Couldn’t make it to Smokeball Spark this year? No problem, here’s what you missed.
Back for its third year, the annual Smokeball Spark conference took place in Sydney in late February, bringing together hundreds of attendees, partners, and speakers to discuss new ideas, practical strategies, and the latest legal tech innovations for small law firms in Australia.
Smokeball Spark 2025 highlights
This year’s speaker lineup was packed with industry leaders and innovators (including quite a few familiar faces from our customer community). Some of our favourites were:
- Laura Vickers, Director of Nest Legal, shared how tech tools like online intake forms, smart precedents, and AI-driven automation can speed up and simplify work for family law firms.
- Jennifer Robinson, human rights barrister, shared the power of legal advocacy and captivated us with her 14-year journey representing Julian Assange on the WikiLeaks case and Amber Heard during the defamation proceedings brought by Heard’s ex-husband Johnny Depp against The Sun Newspaper in the UK.
- Todd Sampson, creator of Earth Hour, challenged us to rethink innovation and showed how neuroscience can help boost brainpower.
- Hunter Steele, CEO of Smokeball, who kicked off with insights into the legal industry’s future and the impact technology will have on lawyers (if you’re interested in hearing more then give our recent File Notes episode with Hunter a listen!). He finished the day by sharing vision behind Smokeball and unveiling new features. Smokeball is set to introduce the Archie Prompt Library, a tool designed to make AI prompting easier and more efficient for lawyers. It lets users save and reuse prompts, share them across their firm, and access expert-created prompts tailored to specific practice areas.
With a great mix of legal insights, innovation, and practical strategies for law firms, Spark’s presenters delivered a ton of value to attendees.
VXT at Spark 2025
For those unfamiliar, VXT is a phone system built for lawyers, designed to integrate with the practice management systems (PMS) they use everyday, like Smokeball. VXT’s integration with Smokeball helps lawyers keep track of phone calls, syncs contacts from Smokeball, and makes tracking billable time easy. You never miss a chargeable minute or have to manually enter call details again. VXT makes it easy to find client conversations, transcripts, and notes when you need them.
As the most popular integration in Smokeball Australia’s integration marketplace, Duncan de Wet, Luke Campbell, and Sophie Svenson from VXT had a VERY busy conference.
Catching up with so many of our existing clients and meeting new firms was an absolute blast. Alongside soaking up insights from top legal minds, we also shared two updates for VXT’s Smokeball integration.
Save time and ensure consistent record keeping with default matters
VXT is a phone system that links directly to your practice management software. When you make or receive a call, everything important about that call (how long you talked, what you discussed, and any notes you made) can be saved automatically to the right case and contact in your PMS. Default matters in VXT makes that even easier.
Already using VXT? Well if you’re tired of manually entering matter details and searching for the right matter to save notes to after every call, with default matters, you can now assign a default matter to a contact in VXT. This means you can save any call or communication with a contact to a specific matter, and all future communications will be saved to that matter (until you remove or change the default matter).
How default matters work in VXT:
- You can choose a default matter for a contact from the Inbox page.
- When you save a call with a contact to a matter in Smokeball, it updates their default matter.
- If a contact has a default matter, that matter will be automatically selected at the end of each call. No more searching!
- Any notes made in the call, as well as the call transcript and summary will be saved automatically as a completed task, file or memo.
- Voicemails and SMS messages will also auto-save to the default matter as a file note.
Why we built default matters:
For firms that receive high volumes of calls throughout the day, default matters eliminate repetitive data entry, ensure consistency, and reduce the risk of saving a call to the wrong matter.
Since default matters are user-specific, different lawyers in the same firm can assign different default matters for the same client, allowing for personalised case management.
Transcribe and summarise your calls in seconds — for free!
VXT also made AI phone call transcriptions and summaries free. No extra charges to get a written record of your calls.
We know that clear, accurate records are essential for lawyers. That’s why we’re making it easier (and cheaper) than ever to maintain them.
Why it matters:
- Save time: Instead of manually taking notes or going back through the call to find the action items, you can quickly summarise a call in one click.
- Reduce risk: Keep accurate records without extra effort.
- Capture every detail: No more relying on memory or scribbled file notes.
We recently explored three reasons why firms are switching from handwritten notes to AI phone call transcripts and summaries. With these features, conversations and in-call notes can be saved straight to client matters in Smokeball, keeping communication records organised without any extra effort.
Missed us at Spark? Let’s chat
If you didn’t get a chance to chat with us at Spark, don’t worry, you can still book a demo of our Smokeball integration. See how default matters, free transcriptions, and a legal phone system built for lawyers can help your law firm.
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