ll be able to tell if a given matter is profitable or not. Profitability can also be analyzed per matter type or per client.  For small firms, the ability to know at any moment whether you’re making money, and which practice areas are losing the firm money, is crucial to assessing your operations and workflows going forward.

In short, AutoTime allows you to make data-driven decisions about the profitability of your firm.  Combine that with the time you save by not having to record and enter your hours, and you’re on the path to maximizing your billable hours.

After all, your time should be spent serving your clients, not doing time entry. Smokeball with AutoTime frees you up to work how you want to work, resulting in a more profitable firm for you and better service for your clients.