Clarissa Rayward

Brisbane Family Law Centre is a boutique legal practice specialising in working with separating families in a way that keeps them away from the Courts and enables them to remain friends for the future. We are now a team of twelve, and I have owned the firm for twelve years.

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One of the most powerful things for our organisation from implementing Smokeball is having all our client and business data in one place. We can now locate client matters quickly, reducing overwhelm and increasing productivity.

The email management system is life-changing. I receive a considerable volume of emails each day, and one of the challenges I was having with our old system was not being able to store emails efficiently. Smokeball integrates with Microsoft Outlook and automatically tracks and moves all communication across to client files.

Smokeball is really user-friendly. From early on, I could easily navigate the system intuitively, and I didn’t have to sit through 20 hours of training to get there. That was important to me when implementing a new legal practice management software and training our team; I wanted to find something that was easy to understand and work with from the get-go.

Since we implemented Smokeball, my team has had lots of great things to say about the product, which I think in itself is very telling. As a business owner, implementing significant firm-wide change will always come with challenges and kick-back, but I haven’t seen that in my organisation while transitioning over to Smokeball. As we found things we couldn’t understand or couldn’t do, there was always someone willing to help us work it out — I have really appreciated the support and training we’ve had from the Smokeball team.

One of the things I experienced during the client onboarding experience was that the Smokeball team was able to do that with me and again separately with my whole team. My team’s feedback after they participated in the demo was incredibly positive.

My team could ask questions and have them answered in real-time. There was a real level of respect for my team by virtue of who showed up from the Smokeball team. They were there to see if it was the right product for our firm, not just to sell the product. It was a surprisingly pleasant experience in terms of purchasing technology.

I would absolutely recommend that anyone looking at legal practice management software to consider Smokeball. We’re all running very different businesses, so the things that I need may not be what others need, but I would say to participate in a Smokeball demonstration and look at how the program works. I was looking for a practice management system that streamlined and automated client and business data but enabled me to do that in a customised way, and Smokeball certainly delivers on that.

Smokeball is a competitively priced product in the market with a lot of bells and whistles, and that was exactly what I was looking for. Our investment in the technology has been worthwhile, and I’ve certainly found it really beneficial to our firm.