Obligations

Every file is full of promises. The bank will deliver a registered discharge within 60 days. Our firm undertakes to hold a cheque until the seller’s lawyer confirms. The agreement is conditional on the buyer’s financing. Most of the time those promises live in somebody’s head, or in a letter, or in a sticky note on a monitor.

An obligation is Laminar’s name for one of those promises, written down once on the matter and tracked until it is dealt with. It works in either direction: a promise we gave, a promise someone gave us, or a condition both sides agreed to. Each obligation belongs to a service on the matter, and you find it there: a sale’s obligations are on its Obligations page, under the tab for their kind.

Kinds of obligation

Every obligation has a Kind, chosen when you add it and fixed afterwards, because a different kind is a different promise:

Kind	What it is
Discharge	A registered interest, usually a mortgage, that must be cleared from named titles
Payout	A creditor the client has asked to be paid out, with the amount from its statement
Undertaking	A promise a lawyer gave, or received, to do or deliver something
Trust condition	A condition attached to trust money, such as holding it until something happens
Condition	A condition of the agreement
Holdback	An amount kept back until a stated thing happens

Each also has a Direction: Given by us, Given by them, or Condition of the agreement. A condition is always a condition of the agreement, and nothing else is. A trust condition the firm places on the other side is Given by them, since they are the ones who have to meet it.

The direction decides what Laminar offers you on the obligation. A promise Given by us is the firm’s own: a discharge, payout or holdback can be paid with Create the payment, and a discharge can be worked by opening a service for it. A promise Given by them belongs to the other side. You follow it up, attach the evidence when it arrives and mark it satisfied, but Laminar does not offer to pay it or to open a service for it, and its page says so. A discharge the other side owes never shows the mortgage’s registered amount as an amount owed, because that money is theirs to pay.

Adding one

Open the service the promise belongs to, go to the tab that lists that kind of obligation, and choose its add action. You fill in:

• What is promised, in plain words: “Deliver the registered discharge within 60 days of closing” beats “Discharge”.
• Kind and Direction.
• Counterparty, optionally: a contact on the matter.
• Service: the service on the matter the promise belongs to, already set to the one you added it from.
• Due, optionally.
• Amount, for the kinds that carry money: discharge, payout and holdback.
• Note.

Add payout, on a tab that lists payouts, is the shortcut for the most common money promise: a creditor to be paid out, with the amount from its statement.

The list has two tabs: Open, the promises still outstanding, and All, which includes the ones already closed.

Who sees it through

Every obligation can have someone at the firm responsible for it, whether it is our promise or theirs. On the obligation’s page, set Assigned to to a person or a team. Only people and teams on the obligations list in Settings, Assignment Capabilities can be chosen. The obligations assigned to you appear in My Tasks, under Obligations, soonest due first.

An obligation is not a task, but tasks can serve it. On the obligation’s Tasks tab, add the tasks that are work toward keeping it, such as chasing the lender for a discharge. Each one shows the obligation it serves, with a link back.

Due dates and overdue

A due date is optional. An obligation that is still open with a due date before today is marked Overdue. “Today” is today where you are, not on a server somewhere. Closed obligations are never overdue, however late they closed.

Closing an obligation

Closing is how you say the promise has been dealt with. How it closes depends on its kind:

• Mark satisfied for most obligations: the promise was kept.
• Mark waived for a Condition only: the party who had the benefit of it chose not to insist.
• Release for a Holdback, and it is the only way a holdback closes.

Closing records the Date, which cannot be in the future, and optionally the Evidence: an asset that proves it, such as the registered discharge or the seller’s lawyer’s email confirming the condition. Upload it from the close dialog with Upload evidence, or pick one already uploaded about the obligation on its Assets tab. The obligation’s own page has Detail, Assets and Activity tabs, so the evidence and the history are one click away.

Closed the wrong one? Reopen it from the row’s menu. Reopening clears the date and unlinks the evidence, and the asset itself stays where it was. The reopening is logged.

Discharge obligations

A Discharge obligation adds two things to the usual fields:

• Interest to clear: the interest on title you are clearing, such as a registered mortgage. It is chosen when the obligation is added and cannot be changed afterwards.
• Clear it from: the parcels the interest is to be cleared from. At least one, and only parcels the interest is actually registered against. This is the obligation’s scope, and you can edit it.

The obligation’s page shows, parcel by parcel, whether the interest is Still registered, Discharged, or No longer on title.

While an open obligation’s scope includes a parcel, the interest’s link to that parcel’s title cannot be dropped. Laminar refuses and names the obligation. The promise would otherwise quietly lose the thing it is about.

Most discharge obligations are added for you by a decision on a service’s Title tab. Who gives the promise depends on the decision. On a sale, Must be cleared is the firm’s own promise. On a purchase it is the vendor’s lawyer’s. On a Mortgage (Borrowing) you choose: Must be cleared by us records the firm’s promise, Must be cleared by the lender’s lawyer records theirs, and changing from one to the other replaces the first obligation with the second.

Opening a service to work a discharge

A discharge is a promise, but clearing a mortgage is also a job with a payout statement, a payment, a registration and letters. That job belongs to a service. In the Handled by panel on a discharge obligation, choose Open a Mortgage Discharge, pick the Jurisdiction (it starts as the owning service’s), and choose Open. Laminar does the set-up in one step:

• The service is added to the matter, named for the lender.
• The interest’s instrument number becomes the Mortgage Registration Number.
• The interest’s holder becomes the Mortgagee. When the owning service has client-side parties, they become the Mortgagors.
• Its governing date starts from the owning service’s.

From then on the service works the obligation. Its Parcels page lists the obligation’s scope, its Payout Amount supplies the obligation’s amount, filling in its discharge registration number and date marks the titles discharged, and its Payment page lists the payments that belong to the obligation. The details are in Mortgage Discharge.

A Mortgage Discharge is offered for a mortgage or a line of credit secured by one. Other interests, such as a writ or a lien, have no service to open yet. An obligation has at most one such service at a time.

Opening the service does not close the obligation. Delivering the registered discharge is the promise; the service is how you work toward it. Close the obligation yourself when the discharge is in hand.

The amount, and where it comes from

An obligation that carries money shows an Amount, and a line underneath saying where that figure comes from, in order of preference:

1. Frozen on approval of its payment, once a payment has been approved (see below).
2. From the service working it, for example “From Mortgage Discharge RBC: payout statement as of 17 Dec 2026”.
3. Typed from the creditor’s statement, when you entered it yourself. For a holdback this reads The amount held.
4. Estimate from the interest until a statement arrives, marked with an Estimate badge: the amount registered on the interest, which is a starting point and nothing more.
5. No amount yet.

When a better source arrives, the figure moves up the list on its own. A statement beats an estimate without anyone retyping anything.

Creating the payment

An obligation is the promise. The trust ledger holds the money. To pay what is owed, choose Create the payment on the obligation (or on the Payment page of the service working it). A short dialog asks:

• Paid to: who receives it. For a discharge it starts as the interest’s holder, for a payout as the counterparty. A holdback has no default.
• Payment method, optional. If the payee has exactly one standing method, it is filled in for you.
• Trust account: which of the firm’s accounts it comes out of.

Laminar creates an expected expenditure in the matter’s trust ledger for what is owed, less whatever the obligation’s earlier payments already cover, and titles it for you (“Payout to Royal Bank of Canada, mortgage 192 334 222”). It then goes through the usual approval and processing described in Trust Transactions.

While that payment is still a draft it follows the obligation. If a new statement raises the payout amount, the draft’s amount changes with it, and if the amount drops to nothing the draft is removed. You cannot type over a followed amount; change the obligation instead. Only one draft can follow an obligation at a time, so Create the payment is unavailable while one exists, and also when nothing is owed beyond what has already been paid.

Holdbacks

A Holdback holds its payment. Until the holdback is Released, the payment sourced to it shows a Held badge in the ledger, is counted under Currently held, and cannot be approved or completed. Releasing the holdback lifts the hold at once, with nothing else to do. A holdback also never appears on the statement of adjustments.

When a payment freezes

The first time a payment sourced to an obligation is approved, has an actual amount recorded, or is completed, it freezes: its amount stops following the obligation. At that same moment the obligation’s own amount freezes, at the total of its payments. Both stay frozen even if the approval is later withdrawn, so a figure that was once signed off is never silently repriced. If the lender later sends a corrected statement, the obligation shows both the frozen figure and what is now owed, with the difference, and a further payment can cover it.

Detaching a payment

If a payment should stop following its obligation, choose Detach from source on its row in the ledger and confirm. It keeps its figures, becomes an ordinary transaction you edit yourself, and is never recalculated again. A detached row still notes where it came from. A frozen payment cannot be detached, and neither can a held one.

Removing an obligation

Remove an obligation from its row’s menu. It goes along with its scope and any draft payments that followed it, and its history stays. Laminar will not remove one that:

• has a payment that is Frozen, or
• has a service working it. Remove that service first.

The dialog lists exactly what stands in the way.

The same care applies around an obligation. An interest cannot be removed from the matter while an obligation about it has a frozen payment or a service working it; if neither, its open obligations and their drafts go with it, and closed ones stay as history. A service cannot be removed while it owns an open obligation; close or remove each one first. Closed ones stay, still naming the service that was removed. Removing the service that works an obligation leaves the obligation in place, ready for you to open another or carry on by hand.

Why this matters

A promise written in one place can be found, dated, and checked off. The person taking over a file on Monday sees what is still owed, to whom, and by when. Payments follow the figure that justifies them instead of a number someone typed last week. And the evidence that a promise was kept sits on the promise, rather than somewhere in the email.