LegalScout vs Smokeball (2026)

An intake or triage workflow can route a qualified matter to the right team member, update the matter in Clio or Actionstep and write a matter summary without anyone stepping in, and LegalScout also connects to Smokeball. Drafts and family law balance sheets leave as Word or PDF files. Integration stops at those practice systems, and firms cannot add other tools for the AI to use.

Sourcelegalscout.com.au/features/ai-law-agentsread 2026-10-13

In chat, Archie turns an answer into a Smokeball task, memo or calendar event, each prepared as a draft the user edits and saves.

Archie Apps run specialist jobs on a matter's files with no extra login, some built by Smokeball, such as the Bank Statements Analyzer and Legal Chronology, and some by partners, with CaseMark, Novo AI and Supio producing deposition summaries, medical narratives and demand letters that save back to the matter as Word or PDF. LawY, included with Archie, answers legal questions from inside the matter.

Around the AI, the Smokeball Marketplace connects the platform to services such as InfoTrack, and a public API lets a firm build its own connections, though Archie itself calls only the tools Smokeball provides.

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A firm maps a process once, with its intake questions, qualification criteria, triage logic and routing rules, and the Planner AI stores it as a reusable workflow template that runs end to end on every trigger.

Each run qualifies the matter, makes the routing decision, updates the practice system and writes the summary, and a single agent run can take a drafting task from start to a finished, reviewed draft.

Drafting itself splits the work between two agents, a Planner that gathers the facts through a structured conversation and a Composer that writes from the firm's precedents. Each agent run costs 5 credits.

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Archie works through a question step by step, pulling in matter details, documents, emails, tasks and invoices, checking its own answer and carrying on until the answer is complete, and Advanced thinking lists that process on complex prompts.

Archie Apps run fixed multistep jobs, such as a chronology built from documents of up to 200 pages against the event types a user ticks, or an analysis of up to 25 bank statements against the spending a user is looking for, and Smokeball Workflows automate matter tasks on the higher plans. Archie handles one request at a time and cannot yet run a whole workflow end to end.

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Intake workflows run overnight on the enquiries a firm would otherwise leave unanswered, holding the first conversation with the prospective client and routing the matter, incoming work is classified and sent to the right person as it arrives, and post matter follow ups go out on a schedule. Everything else starts from the web app, where users ask Ask Scout, query a workspace or launch a drafting run. The trigger behind each workflow run, whether a web form, an inbox or a rule, is not spelled out.

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Archie Suggestions read a matter's documents, emails, tasks and deadlines as the matter changes and offer next steps as tiles, such as a task, an event, a memo, an email draft, a ready made prompt or a relevant app, each with the reason behind it. Archie is reached from the matter view, the Word add in and the new Outlook add in, which summarizes long threads and offers quick replies drawn from the matter, and prompts can be spoken through voice dictation. Archie never starts work on its own, so each suggestion runs only when a user clicks it.

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LegalScout indexes the firm's uploaded precedents, past contracts and approved clauses in My Firm Documents and searches personal and firm documents semantically, with @mentions to point at a specific file. Ask Scout reads the matter's documents first, then the firm's library of pattern pages, past matter insights and synthesized precedent notes, and only then live Australian case law, legislation and government sources, with citations under every answer. Retrieval augmented generation keeps each answer tied to those sources across 17 Australian practice areas.

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Once switched on, Archie indexes the firm's 50 most recent matters and ingests others on first use, covering matter details, parties, tasks, events, memos, invoices, emails and the full text of documents. Knowledge sources add firm wide reference documents in PDF, DOCX, TXT or Markdown, such as a statute or a tone guide, scoped by matter type and switched on for one user or for all staff.

Each answer shows what Archie looked at and cites its source. Legal questions go to LawY, set to the matter's practice area across estate planning, probate, elder law, family law and real estate, with its sources and follow up questions under each answer. Images, image only PDFs and spreadsheets are outside what Archie can read.

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Research conversations run over several turns with their history saved in each workspace, workflow templates stay in the firm's account, and a firm library of pattern pages and past matter insights grows with use, so later answers draw on earlier work. Conversations and documents stay open for 90 days after their last activity, then move to an archive for compliance and legal hold, and are permanently deleted 30 days after that. Prompts and uploads are kept only when a user saves them.

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Each Archie conversation sits inside one matter and reads that matter's own records afresh, so context carries over through the file, and Archie never mixes matters or firms. Knowledge sources hold reference documents for the whole firm, and prompt inputs ask for the facts a matter lacks before a saved prompt runs. Archie does not carry a user's preferences from one conversation to the next, and tone profiles that will apply a firm's writing rules by audience are still to come.

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Drafts come back for a lawyer to review, with clauses that need a partner's sign off flagged and the places where human judgement is still required marked, since LegalScout treats every output as a draft, not a decision. Review happens at the output rather than at each step, so intake and triage workflows run from the client conversation through routing and the practice system update with no lawyer in the loop, and there is no step to approve a routing decision or a record change before it lands.

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Every task, memo and calendar event Archie prepares is a draft the user edits and then saves, and a suggestion produces output the user confirms or dismisses. In Word, Archie proposes targeted edits that are previewed before they apply, and in Outlook it drafts replies the user sends. Legal answers from LawY can go to a lawyer for verification, and settings make Archie ask follow up questions on vague prompts and confirm which file a prompt refers to.

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Every user signs in through Auth0 with multi factor authentication enforced, and LegalScout holds no password hashes. Role based access scopes each user to their own organization, with permissions enforced at the API layer.

Data is encrypted with AES 256 under AWS KMS keys and TLS 1.2 or later, every sign in, document access, AI query and admin action lands in a tamper evident audit log, security scans run on every code change, and a defined incident response plan sets escalation procedures. Practices are mapped to the Australian Privacy Principles, with data export and account deletion on request.

No certification is in place yet, since ISO 27001 controls are mapped with a gap analysis in progress and ISO 42001 and IRAP are targets, and there is no single sign on through a firm's own identity provider.

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Smokeball holds ISO 27001:2022 certification, runs annual external penetration tests, encrypts data with AES 256 at rest and TLS 1.2 or later in transit, and makes two factor sign in compulsory. Firms can sign in through Microsoft Entra SSO over SAML, and firm owners set role based permissions per user, including one that switches Archie on or off for each person. Archie only works on matters a user can already open, never crosses firms or matters, and runs under zero data retention agreements with its model providers.

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Each draft carries a trail of who ran it, when and from which precedent, and every draft is kept in the user's or the firm's document store. Answers show their sources, and LegalScout keeps a tamper evident log of sign ins, document access, AI queries and admin actions on its side. A firm gets no step by step view of what a workflow or agent run did, such as the questions asked, the routing decision and the practice system change.

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Authorized users can review a log of the questions staff put to Archie, which shows how the firm prompts it. Advanced thinking lists Archie's reasoning while it works on a complex prompt, each answer shows the files Archie read, and the tasks, memos, events and app outputs it produces land in the matter once saved. Beyond the question log and those saved items, a firm cannot replay what Archie did on a request.

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Compute, the PostgreSQL database, document storage, caching, queues and AI inference all run in AWS Sydney, ap-southeast-2, and data never moves to US, EU or other AWS regions, with inference on AWS Bedrock inside the Australian boundary. Every customer runs in that one region by design, which suits Australian firms and rules LegalScout out for a firm that must keep data in another country or in its own cloud.

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Smokeball runs separate stacks in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, each with its own sign in and API hosts, on AWS across several availability zones. Data stays in the firm's home region, Australian data in Australia, UK data in the UK and US data in the US, and the cloud and AI providers work under data processing agreements that cover any international transfer. Smokeball runs only as its own hosted service.

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Six capabilities come built in, contract review, drafting, legal research, family law financials, employment contract review and agentic workflows. Intake, triage, conflict pre screening, KYC onboarding and follow up are the suggested uses for workflows, but each workflow template is one the firm defines with the Planner's help, and contract review runs against the firm's own playbook. LegalScout has no catalog of ready made agents or workflows to switch on.

Sourcelegalscout.com.au/features/ai-law-agentsread 2026-10-13

Archie Apps is a marketplace of ready made tools a firm runs on a matter, from Smokeball's Bank Statements Analyzer, Legal Chronology and audio transcription to partner apps from CaseMark, Novo AI and Supio for deposition summaries, medical narratives and demand letters, some at extra cost.

A prompt library carries out of the box prompts by practice area, such as an estate plan summary or a response to a dissolution petition, with prompt inputs that collect missing facts before a prompt runs, and the Word add in offers review playbooks built by the Smokeball team beside the firm's own. Smokeball AI also generates an intake form for a chosen state and matter type, or converts a paper form.

Sourcesupport.smokeball.com/hc/en-us/articles/32304670869399-archie-appsread 2026-10-12

All inference runs on AWS Bedrock in Sydney, and no request goes to OpenAI, Anthropic or other outside AI APIs, but buyers are not told which models run there. LegalScout trains and fine tunes its own models in Australia and never trains them on client content. The Pro pack's custom model presets hold a firm's own research instructions, research offers an enhanced reasoning mode for harder questions, and Enterprise adds custom fine tuning, but a buyer cannot choose a model maker.

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In Archie's settings a user picks the model for their own work, from OpenAI's GPT-5.2, the default, through GPT-5.3, GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5, with thinking versions of GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.5, to Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8 and Claude Sonnet 5. A model joins the list only after Smokeball's own privacy and security review, under agreements that stop the provider storing or training on firm data. Firms cannot connect their own provider account.

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LegalScout runs as a web app and offers open APIs, by its own account, for updating client matters in Clio and Actionstep, but a developer finds no API reference, keys or SDK to build against and no MCP server. A separate attorney directory under the same name offers an API and an MCP server with no link to LegalScout's Australian platform, so those tools say nothing about this product.

Sourcelegalscout.com.au/resources/faqsread 2026-10-13

Smokeball's public API covers matters, contacts, events, documents and other practice data, with OAuth through the authorization code or client credentials grant, separate base URLs for the US, Australia and the UK, rate limits, webhooks and a Client SDK. A firm can build apps for its own use straight in production through the Developer Console, while partners go through staging and a security review before listing in the marketplace. The API reaches the practice management platform, and Archie has no API or MCP server of its own.

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Contract review checks the documents a firm uploads against its playbook, and LegalScout refines its own models from practitioner feedback. A firm cannot test a workflow against sample enquiries before it runs on live ones, or check a changed template before it goes out.

Sourcelegalscout.com.au/features/ai-contract-reviewread 2026-10-13

Playbooks run a firm's review checklist over a document rule by rule and offer an action where they can, and users rate Archie's answers with a thumbs up or down. A firm can rate answers but cannot run test questions against Archie before rolling out a new model or knowledge source to staff.

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Ask Scout runs live web searches across Australian case law registries, government sources and legal commentary when no documents are loaded, and workflows reach practice systems through their integrations. It never drives a browser or another application on the user's behalf.

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Inside Smokeball, Word and Outlook, Archie works through Smokeball's own add ins, and an Archie App transcribes uploaded audio. AutoTime records time from activity in Smokeball's desktop app, and Smokeball AI writes descriptions for those entries from the user's last 100 description edits. Archie does not operate websites or other applications for the user.

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