Trial Commander vs Smokeball

Two real products. Here is how to tell which one is yours.

A practice management product whose signature capability is automatic time capture, sold through a quote rather than a published price.

This page is written by Trial Commander, so read it as what it is. Every claim we make about our own product below is one you can hold us to. We have not reproduced Smokeball's prices or feature list — go to their pricing page and read the current one.

What Trial Commander does

Claims about our product, stated so they can be checked against the trial.

Deadlines

Computed from statute and court rule for the matter's jurisdiction, not entered from a template. Florida ch. 627 first-party property clocks and ch. 440 workers' compensation ladders; the Federal Rules chain counted under Rule 6(a) against the calendar of whichever of the 94 US district courts the matter is in. Local rules are not computed anywhere in the product, and a judge's scheduling order supersedes almost every civil default — the product says so on the page rather than in a footnote.

Time capture

Entries are drafted from calls, emails, texts and calendar, then held for attorney review. Nothing is billed automatically — a draft an attorney never approves never reaches an invoice.

AI, and who pays for it

Starter runs on the firm's own Anthropic API key, so AI bills to the firm's own account under its own spend controls and we take no margin on it. Managed allowances of $10, $20 and $40 per user per month are available on higher plans. From Bridge up, individual members can connect personal Claude subscriptions over MCP.

Trust accounting

IOTA trust accounting with three-way reconciliation, included from the Bridge plan up at $109 per user per month. Starter and Practice track time and billing but not trust transactions — which is stated plainly rather than discovered at reconciliation time.

Pricing transparency

Every price is on the pricing page: $49, $69, $109 and $149 per user per month, with the practice-area add-ons named. No quote required, and a 30-day trial of the full product with no credit card.

Jurisdictions

The practice system works nationwide. Deep statutory content is live for Florida, Texas and the District of Columbia. California, New York and Illinois are in review and are NOT live — if you practise primarily in those states today, that is a reason to wait or to choose something else.

What we do not have

No SAML single sign-on. No HIPAA Business Associate Agreement on any plan. No Google Workspace integration. No SMS messaging yet. If any of those is a requirement rather than a preference, we are the wrong choice today.

What to ask Smokeball

Questions rather than claims, because we are not the right source for what another vendor's product does today. Ask us the same ones.

→What is the per-user price, what is the contract term, and what happens to it at renewal?
→Is automatic time capture desktop-software-based, and what does it require on each machine?
→Are statutory deadlines computed for my jurisdiction?

What we can say about Smokeball, and where it came from

Each line names the page it was read from and the date it was read. Vendors change their products; if one of these is out of date, it is out of date from that day.

Smokeball does not publish prices. Its pricing page lists four plans — Bill, Boost, Grow and Prosper+ — each behind a 'Get pricing' request, and states that pricing depends on firm size, plan, contract term and optional products.

Source: https://www.smokeball.com/pricing — read 2026-09-15

Where Smokeball is the better answer

Smokeball built its reputation on automatic time capture and has been doing it longer than we have. A firm whose single biggest problem is unrecorded time should evaluate both and pick on the capture quality, not on anything else in this comparison.

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