Law firms need to maintain control over overall productivity regardless if one employee is working remotely on the road (in court, with a client, at a conference) or the entire office is working from home due to COVID-19.

We wrote about this issue in late March, and the need for transparency and accountability has only grown since.

As a result, we’re proud to present updates to our Activity Intelligence (A.I.) feature in all licenses of Smokeball. Every user can now keep track of their own activity, as well as (with certain permissions) dive into the minute-by-minute activities of others.

Given the current climate with most firms working from home, it is harder for firm owners and senior lawyers to know if their staff are being productive whilst at home. Our Activity Intelligence features are the most robust offerings in the marketplace, and we want our clients to be able to make the most of it.

Firm leaders want to understand if someone is starting work late or has large gaps in their day so that they can follow up with staff to keep them productive. They also want to know if someone is not really using Smokeball so that they can get them to work more efficiently.

We’ve updated the AI tab to include more efficient tools and information that firm owners can digest quickly, so they can see when their employees started their day, what parts of the day they weren’t active, and what they spent the bulk of their day working on from a matter or activity type perspective.

Once an hour of activity has been logged, it automatically populates in AI, giving an overview of work accomplished during a given day. This not only increases transparency between employee and employer, it also provides evidence for building trust with clients, and protects firms if/when time worked on a given matter is called into question.

The AI update is part of a larger suite of upgrades released this month as part of our effort to help law firms work remotely without sacrificing productivity.