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I was talking to some friends who I met in law school and through litigating, and some of them work for larger law firms who have been working on policies around AI. They were mostly just joking around about the current state of AI governance at their jobs, while admitting that they didn't know enough about the new tech to be able to form better policies on their own, as they are more focused on their caseload than certifying themselves in AI use. (Actually, watch this space, I’m working on something.)But it got me wondering what is happening at other firms, and what other legal professionals’ vibes are. For the record, Smokeball has an AI policy, as well as a data security policy. Even though AI is very minimally involved in my role and not involved in my posting here at all (that’s my voice! for better and worse!), I need to know the policies. I also sync periodically with other departments who do find themselves using AI in their role (including Archie within Smokeball!) so I can be

We are moving from an onsite server to the cloud, using SmokeBall for the cloud.  Are others using SB to store their office administration files, e.g., administration, practice management, civic and social service, professional service (e.g.for state bar or local bar), client development, professional education, hiring and training staff)?  In our old system, we have separate non-billing “Y” numbers we assigned to each of those categories and filed our pdfs into subfolders for each.  A “Y” number or “matter” was a non-billable category.  In SB, the only matter types available (since we can’t create our own) are Administration and under that a sub folder titled Administration again another sub folder titled General.  Do others then created subfolders under each of those areas?  

Does anyone else experience issues with reply emails coming back and not showing tagging in Outlook? So, for example, email a client from Outlook, email is sent with SB tagging (meaning, i put the matter info in the box at bottom of the email). But, sometimes, often but not all the time, the email i receive back from the client has no info in the SB box in outlook. Drives me crazy as i spend a lot of time re-tagging email threads.Curious if this happens to anyone else?

Is there a way to put a matter on hold because a client isn’t paying their bill? 

I reviewed the Beta Release Notes for Version 9.19 but I don’t see anything in there related to the latest Messages update so I am curious if anyone else is experiencing similar issues or have similar feedback. While the latest update includes some great new features, such as marking messages unread and liking messages, it seems to have amplified issues experienced prior to the update and added a few more. Support tickets have been opened previously to review some of these issues but there seem to be no long term fixes. Issues and feedback include:-Intermittent delay in receiving messages making real time direct and immediate communications impossible.-Message notifications lingering after a new message has been read.-Message notifications dismissing after reading a new message but then pop back up on the same message moments later.-Sent messages not appearing in the chat until the chat, sometimes the entire matter window, is refreshed.-I can see someone liked my message, but not who.

Last week and the week before, our poll topics were about using AI even though it scares you. Several of you contributed responses, and it gave me a look at where some of our legal professionals’ comfort level is with legal AI right now. I’m interested to see how many of you let it fade to the backburner and how many of you dig in your heels and learn more. I try to read about legal AI every single day, to keep my knowledge current and my perspective growing, but where I falter a bit is using or applying that learning. Or, if I do use it, I do it once or twice and then forget because I’ve moved on to learning about another facet of it, so I don’t utilize the cool things I already know it can do for me. To that end, I am wondering what your most important legal AI skill right now is, based on how YOU use legal AI in your practice. I know this will vary based on your role in a law firm, too - a managing partner is going to be using legal AI differently than a legal secretary or litigatio

Is there anyone using Odella here with Smokeball?  Would love to learn about some use cases.

I noticed that in two separate matters overdue tasks are not appearing in my daily digest.  Overdue tasks from other matters are listed.  Has anyone else encountered this problem? Any solution?

New to Smokeball (yesterday!) so pulling my hair out a bit here. Long time DocuSign user and keeping that account while we try out InfoTrack. How do I delete a draft envelope? So simple in DocuSign and doesn’t appear to be an option but it must be . . . help!

Hi SB communityI have just transitioned to Smokeball today. I have set up the activity fee and attached the hourly rates for each staff member. When i go to cost my time in time and fees, i am required to toggle between hours, fixed or units. Is there a way to set this option to ‘unit’ without having to change each time.  Thank you  Aarti

I would like to apply a different workflow to each individual matter stage. Is this possible? For instance, Intake stage would get an intake workflow, when moved to next stage, next stage would get the next stage’s workflow.

I would like to download all of my template forms and intake forms in one place. Is there a way to do that?

I work with many professionals in their professional capacity and also in their individual capacity. They have professional and personal emails.I do not see a way to add 2 different emails for the same contact and choose 1 as the primary to populate the email dialogue window.What am I missing?

I would like to use Archie to pull information from a file and fill in claim forms 

I have created a multiple choice field to insert text but I just need the choice to come in not do a whole lot of IF/ELSE/END IF.  This is too cumbersome.  Any suggestions.  Eg my choices arediscretionaryunitestatetestamentaryso I just need the relevant word to come in - something so simple is so complicated in this program. A simple computation would be great too. 

I have a bunch of questions and will set up a Billing Q&A, but I thought that here I might be able to get a change for more suggestions, perhaps from someone who has a good workaround.I am a sole business transactional attorney. Many of my clients will have multiple matters running at the same time (eg: 2 trademarks; 3 major contracts; 1 re-draft of their in-house NDA). They do NOT want to get 6 invoices this month.I’ve been using “combined pdf with cover letter” which is a great start. But, my understanding is, that cannot be emailed from within Smokeball billing. Question 1: Can I email the combined pdf with cover letter invoices from within smokeball?What I’m doing so far is to download that Cover letter with the invoices to my desktop outside of Smokeball. I’ve created an Outlook email cover letter, and I sent that out. BUT… what I didn’t anticipate was, the client still has to click on each invoice to pay.Question 2: Am I correct that the client then has to pay for each matter

Hi folks, I had a great question from @Wendy Marroquin who’s new to running her firm with Smokeball. Welcome Wendy!I thought I would share her question with the community so that others can read the answer and benefit from it too. Here’s the question:“I am having trouble with the medical records requests and doctor's information. How do I add their names and faxes so it is automated?I can create the letter no problem, but adding all those details takes time.”P.s If you are in the Personal Injury space and have any tips for Wendy and her firm as they get started please do share with her.  

Does SmokeBall have a function to notify solicitors who are tagged on a matter when a document is saved to it? Or some other function that might help notify them when documents dropped or posted to the office have been scanned to the matter? Occasionally our filing clerks overlook messaging the solicitor when a document has arrived - potentially catastrophic if time senstive.

I am having a look at New Outlook.  We have a number of shared mailboxes.  The Smokeball integration doesn’t appear to work with them.  Is there a way we can assign emails in shared mailboxes to matters? 

I keep a prepared list of future polls for this AI Lounge that I rotate through, but the responses to last week’s poll gave me pause. It was so interesting. The majority of you said that your current lawyerly (or legal staff!) opinion about legal AI as you’re seeing it be used is that it’s very helpful, but it scares you. Honestly, you’re so real for that. I get scared of it, too, and I have a rather unique perspective on it, because I have the opportunity to use it in my admittedly limited legal practice these days, and also I get to see it being developed and refined in real time, as Smokeball continues to perfect its Archie AI. I’ve used legal AI tools, I’ve played around a lot with our own Archie, and I routinely meet with my lovely colleagues like ​@Eric Gloyd  and ​@AmandaW and ​@maria.murillo and ​@Reena Jailwala and Matt G to help configure prompt libraries, understand new features, and see how it all fits together when it goes to market and hits y’all’s desktops. It is a reall

We have determined that it would be beneficial if we knew the time when clients called on our phone messages, especially for clients who call multiple times during the day. Is there currently a way that SB could generate a timestamp on a phone message or does anyone have any suggestions other than having staff manually put in the time within the message?