Customer Stories / Software & Internet
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Smokeball Boosts Revenue Potential for Law Firms by up to 30% Using Gen AI on AWS
Learn how the Sydney-based legal management software firm is driving profitability and enhancing efficiency for small and medium-sized law firms through AI technology on AWS.
Up to 30%
more billable hours captured, driving potential revenue growth
Up to 3 hours daily
reduction in time spent on administrative tasks like form/document creation and review
Reduced legal costs
for clients through automation of previously manual paralegal work
Overview
Founded in 2012, Smokeball serves over 6,000 law firms with 25,000 daily users across Australia, the UK, and the US with innovative practice management solutions. These firms often struggled with time-consuming administrative tasks that reduced billable hours and impacted client service.
Recognizing this challenge, Smokeball developed Smokeball AI, a suite of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Launched in 2024, these tools automate traditionally manual tasks such as document processing, client intake, and time tracking. By transforming hours of administrative work into minutes, lawyers are now freed to focus more time on billable work and client relationships. This shift significantly reduces time spent on non-revenue generating activities and lowers legal costs for clients.
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Opportunity | Pioneering AI-Driven Efficiency in Legal Practice
Smokeball's expertise in legal technology positioned it to address a critical need in the legal industry—elevating productivity through cutting-edge AI solutions. While digitalization had made significant progress, the company identified that innovative law firms required more sophisticated tools to optimize operations and enhance client service.
To meet this need, Smokeball developed a strategy focusing on three key areas. First, it aimed to use generative AI for swift document processing and analysis. Second, the company planned to create automated client intake and onboarding systems. Third, Smokeball set out to develop precise, AI-driven time tracking and billing tools.
Initially, the company explored third-party AI options. Due to challenges with application programming interface (API) limitations and lack of direct support, Smokeball decided to find a more robust solution. The company needed a scalable cloud infrastructure that could securely manage vast amounts of sensitive legal data while providing state-of-the-art AI capabilities. Smokeball turned to AWS for its comprehensive suite of cloud services, including advanced AI and machine learning tools. These provided the scalability and support needed for rapid development and deployment.
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AWS has been crucial in helping us deliver on our mission. We've always aimed to transform how small and mid-size law firms operate, and the cloud infrastructure from AWS has supercharged that effort. It's letting us bring AI capabilities to firms that previously couldn't access this kind of tech. But for us, it's not just about the technology – it's about freeing lawyers to do what they do best. By automating the admin work, we're giving lawyers back time to focus on their clients and practice law. That's what really excites me. We're not just making firms more efficient, we're helping lawyers rediscover why they got into law in the first place."
Mr Hunter Steele
Chief Executive Officer, Smokeball
Solution | Transforming Legal Workflows Using AI Capabilities on AWS
Smokeball implemented its Smokeball AI platform by using specific AWS services to create three key tools—Archie, Intake, and AutoTime. Each tool addresses a critical area of legal practice management.
To tackle document processing time and analysis challenges, the company developed Archie, a matter-based AI assistant. Smokeball used Amazon Bedrock (Claude V3), a fully managed service offering access to high-performing foundation models through a single API, to equip Archie with natural language processing capabilities. This innovation provided swift summarization, analysis, question answering, and correspondence drafting. This saved between up to 3 hours each day on administrative tasks, boosting lawyer productivity.
The company also streamlined client intake and onboarding processes with its Intake tool. Utilizing Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning platform, Smokeball developed a system that processes and analyzes existing forms, automatically generating new, customized versions. This advancement cuts form creation and population time from one hour to just 5 minutes, significantly improving efficiency in client acquisition.
To address time tracking and billing needs, the company combined Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker to create AutoTime. The automated time-tracking tool not only reduces daily timesheet creation from hours to minutes but also helps lawyers capture up to 30 percent more billable hours, enhancing law firms' profitability.
To ensure robust performance, scalability, and security for its AI infrastructure, Smokeball strategically implemented additional AWS services. The company used AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, to handle AI-powered responses without complex infrastructure management, streamlining operations.
Smokeball also integrated its AI with existing legal management solutions utilizing Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), a fully managed message queuing service. This facilitates efficient data flow and task management across its platform.
Identifying the need for scalability, Smokeball deployed Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a fully managed container orchestration service. With this, the company can automatically scale its application infrastructure based on demand, delivering optimal performance during peak usage and cost-effectiveness during quieter times.
Outcome | Advancing Legal Innovation with Generative AI
With the help of the AWS team, Smokeball developed and launched its generative AI tools in public beta within just six months. The company's successful implementation of its tools using AWS has set the stage for continued innovation in legal technology. Smokeball has experienced significant growth, particularly in the US market, demonstrating the global appeal of its AI-powered solutions.
Building on its achievements, the company plans to explore new applications for AI to enhance its offerings. One key area of focus is helping law firms with branding and marketing. Smokeball aims to develop generative AI-driven tools for creating targeted social media content and blog articles, providing even small firms with the means to maintain a strong online presence cost-effectively.
The company is also assessing ways to incorporate data insights from existing solutions. By analyzing anonymized user data with AWS analytics services, Smokeball aims to provide law firms with valuable industry trends and operational insights, helping them make data-driven decisions to improve their practices. These initiatives enhance law firm efficiency and reduce legal costs, making quality legal services more accessible to clients.
“AWS has been crucial in helping us deliver on our mission. We've always aimed to transform how small and mid-sized law firms operate, and the cloud infrastructure from AWS has supercharged that effort. It's letting us bring AI capabilities to firms that previously couldn't access this kind of tech. But for us, it's not just about technology—it's about freeing lawyers to do what they do best. By automating the admin work, we're giving lawyers back time to focus on their clients and practice law. That's what really excites me. We're not just making firms more efficient, we're helping lawyers rediscover why they got into law in the first place,” said Mr Hunter Steele, Chief Executive Officer, Smokeball.
About Smokeball
Smokeball is a global practice management powerhouse with a commitment to transform legal practices through innovation. The all-in-one cloud-based platform empowers firms to enhance productivity, manage compliance, unlock revenue, and deliver exceptional client care. Founded by passionate legal minds dedicated to making law life easier, Smokeball’s hands-on approach and exceptional support define its role as a trusted advisor in the legal tech industry.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Luma (coming soon), Meta, Mistral AI, poolside (coming soon), Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI.
Learn more »
Amazon SageMaker
Bringing together widely adopted AWS machine learning (ML) and analytics capabilities, Amazon SageMaker delivers an integrated experience for analytics and AI with unified access to all your data.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.
Amazon Simple Queue Service
Learn about how first-in-first-out (FIFO) queues help make sure the messages you send to systems are published in the correct order.
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