How to choose between GenieAI and Smokeball
These two tools solve different shapes of contract problem. The questions below tell you which one you have.
Questions worth asking before you choose
- Are you a commercial or in-house team that needs to draft, review and negotiate contracts, or a law firm running billing, matters and case management? For contract drafting, review and negotiation choose GenieAI. If you need to run the operational side of a legal practice with time-tracking, billing and matter management, Smokeball is built for that.
- Do you need AI that reviews contracts, flags clause-level risk and edits documents inside a live workflow, or template-driven document automation tied to firm productivity reporting? For AI-native review, risk assessment and document editing choose GenieAI. For template automation wrapped around practice productivity metrics, Smokeball is built for that.
- Do you want real-time collaborative editing and clause-by-clause negotiation with counterparties, or a client portal and internal task management for a fee-earning team? For real-time collaboration and negotiation on contracts choose GenieAI. For a client-facing portal and internal task and deadline management, Smokeball is built for that.
Choosing between GenieAI and Smokeball
Choose GenieAI if
- Review needs to be actionable by the business, not just accurate. GenieAI rates clauses red, amber or green against your own positions, so a commercial lead can see what to challenge without waiting for a lawyer to interpret it.
- You want the whole contract in one place, whether or not you draft today. GenieAI covers review and negotiation and drafting. Many teams start with review alone and add drafting later.
- Your team works in Word. The Word add-in puts review and drafting where the documents already live, with styling and numbering intact.
- A commercial, procurement or operations lead is doing the work, not a lawyer.
- You run project-based work where value concentrates in a few large agreements, as in construction, energy, mining, technology and real estate. A single missed indemnity or variation clause costs more than the whole review process.
- Where contract data sits matters. GenieAI is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified, set out on our security page.
Consider Smokeball if
- Smokeball is genuinely built to run the business of a small law firm, handling matter management, time-tracking, billing and productivity reporting rather than the contracting lifecycle itself.
Where GenieAI is not the answer
- You are a law firm delivering billable client matters. GenieAI is built for the legal work a business does on its own contracts, including a firm's own commercial paperwork. It is not a matter-management or client-delivery tool.
- If your core need is practice management for a fee-earning firm, tracking billable time, invoicing clients and managing matters end to end, that is a different shape of problem and GenieAI is not the tool to run it.
Smokeball alternatives by team type
Which alternative fits depends less on the feature list than on who is blocked.
Best for commercial and sales teams
The bottleneck is legal review time on standard sales agreements. GenieAI lets the commercial team draft and send inside guardrails legal sets, so legal sees the exceptions rather than everything.
Best for in-house legal
The bottleneck is routine volume reaching a small team. Teams at this stage typically compare GenieAI, Smokeball, Clio, LawGeex. The deciding question is usually whether review output can be acted on by the business itself, or whether every flagged clause still routes back to legal.
Best for procurement and supplier contracts
Paper arrives on the counterparty's terms and has to be reviewed and negotiated against your standard positions. The question is whether the tool knows what your positions are, not just what the document says.
Moving from Smokeball to GenieAI
You do not need to arrive with anything prepared. We do the work with you.
What we handle
- Bringing your agreements across. You do not need to sort, clean or categorise anything first. We take what you have in whatever state it is in.
- Turning your positions into a playbook. Most teams have never written these down, and that is completely normal. We draw them out in a working session and turn them into something the system enforces.
- Your templates, formatting intact. They come over in Word with complex legal styling, numbering and clause formatting preserved, so nothing needs rebuilding.
What changes in week one
Review output comes back rated against your positions rather than a generic standard, so a commercial colleague can act on it directly instead of forwarding it to legal. Review, negotiation and drafting sit in one place, so the same tool covers the contract for as long as you need it.
