Smokeball Bill: The Free Trust Accounting & Billing Software for State Bar of Texas

Episode Notes

Transcript

Laurence Colletti:

Hello, welcome to another edition of On the Road with Legal Talk Network. This is Laurence Colletti. I’m the host for this episode, which is Rare. Rare. We are recording from the State Bar of Texas annual meeting here in Dallas. Now for fans of Legal Talk Network, this is a little unusual because most of the time we record the state bar of Texas podcast when we cover their annual meeting, but we have a special announcement today, so we decided to crank up the works for On the Road. And then I have a wonderful guest joining me to help out with this. I have Jane Oxley from Smokeball. Welcome.

Jane Oxley:

Thank you. It’s great to be here. Well,

Laurence Colletti:

Jane, tell us about yourself Now you’re the Chief Revenue Officer, as I understand, and co-founder of Smokeball. Now, I think most attorneys know what Smokeball is, but there might be a few out there that are still kind of finding their way. So tell us about Smokeball. What does it do?

Jane Oxley:

So we are a practice management software. So we’re an end-to-end offering. We help smaller law firms, so really around one to 75 humans working in a law firm to help them get their work done every day more efficiently. So everything from lead intake to getting their work done with beautiful document automation all the way through to billing and collections, the whole woe go to woe.

Laurence Colletti:

Okay, awesome, awesome. And so this special announcement they have, I do have a little bit of a disclaimer. So our companies are pseudo related and that, as you and I were talking earlier, I’m still a little confused on the opaque nature of that, but we are related. We do like each other. There’s some common interest across the different ownership lines. Just wanted to put that out there for the listeners. But I do think this is a worthwhile announcement here, especially if you’re in the state bar of Texas. Let’s start with that. So this breaking news for State Bar of Texas. You guys partnered up. What’s going on here?

Jane Oxley:

So we have been a member benefit of the state bar of Texas for some time, but in the last couple of days we have had a big announcement, which is that our product that is called Smokeball Bill, it’s a trust accounting and billing software, is now free for every member of the state bar of Texas completely free.

Laurence Colletti:

So it’s free regardless of whether they also use Smokeball for their practice management platform just free.

Jane Oxley:

Yeah, well, I mean basically Smokeball comes in different tiers. So if you just need time and billing that is, you’ll get that completely for free. You can then choose at some point to upgrade to a different tier of smo, which will give you full practice management, case management functionality, intake and so on. But for trust accounting and billing, which is a huge need, an imperative need for every law firm operating in Texas that is completely free with this offer.

Laurence Colletti:

Well, tell us about some of the functions and features. What specifically does it do?

Jane Oxley:

It does everything you need for billing and trust. So you’ve got three-Way trust accounting and reporting, which is very important when it comes to trust accounting. It has really flexible billing, so it has flat fee billing, it has time-based billing. You’re more traditional. It has contingency billing. It tracks your expenses. It’s very customizable for your invoices and your accounts receivable, and it also gives you access to online payments so that your firm can get paid faster.

Laurence Colletti:

Now, you all saw a need for this and you talked with State Bar of Texas, and so what were some of the things they were expressing some concerns about and you said, Hey, you know what? I think we have a solution for this. So tell us about that process.

Jane Oxley:

Yeah, so the state bar of Texas is a wonderful partner for us and they feel very passionately about supporting their local community, which is actually Smoke Pool’s purpose as well is to support the legal community and the wider community through our services. So what they wanted to do was really make sure that they could help the smaller firms, the solos more effectively. It can be harder for them to access resources to get their billing and trust done compliantly. And it’s a risk for law firms if they’re not using the right tools to do this. So we came together and had a great conversation. We’re like, what can we do to support these smaller firms better? Help them be compliant, which means they can then go on to hopefully build a great business. So yeah, basically we sought opportunity to collaborate and create something completely unique together and a little bit magical, I think.

Laurence Colletti:

Well, for some of the solos and smalls out there. I know, and this is just I guess across the board for everybody, finances can be somewhat limited and things are kind of expensive right now, and so they may not have a lot of familiarity with some of these other types of software packages. Maybe they’ve been kind of just shoestring it together on tablets or maybe a spreadsheet or something like that. But for those lawyers out there that may not be Math Incline or maybe don’t understand accounting, or maybe you’re kind of new to opening and running a business, are there some tutorials you all have to use Smokeball Bill?

Jane Oxley:

Absolutely. So you actually get a lot of support with Smokeball. That community purpose of ours actually follows through to how we support our product and even develop our product. So you get access to a full academy. We actually have an academy which would step you through how to use the entire program. We’ve got our support hub, we’ve got a chat where lawyers can review questions and ask questions live, and we even have a community, it’s called the mobile community, where they can connect with other clients, other Texas bar members and our team to get answers and ideas for ways to use the product better.

Laurence Colletti:

I think in the world of, and I understand this is not a membership benefit per se, but you’ve got a lot of these services that come as part of your bar membership and everything. I do think it’s worthwhile kind of mentioning if this was a standalone product in terms of value, what would it cost somebody that just if they had to buy it direct?

Jane Oxley:

Yeah, sure. It’s $49 per user per month, so it has a real cost. It’s a beautiful product. Yeah, so it is a huge value add.

Laurence Colletti:

So $49, they do not have to pay because it is free because they are members of the State bar of Texas.

Jane Oxley:

Yeah, correct.

Laurence Colletti:

Now, state Bar of Texas, you started with them first, and so what was going on there? You just decided State Bar of Texas seems like we’re going to start with them, and is there plans to maybe expand this to other states or how does that work?

Jane Oxley:

Yeah, so we did start with Texas. As I said, they are a wonderful partner and they are, I think, innovative and wanting to find ways to serve their members better. And I think for us, this is something we do foresee expanding to other states. We are talking to some other state bars right now. Obviously we’ve seen a lot of chatter around this. Law firms are very excited about this, and they see it as a real true benefit to come from their state bar. So I think there’s a lot of bars who not necessarily struggle, but would like to have higher membership, especially those voluntary bars. So this can provide bar associations with something quite unique to help the profession.

Laurence Colletti:

Well, that was a nice lead in for my last question, and that’s for if there’s some state bar of Texas lawyers out there that are interested in coming on trying out Smokeball bill, how can they find you?

Jane Oxley:

Yeah, so they can find us a couple of ways. So there’s a URL on our own website, so www dot Smokeball dot com slash Texas bill, or you can go to the BAR’S website and find the listing under their member benefits section. Is it okay if I mention one more thing while I’m here? Yes. Okay, great. So I know everyone is talking about AI right now, and I just thought I couldn’t leave today without talking a little bit about AI because Smokeball I think really is not only innovating in the working with state bar associations, but also in the AI space. So we have some big stuff coming up next month. We have a whole host of AI tools that are integrated into Smokeball launching, and I’m really excited about them because when we talked at the beginning about what Smokeball does and the practice management suite that we offer, our practice management being so end to end means that we have so much data, AI feeds on data, and we have all of our clients’ documents and emails and tasks and data in our system, which means we can do some really magical stuff to help them get their work done more efficiently.

So watch this space for snowball ai.

Laurence Colletti:

Well, it looks like we’ve reached the end of the road for this episode. I want to thank our guest, Jane Oxley for joining us. Thank you so much.

Jane Oxley:

Pleasure to be here.

Laurence Colletti:

And also thank you to our listeners for tuning in. And if you like what you heard, please rate and review us in Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon music, or best at your favorite podcasting app. Until next time, I’m Laurence Colletti and you’ve been listening to On the Road with Legal Talk Network.

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