Genie Gillespie has always been committed to serving her community & family law clients. After founding Gillespie Law Group, she got busier. Drowning in paper, Genie struggled to meet deadlines, track documents, and make it all work. Enter Smokeball—a second brain that keeps Genie’s practice organized, efficient, and error-free.
Needing help helping clients
Genie shares: it's always been really important to me to help as many people as I can. Not everybody can afford an attorney. I love doing adoptions. I love making families. All of the stuff that goes with that, being part of the happy ending, especially my foster kiddos who I love. I worked at big firms, and the bureaucracy made me crazy. I realized I wanted to be my own boss. In 2016, my husband Mac decided that he was done with the big firm scene, too. We became Gillespie Law Group.
I say this all the time. But I have no idea how we ever practiced without it, truly. Smokeball is incredible. It does everything. It makes life so much easier. I have always been relatively tech savvy. I basically just made it work for myself. I set up my folders. I gave them the names that I thought would work. I was most worried all the time about forgetting a deadline. And I honestly was tired of all the paper in my office, too. Even before the pandemic, I wanted to go paperless. I just could not deal with all of the files, folders.
My mentor, who had been guiding me throughout my career was retiring. She wanted me to take over her practice and fold it in to ours. That was going to make me busier, which is great. But I realized I needed to organize things better. Until I saw the first demo for what case management software could do, I had no idea how many things I could be doing better. Take document generation: you're basically doing search and replace to get names. Sometimes, you miss one. And then you get embarrassed because you filed something that has somebody else's name in it.
How Smokeball saves significant time and errors
I love Smokeball's document generation because it makes me more efficient. I get things done faster, and I know they're accurate. I've got 10 different types of petitions for different types of cases. Everything is so much faster now. Generating documents, pleadings, all of those things. I need a default motion for this case. Default motion. Unknown father. Done. But literally less than a minute probably, quite frankly. And it's fabulous.
Workflows was also huge. One of the first things I do once I start a case is set up the workflow. I put in the triggering dates. So now, I have dates that automatically populate based on events. The workflows are just so helpful, especially with things like defaults. It shows up on my task list and says: you need to do this default order today. And then, I pop into my document generation. And because I've set up my default motion and the order, it takes me literally less than five minutes to do a motion for default, which is fabulous. And the minute Smokeball integrated with InfoTrack, it was like, oh my god. This is amazing. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to go back and check.
Genie can't imagine practicing without Smokeball
I truly don't know how I practiced for so long without Smokeball. It helps in every single aspect of your practice. It makes life easier. It gives you less stress. You're not missing deadlines. I am not waking up in the night realizing I forgot to file or calendar something.
Knowing that we have Smokeball does not make me fear growing. A lot of solo and small firms at some point feel like, "wait a minute. I'm not sure we can do much more unless we hire more people." And I'm not worried about expanding. I feel like Smokeball is my assistant. I don't need another staff person, because I have Smokeball.
