Tasks & Work Items

Tasks are the individual units of work in Laminar. If matters track the big picture (“where is this deal?”), tasks track the actual doing (“what needs to happen next?”).

What a Task Is

A task is a single, assignable piece of work. “Order title search.” “Request mortgage payout statement.” “Review survey.” Each one has an owner, a status, and optionally a scheduled date.

Tasks belong to matters. Every task lives inside a matter, and you can see all of a matter’s tasks from the matter detail view. But you’ll interact with tasks most often through your My Tasks list, which pulls together every task assigned to you across all your matters into one place.

A task is meant to be small and specific. If you find yourself creating a task called “Handle everything for the Smith closing,” that’s too big. Break it into the actual steps: “Review title search,” “Prepare statement of adjustments,” “Schedule signing appointment.” Each of those is a task.

Task Workflows

Tasks have their own workflows, separate from (and simpler than) matter workflows. A typical task workflow is:

Unstarted, Started, Completed

Some task types might have more stages, but the idea is the same: tasks progress through a short lifecycle that tracks whether the work is pending, underway, or finished.

Completing a task (moving it to Completed) removes it from your active task list. It’s still recorded in the matter’s history, and you can always find it in the activity timeline, but it’s no longer taking up attention.

My Tasks: Your Daily Operating View

The My Tasks view is where most people spend the majority of their time in Laminar. It shows every task assigned to you, organized into three views:

Ready shows everything that needs your attention now. This includes overdue tasks (past their scheduled date) and unscheduled tasks (no date set yet). Overdue items are highlighted so you can spot them immediately.

Future shows tasks scheduled for upcoming dates. They’re organized but staying out of your way until their day arrives.

Completed shows tasks you’ve finished, in case you need to look something up.

The power of this view is that it’s honest. It shows you what you actually need to deal with right now, not every open item across your entire caseload. Scheduling is what makes this possible. (See Scheduling Your Work for the full concept.)

Work Items: The Broader Category

You’ll mostly hear the word “task” in day-to-day use, but Laminar has a broader concept called Work Items. A Work Item is any typed, trackable unit of work. Tasks are one kind of Work Item. Trust transactions are another.

The Work Item concept matters because it enables features that work across different types of work:

Work Items view groups all your work by type. Instead of seeing a flat task list, you can see “I have 5 title pulls, 3 mortgage instructions, and 8 document packages to prepare.” This batching by type helps you work more efficiently, because similar tasks often have similar steps.

Work Item Types give each piece of work a category. A task called “Order title search” might have the type “Title Pull.” This lets you see all your title pulls across all your matters in one place, which is useful when you’re doing several of the same thing in a row.

For now, you can think of Work Items and tasks as the same thing. As you use Laminar more, you’ll notice that trust transactions and other entities share the same patterns (status tracking, assignment, scheduling), and that’s the Work Item concept at work under the hood.

How Tasks Relate to Matters

Tasks live inside matters, but they don’t control the matter’s workflow directly. Completing all the tasks in a particular stage doesn’t automatically advance the matter to the next stage. Those are separate decisions.

This is by design. Consider a scenario where you’ve completed every task in the “Searches” stage, but one of the search results came back with a problem. You don’t want the matter to auto-advance to “Conditions” while you’re still investigating. The matter stage reflects where the deal actually is, and that requires human judgment.

What tasks do provide is evidence. When you look at a matter and see that all the Searches-related tasks are complete, that gives you confidence to advance the matter. But you make the call.

Creating Tasks

Tasks can be created from a few places:

From within a matter: Open the matter, go to the Tasks section, and click the add button. The task automatically belongs to that matter and inherits the matter’s assignee by default.

From the Create button: Click the + button in the top bar and select “Task.” You’ll need to specify which matter it belongs to.

You set the title, assignee, and optionally a schedule date and description. Keep titles action-oriented: “Order title search” is better than “Title search.” The verb tells you what to do.

Assignment Rules

Every task has exactly one assignee. This can be a user or a team.

When a task is assigned to a user, that person sees it in their My Tasks list. They’re responsible for completing it.

When a task is assigned to a team, team members can see it in their team’s work view. The task can be reassigned to a specific team member when someone is ready to pick it up.

Tasks created on a matter default to the matter’s assignee. You can change this at creation time or later by reassigning. Reassignment is logged in the activity timeline.

Task Properties

Every task has:

Property	What It Does
Title	Short description of the work. Keep it action-oriented.
Status	Current position in the task’s workflow (Unstarted, Started, Completed).
Assignee	Who’s responsible. A person or a team.
Matter	Which matter this task belongs to.
Scheduled date	When this task should appear in the assignee’s Ready list. Optional.

And optionally:

Property	What It Does
Description	Longer explanation or instructions.
Work Item Type	Category of work (e.g., “Title Pull”). Gives the task a specific workflow and makes it visible in the Work Items view.
Notes	Timestamped comments added over time.
Assets	Files attached to the task.
Links	Relationships to other tasks (related, blocks, blocked by, duplicate).