Kerri Shaw and Gemma Bunner

After ten years of working for a large national law firm, we co-founded Shaw & Bunner Legal in 2018. Our mission was to represent regional-based clients who have suffered an injury, invest in their journey, and provide solution-driven advice.

It's been an incredible experience starting our own firm, and we’ve learned so much. Like many Personal Injury firms, we started in a more generalised space doing Wills, estates and conveyancing, and probates, and then built our niche in Personal Injury law. That’s reached a point where we’ve dropped the other practice areas, and we’re now a boutique Personal Injury law firm.

We were sold on Smokeball within two minutes of the demo. We can’t rave highly enough about Smokeball. We had a previous practice management system that was inferior. Now we’ve switched to Smokeball; we feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface of what the platform can do, and we’re excited about implementing it more across the firm.

Flexibility is really important to us and with Smokeball and our IT setup, we can work remotely if one of our kids is unwell. We’ve learned to put structures in place so that when things don’t go to plan — because, with kids, they inevitably don’t — we can make the school assembly or cover each other’s matters if needed.

As a team, we have really embraced Smokeball’s Communicate messaging platform. We now use it to communicate with each other on a file, allocate tasks and review cases. The great thing about that is it is all there. You can quickly refresh your memory rather than trying to open various email chains.

We really like that it sits within the matters, and all your correspondence is in the same communication chain. We can correspond and collaborate internally and know that it is completely secure. We also use the Communicate platform to text clients messages and appointment reminders. It’s so valuable because we don’t need a third-party platform and all the client’s information is easily accessible and in one place. Smokeball is amazing, particularly when we all shifted to working remotely — Communicate was a godsend.