Actionstep in Richmond offers their flagship legal practice management software as an end-to-end solution, containing both matter management tools and business administration automation, with an internal billing and accounting system.
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Smokeball
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Smokeball in Chicago offers their flagship cloud-based legal case management application featuring time tracking, file and document management, billing, and legal form generation.
ActionStep is a powerful CRM and matter management tool. It provides many other good benefits too. For example powerful accounting and billing, time tracking and document management. Only in highly specific areas, like multiple many to many contact relations has it fallen short. But even in this highly specialized area, so many other benefits are provided that it hardly matters.
1. Small and medium-sized law firms: Smokeball is specifically designed for small and medium-sized law firms, making it well suited for this type of organization. 2. Firms looking to streamline their workflow: Smokeball's range of features, including document management, time tracking, email management, calendar management, and task management, make it well suited for firms looking to streamline their operations and increase efficiency. 3. Firms looking to improve collaboration: Smokeball's centralized document repository and task management system make it easy for teams to collaborate and access information, making it well suited for firms looking to improve collaboration among team members.
Document Management: Smokeball provides a centralized document repository where users can store and organize all their case-related documents. This helps to improve document accessibility and collaboration among team members.
Time Tracking: Smokeball automatically tracks time spent on a case, eliminating the need for manual time tracking. This results in improved billing accuracy and helps the firm to accurately bill clients for the time spent on their cases.
Email Management: Smokeball integrates with a user's email account and automatically categorizes emails as they come in. This helps users to quickly find and access important emails, reducing the amount of time spent searching for information.
ActionStep is difficult to setup. I suggest working with a consultant which increases cost.
Needs mobile app.
One of our practice areas, Property Law, request we have a many to many contact relation. ActionStep cannot accommodate this. However, no other software I have reviewed can do this either. ActionStep is the most robust that I have seen and comes closest to making this work.
User Interface: Some users have reported that the user interface could be improved to make it more user-friendly and intuitive.
Customer Support: Some users have reported long response times and inconsistent quality of customer support, which could be improved to provide better service to users
Mobile Accessibility: Currently, Smokeball does not have a mobile app, which limits accessibility for users who are frequently on the go.
I have worked with a lot of software. Each one has a different focus. ActionStep is better at workflow and task automation that the items above, in my opinion. However, having gone through many different deployments, what really matters is identifying your key requirements and needs. Then evaluation software against those. Once you have your requirements and software, focus on using that software to fix issues in existing workflow. This, when compared with ongoing training, is what it means to invest in software. Simply purchasing ActionStep or any software without identifying needs, problems in workflow or an investment in training is not a good plan. Neither is comparing the vendors to one another without knowing all of your specific needs.
I love the workflows that can be deployed for practice areas to ensure consistency. This has reduced new employee onboarding time and increased the speed at which we can complete matters.
Since ActionStep lives in the cloud, and we have O365 our firm is very mobile without spending lots of money in TS or other such infrastructure.
Creating the workflows is a bit complex, so this increases the overall cost and makes an ROI take longer. I suggest spending a bit more initially to get everything setup and working with a consultant to learn how to do this on your own during that initial setup.
