Smokeball

Product and design consulting · Smokeball · 2022–24, 2025

The problem

Smokeball sells practice management software to law firms. The product that made the company is a Windows application installed on a server in the firm's own office, and by 2022 it had been running for twenty years. There was no web product — the few web features that existed were iframes inside the desktop shell.

The US solo and small-firm market wanted something else: a cut-down product a lawyer could open in a browser and start using the same day. There was a launch date attached to it.

So one product had to carry three jobs at once — a companion to the desktop install, a standalone product in its own right, and the scaled-back way into the US market. The data stayed on the practice's own server, so the web product called the desktop product's APIs for everything it showed. The desktop teams shipped on six-month cycles. None of it could be released in one hit.

What I did

• Designed Smokeball Boost end to end — dashboard, matters, contacts, time tracking and billable hours, calendars, to-dos, conflict checking.
• Set the design system foundation in Figma. A coded system was not available to us, because each product ran a different codebase and front-end framework, so one static source of truth was the honest answer rather than the ideal one.
• Built the intake form builder, complex enough to feed both the desktop and the web system.
• Worked as the most senior individual contributor across two product managers in Australia, two in the US and three engineering squads, against a fixed external date.
• Coached the mid-weight designers on working with their product managers, and the product managers on prioritisation.

Why they brought me back

In 2025 Smokeball re-engaged me for the two hardest problems in the product.

Roles and permissions: access had been all-or-nothing in an industry that cannot work that way. Most of that job was business analysis — establishing what each permission actually changed across region, matter and role, in a system that had grown team by team and custom case by custom case. Conflict checking: deciding whether a firm can act for someone it may already have acted against, which is a judgement with weightings, not a database lookup.

Also on this engagement, an AI add-in for Outlook that put the drafting where the lawyers already were.

What it produced

Boost is live three years on and the interface is unchanged in the essentials. Before the first engagement ended I wrote the design maturity framework and the role specifications that took the team from two designers to four, with a head of design and two seniors — and they picked the system up from where I left it rather than replacing it, which is the measure I care about.

The permissions work was specified, prototyped and validated with the people who set up real firms. My engagement ended before adoption, so I have no numbers for it and would rather say that than imply otherwise.

The full case studies — Boost, intake, permissions, conflicts, the Outlook add-in, and how the work was run — are in the portfolio. Ask me for access.