New releases embed powerful, agentic AI directly into the tools lawyers use every day, eliminating friction and delivering on the AI promise.
CHICAGO, May 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Smokeball, the leading cloud-based practice management platform for small to mid-size law firms, today announced a major evolution of its integrated legal AI. Smokeball’s AI matter-assistant, Archie AI, is delivering unparalleled efficiency gains through its agentic reasoning built directly into legal professionals’ daily work and matters.
Archie is embedded directly into where legal work happens—most notably matters, Microsoft Word and Outlook. This enables firms to work faster, more accurately, and with greater confidence, without interrupting their workflow.
At the same time, Archie has undergone a foundational intelligence upgrade. Through a new agentic architecture, Archie can reason across multiple steps — retrieving deeper matter context, evaluating its own response, and ensuring every answer is complete, well-supported, and verifiable.
“AI shouldn’t feel like a separate tool lawyers have to learn or adapt to; it should work the way they already do,” said Hunter Steele, Founder and CEO of Smokeball. “With Archie: Next Generation, we’ve embedded powerful, agentic AI directly into the core of legal workflows, so firms can move faster, work more accurately, and stay focused on what matters most. This is about solving real problems in legal practice, not chasing hype — and it’s a fundamental step forward in how AI supports the practice of law.”
AI That Works Where Lawyers Work
The Archie: Next Generation release introduces a suite of new capabilities designed to remove friction, reduce manual effort, and deliver meaningful productivity gains across daily legal tasks:
Archie for Word Add-In
Archie is now embedded directly into Microsoft Word, allowing lawyers to analyze documents, draft content, make targeted edits, and run structured reviews with playbooks — all without leaving their document. With automatic access to matter context, Archie works alongside lawyers in real time, providing tailored responses while preserving full control over final outputs.
Archie in Outlook
Smokeball brings Archie directly into the email workflow with AI-powered drafting and summarization tools embedded in Outlook. Lawyers can instantly summarize threads, generate or refine emails with matter context, and respond faster using AI-suggested replies hat intelligently adapt to how they are working.
Archie Matter Widget
Archie is now accessible directly within each matter’s home page, surfacing contextual suggestions and enabling real-time interaction without requiring users to open a separate interface. This creates a more integrated and intuitive experience at the point of decision-making.
Smarter, Faster, More Natural Interaction
Archie Suggestions
Archie proactively analyzes matters and surfaces actionable next steps before users need to ask. Suggestions appear as intuitive tiles, offering drafting assistance, document analysis, task creation, and more — each clearly explaining its relevance and underlying context. With one click, Archie writes and executes the prompt on the user’s behalf.
Voice Dictation
Lawyers can now interact with Archie using natural speech, dictating prompts directly into chat. This provides a faster, more fluid way to work, allowing users to switch seamlessly between typing and speaking without disrupting their workflow.
Tone Profiles
Recognizing that tone in legal communication is critical, Archie now allows firms to define how emails, letters, and memos should sound across different audiences — from clients to courts. These profiles are applied automatically, ensuring every draft reflects the firm’s standards of professionalism, clarity, and intent.
Delivered with Agentic AI
At the core of this release is Archie’s advanced intelligence through agentic reasoning, a foundational shift in how it operates.
Instead of generating answers in a single pass, Archie now uses an iterative reasoning system that works through problems step by step. It leverages deeper matter context, reassesses as needed, and produces responses that are comprehensive and verifiable. This enables Archie to:
- Handle complex legal workflows with greater reliability
- Work effectively across large matters with extensive documents
- Perform actions such as create tasks, memos and events (with user approval)
- Identify gaps in information instead of producing incomplete answers
- Provide transparency into the steps taken and how conclusions are reached
This evolution transforms Archie from a drafting assistant into an advanced system supporting real legal work end to end.
An AI Paradigm Shift
This release signals a shift in how legal professionals will use AI.
Archie is built around the realities of how lawyers work: inside documents, emails, and matters. Guided by your matter details, files, events and emails, Archie eliminates context-switching, saves hours of work on repetitive tasks, and delivers tailored, trusted outputs that meet professional standards for accuracy, tone, and reliability.
This vision extends even further through Smokeball’s recent partnership with Thomson Reuters, bringing together Smokeball’s practice management platform and Archie AI with CoCounsel Legal — an industry-leading solution for authoritative legal research, analysis, and drafting. Together, this creates a unified ecosystem that connects the business and practice of law within a single, seamless experience.
By embedding AI directly into everyday workflows and continuing to evolve its already powerful intelligence, Smokeball has set the new standard for practical, trustworthy AI in legal practice.
About Smokeball
Smokeball is the premium cloud-based practice management platform for small to mid-size law firms. Founded in 2012, with offices in Chicago, Sydney, and London, Smokeball serves law firms across the US, Australia, and the UK, handling case management, document automation, billing, time tracking, calendaring, and client communications. Smokeball’s Archie AI Matter Assistant is embedded directly into the platform, delivering real-time document summaries, matter-specific queries, file comparisons, and document drafting using the firm’s own data—all within a secure, ring-fenced environment where client data is never shared or used to train external models. Smokeball’s user base is predominantly firms of 2–30 people: solo practitioners and small teams who need powerful tools to compete at the highest level. For more information, visit smokeball.com.
Media Contacts
Smokeball: Nina Walker, [email protected], +1 (866) 934-9062
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SOURCE Smokeball, Inc.
