Business Transactional Issues

C

Hey Y’all,

 

I’m a business transactional attorney. What that looks like is that:

  1. My clients are 98% entities, and the other 2% are independent contractors or individuals starting entities and the entity will ultimately be my client.
  2. Business clients stick around for decades. I have some clients who’ve been with me 20+ years and that means LOTs of matters.
  3. I work on a lot of contracts. Contracts, contracts, contracts.  
  4. Items 2+3 = lots of contracts for the same client over lots of different subjects.

While I appreciate litigators might be the majority of users, and while they do need a lot of organizational computing power and form filling out, transactional attorneys need computing love too, and while Smokeball certain seems to show us more love than a lot of other platforms - it still feels to me, a bit like I’m a step child.

Off all of the Matter Categories, so much of my work is just in the Commercial Contract category, and if I wanted to break things down further, all of the other categories where I advice my clients are focused on disputes or administrative work (ie, Labor isn’t about employment contracts, but employment disputes.

Wondering if any other transactional attorneys are out there, and maybe feel the same way.

And since I don’t believe in whining without providing some cheese - here’s my high level suggestion:

“Commercial C​​​​​ontract” is too large a matter sub-category. I need more tags than there are colors, and even if colors were infinite it’s difficult to remember by color.

Could we have sub-sub categories? Or move Commercial Contract to become a main category and then add the tags (and a few others I could suggest) as sub-categories.

Could we have Commercial Contracts, Labor Contracts, Intellectual Property Contracts, Investment Contracts etc.

Or is my practice just the odd one out? As a business attorney I know and agree that Smokeball has to put its human assets to work on things that benefit (or will draw) the most customers. But I don’t think I’m that alone.

Any thoughts

Nina

PS - the very fact that the work “business” only turned up the tag “business development” and I had to add business law, indicates that maybe I am alone in this issue, or maybe I’m just more into discussion boards than most business attorneys. 

3 replies

Sara Sultan
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

Hi Nina,

Most of our business users just use Matter Tags to differentiate between contract types, but let’s see if some of our other business attorneys have anything to say.

 

@Joe , @Alexis Taylor @mmercer @Phickman @MatrixSrfr @JKibler 

Sara Sultan (she/her)
C

Sara,

Thanks!

I remember you told me about sorting by tags, and maybe it’s being new but I find that as I add more and more of my clients and their matters, as much as I’m getting used to Smokeball, it just still seems unwieldy. Maybe, as I said, it’s just being new.

Trey did suggest is provide a list of the types of agreements and also any different fields for different types of agreements. I’ll work on that this weekend.

 

Nina

 

A

Nina,

I agree with you.  I am a transactional paralegal.  We would like expiration dates to be added to the contract information and then have it create an event to alert us when those expirations are approaching.  I have been trying to use other sections of Smokeball, but with little luck.  I could add tags and run a report, but it’s not as efficient as it should be.

 

Angie

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