Smokeball is a law practice management software with document assembly capabilities. Smokeball has an unusual name, to be sure; but, it actually comes from a famous legal case, which just about every substantive law-loving attorney can appreciate. (I love the smell of precedent in the morning.) Smokeball was founded in 2010 and has been adding useful features for law firms ever since. But, amidst the explosion of interest in legal tech software that has generated since the coronavirus pandemic, Smokeball has made some serious moves, including taking on $30 million in investment in early October to promote its further development and growth. And, with that cash infusion in its back pocket, Smokeball is building on an already impressive foundation, which will be addressed below. Frankly, with all the features already in place, it’s going to be pretty exciting to see what Smokeball will be able to add, moving forward, with new investment funds. Passive Aggressive: Smokeball’s Passive Timekeeping Application Is Smokin’ If law firm attorneys and staff hate manual time tracking – and, honestly, how could they not? – Smokeball includes a native passive timekeeping program that captures user time automatically as tasks are completed. If you’ve not heard of a “passive” timekeeping tool, it is a program that logs time automatically for specific timekeepers within the system by tracking their web-based activities. This solves the problem of contemporaneous timekeeping and allows lawyers to avoid the always-problematic situation that results when attorneys (and other law office timekeepers) have to reconstruct large swaths of time after the fact — which often results in write-offs, and missed billables. The passive timekeeper feature available in Smokeball works for internal Smokeball operations, as well as with integrated software, like Microsoft 365. All such captured time is pending until the user manually finalizes it. Eliminating