Kath Manby

Area of Law: Family Law

Firm size: 10

Location: Queensland

·      Supports firm growth

·      Has increased fee earning capacity

·      Unified workflows save time and reduce errors

VM Family Law, founded by Principal Solicitor Kath Manby, is a specialist family law firm focused on domestic and family violence. Within three weeks of starting, Kath’s firm was already growing, and today they have 10 team members.

Running her own firm can be challenging, and as the only independent children’s lawyer on the team, Kath has had to balance running her firm with reviewing case files, billing, and mentoring the team.

With an increasing workload, Kath had to find the best Practice Management Software to help manage her work and that of her growing team. “Smokeball does far more good things than our previous PMS where the workflows were non-existent. Another challenge for me was the support. In contrast, Smokeball’s support is fantastic”, says Kath.

Since starting with Smokeball, the VM team are using the software from intake all the way through to workflows and tasks, to now using Archie AI.

Says Kath, “We use workflows and they’re wonderful. They make everything so much easier for our support team to follow and understand the flow of work. Workflows and tasks actually alleviates some of my own workload of being constantly available to mentor them, and they allow me to focus on other things.

The biggest thing we have learned is that by having workflows and precedents our support team are now doing paralegal work. They’ve moved up to paralegal status so we’re able to charge more. They’ve become fee-earners and have budgets, which has made them feel like they are making a valuable contribution to the firm. In turn, our lawyers now have capacity to take on more work; it’s had a huge roll-on effect.”

Office Coordinator Kaylee Theuerkauf agrees. “Our use of Smokeball and Archie has transformed the way we work. Archie’s AI quickly finds information, drafts documents, and answers questions, saving our team time and cutting down on repetitive admin. Combined with Smokeball’s organisation tools, it helps us work more efficiently, stay on top of deadlines, and focus on the parts of our job that really matter.”

Kath’s advice for any law firm owner considering a move to Smokeball is “Do it! It will truly change the way you work.”

Benefits of having a unified workflow:

• Workflows and tasks save time, from accurate case tracking, to managing shared workloads which gives Kath’s team time to focus more on fixed-fee work and     increasing fee-earning capacity.
• Creating precedents in Smokeball reduces errors and ensures consistency across documents and other client-facing communications.
• Archie AI helps with finding information, drafting documents, and answering questions when used within the secure and confidential Smokeball environment.

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