So far as I know there is no way to do this automatically. You must change go into the matter info dialogue screen, select “Override” beside “Description” and insert “Estate of EYour decedent’s name”].

I have previously requested programmatic matter descriptions according to type where you can insert your own fields and language. For example, in my landlord eviction cases it would be useful to include the property address in the description or “Re Line”. I have not heard anything from SB about the status of this request.

Hello @Ssweitzer 

The column on the matter list display is for your client (the person you are working with) which is not the deceased.  For those matters we automatically will enter in the name of the deceased in the description followed by the county and case number.  You can choose to override and Jonathan mentions above as well.  For firms that do mostly Estate Administration/Probate they change the order of the column on their matter list to have the description come first.

@Ssweitzer We handle probate as one of our primary practices.  The “Description” field is what we use to show the case info.  We change it to say “Estate of Last, First - County - Case #” so that when you sort like @Sara Sultan shows in her picture then it will sort by the decedent’s name.  Plus you get the county and case # in there for invoices and other areas the description shows up. 

However, you have to put that in manually.  The auto-population of what we really want to show in the description is not changable (IT SHOULD BE) only the “RE:” line for emails is editable in the “Matter Configuration” in settings.

When/how the Description or the Default matter name is used in Smokeball applications has been a challenge for a lot of us for a long while.  Like @Skiles and his firm, we amend the description field as our work-around to arrive at how best to display and locate our various matters.

In a perfect Smokeball world (in my opinion), the Description field would be used on widgets and billing and we’d have the opportunity, as mentioned by @JKibler and @Skiles, to auto-populate it with existing SB data fields. 

The Description field is more digestible and than the default matter name, which can be horribly long-winded (ex: “Guardianship of an Alleged Incapacitated Person”) and it provides us key information at a glance, in the particular naming and filing protocols used by the firm.   

Anyway, most recently, we kicked this around last month: