Donna365 vs Smokeball
For firms comparing legacy matter-management depth against a full Microsoft-native legal OS.
Work surface first
Many firms do not want legal work to live in another tab. They want the full operating system, meaning matters, documents, workflow, research, AI and reporting, inside the Microsoft environment their team already uses. Donna365 is designed to take on that operating role around matters, workflow, matter-grounded Donna AI, document automation, legal research, live dashboards and human review.
What Smokeball does well
Smokeball has built a strong reputation around document-heavy small-firm practice. Its automatic time capture is a genuine strength: it records activity in the background so firms recover time they would otherwise lose, which is a real and measurable benefit for practices that bill by the hour. It pairs that with a large form and precedent library and solid matter management. For a firm whose main pain is leaking billable time and managing a high volume of documents, Smokeball is a credible and well-regarded answer, and the comparison should acknowledge that plainly.
Where Donna365 takes a different position
Donna365 starts from a different premise. Rather than being a deep matter-management application that the firm works inside, it sits as a persistent operating layer across Microsoft 365. The aim is not just to record what happened on a matter, but to keep the matter actively moving: Donna captures intake, builds summaries, prepares drafts for review, surfaces research and flags exceptions, all under human control and scoped to the file. Time capture and document depth are part of running a firm, but Donna365 treats them as features of a wider operating system rather than the centre of it.
Best fit
Smokeball is a strong choice for a firm focused on capturing billable time automatically and managing a heavy document load inside a dedicated application. Donna365 is the better fit when the firm wants to move beyond a matter database into a persistent legal operating system with governed execution, live operational visibility and AI that stays active across the matter, all inside the Microsoft tools the team already uses.
Book a discussion and demo.
Bring one real workflow and we will show how Donna365 can support matter work, governed AI, reporting and rollout inside Microsoft 365.
- See the product flow, not a generic slide deck.
- Talk through your firm size, practice area and current bottleneck.
- Discuss design-partner fit, rollout path and next steps.
