Has anyone set up a Smokeball matter that is just a general office/administration file where you save correspondence and other docs that are not related to a specific matter? Does it throw out any of your reporting etc? Failing that, where do you house all this stuff?
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Using a Smokeball Matter for a general office matter for admin and non-client related documents
- Contributor
Best answer by JKibler
- Financial;
- Human Resources;
- Technology;
- Partner Meetings / Discussions;
- [Name of law firm] Trust Deposit (for our initial cushion deposit);
- [Partner / Employee name] (for documents related to each individual such as hiring / onboarding, CLE / training / discipline, sick/leave, termination etc.)
You can set the matters to “not-billable”. Without knowing how you use your reporting I could not comment on how this will affect it. I want to know how much time is spent on these different non-billable areas of practice.
- Financial;
- Human Resources;
- Technology;
- Partner Meetings / Discussions;
- [Name of law firm] Trust Deposit (for our initial cushion deposit);
- [Partner / Employee name] (for documents related to each individual such as hiring / onboarding, CLE / training / discipline, sick/leave, termination etc.)
You can set the matters to “not-billable”. Without knowing how you use your reporting I could not comment on how this will affect it. I want to know how much time is spent on these different non-billable areas of practice.
- Contributor
Hi Wendy, I specifically asked Smokeball support if there was another way to do this rather than setting up matters with my firm as the client. I had hoped there would be a standard non-billable matter type, such as business development, but apparently there is not. So you do just need to set up each of your non-billable matter codes with your firm as a client (or you could assign a dummy-client name, I suppose!)
Chiming-in.
As
On top of that, we have several institutional clients that have a good deal of non-billable admin work that applies to the client generally, but not to individual billable matters we’re handling for the client. To account for this time, we have created -- and actively use -- a separate “general’ matter in SB for each institutional client. We amended the matter number to add the work “general” in it so help clearly mark it as such and ease searches too.
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