A Note from a Family Law SB User:
When my firm started using Smokeball back in 2017-2018, I remember being very excited about the robust document automation feature in Smokeball. There was already so much to learn, all of the new bells and whistles, pretty pie charts and graphs. When I sat down and thought about what documents to send over for automation, I recall feeling a bit overwhelmed. I started to think to myself “What can I NOT live without?” My firm was roughly 70% family law, and those documents were the most time consuming. Here are some ideas of documents that my firm decided to send over for automation:
- Notice of Motion - seems so simple right? Well, having a fantastic firm template (not a court form) for the NOM ended up saving us tons of time. Preparing a NOM with SB’s document automation took maybe 3-5 mins after we had our firm form automated. Literally!
- Petition for Rule to Show Cause/Civil Contempt: how many times do parties fail to abide by the orders of the court, or their judgment for dissolution. Happens all the time right?!?
- Notice of Filling/Certificate of Service/Proof of Service: SB can even add service lists to your firm forms, so when multiple parties are getting notified, as long as they are listed in the matter template - no problem! Total time saver!
- Petition for Dissolution of Marriage/Judgment for Dissolution of Marriage: a PDOM used to take about 30-45 mins, but not anymore!
- MSA and Allocation Judgments: both of these firm forms contained boilerplate clauses, and the document automation helped save time!
- Discovery requests: Notice to Produce and Interrogatories
- Petitions for Temp Relief, Child Support, and/or Maintenance
I hope some of these ideas help Family Law Firms to jump on that document automation. It helps to send in your most used forms first, and then learn how to automate your own documents when you are able to block off some time.
Emily
