Smokeball vs Relativity
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
Legal practice management with automatic desktop time capture for small law firms; 20,000+ firms on platform. Chicago and Sydney;
About
Smokeball is a legal practice management software company with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Sydney, Australia, serving solo practitioners and small law firms across the United States and Australia. Founded in 2012, Smokeball differentiates itself in the practice management market through its automatic time capture feature—Activity Intelligence—which tracks all attorney activity on the desktop (documents worked on, emails sent, phone calls made) and automatically creates time entries without requiring manual timekeeping. For law firms that bill hourly but struggle with time leakage from attorneys who fail to record all billable work, Smokeball's automatic capture typically increases captured billable hours by 20-30% on implementation, providing a compelling ROI story that drives adoption.\n\nSmokeball's platform includes case and matter management, document management with Microsoft Word integration for document creation and auto-fill, time and billing, trust accounting, task and deadline tracking, a client communication portal, and a robust forms library with court-specific forms pre-populated from matter data. The document creation workflow is particularly efficient—Smokeball's deep Microsoft Word integration and matter-connected form library allow attorneys to generate court filings, engagement letters, and correspondence with relevant client and case data auto-filled from the matter record. The platform also includes practice area-specific workflows for estate planning, real estate, family law, criminal defense, and personal injury, reducing setup time for firms in those practice areas.\n\nSmokeball competes with Clio, MyCase, and LEAP in the small firm practice management market. Its automatic time capture differentiator, deep document workflow integration, and pre-built practice area templates make it a compelling option for small firm attorneys whose time management and document production workflows drive day-to-day profitability. For firms billing hourly that suspect significant time leakage, Smokeball's Activity Intelligence offers a measurable productivity improvement that justifies switching costs from other practice management platforms.
Relativity confidentially filed for IPO in early 2026, the first legal tech company to do so since 2021, while rebranding as a legal data intelligence platform.
About
Relativity was founded in 2001 in Chicago by Andrew Sieja (originally as kCura) and rebranded under its current name in 2017 after its eponymous e-discovery platform became the industry standard. The company serves over 300,000 users in approximately 40 countries, including 198 of the Am Law 200 law firms and the U.S. Department of Justice, processing over 145 billion files through its cloud platform RelativityOne. Valued at $3.6 billion following a 2023 investment round, it plans to invest more than $170 million in R&D in 2025.
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