Setting Up a New Matter

This guide walks through creating a new matter in Laminar, from clicking the button to having a workable file ready for your team.

Creating the Matter

Click the + button in the top bar and select Matter.

You’ll need to provide a few things:

Workflow: What type of transaction is this? Select the appropriate workflow (e.g., “Residential Purchase,” “Residential Sale,” “Private Lending”). This determines the stages the matter will move through.

Title: A descriptive name for the matter. Something like “Purchase of 123 Main St” or “Refinance, Doe, Jane & John.” You want this to be scannable, because you’ll see it in lists and search results constantly. If you’re creating 20 matters a week, clear titles save you time every single day.

Assignee: Who’s primarily responsible for this matter? This defaults to you. If someone else on the team is handling it, change it here.

The matter is created as soon as you submit. It starts in the first stage of its workflow (usually something like “Lead” or “Intake”).

Setting the Expected Completion Date

Once the matter is created, you can set an expected completion date from the matter detail view. This isn’t a hard deadline enforced by the system, but it shows up on the matter header and helps with workload planning. You’ll see the number of business days remaining, which is useful for gauging how much time you have.

Adding Services

Once the matter exists, add the services that describe what the firm is doing. From the matter detail view, look for the Services section and add the relevant ones.

Common patterns:

Client buying a home: “Purchase Representation”
Client buying a home and discharging an old mortgage: “Purchase Representation” + “Mortgage Discharge”
Client selling: “Sale Representation”
Client refinancing: “Mortgage Refinance”

You can add or remove services later as the deal evolves. If a client originally came in for a purchase but then also needs you to handle their mortgage discharge, just add the service. No need to open a second matter.

Adding Contacts

Next, add the people involved in the transaction. From the matter’s Contacts section, add contacts and assign them roles.

For a typical purchase, you might add:

Jane Doe, role: Client
Tom Smith, role: Realtor
First National Bank, role: Lender
Opposing Law Firm, role: Other Side

If the contact already exists in your firm’s system (you’ve worked with them before), search for them and they’ll appear. If they’re new, you’ll create a contact record with their name, email, and phone number.

Contacts can have multiple roles on a single matter, and the same contact can appear across many different matters. Your repeat realtor who sends you five deals a month will have one contact record linked to all five matters.

Setting the Responsible Lawyer

If your firm uses the Responsible Lawyer field (most do), set this on the matter. This is the lawyer who has professional oversight for the transaction and whose approval is needed for trust expenditures.

In firms where the assignee is also the lawyer, these might be the same person. In firms where clerks manage the day-to-day work, the assignee might be the clerk while the Responsible Lawyer is the supervising lawyer.

Creating Initial Tasks

With the matter set up, you’ll want to create the tasks that represent the actual work ahead. From the matter’s Tasks section, add tasks for the work you know needs to happen:

“Send engagement letter”
“Request mortgage instructions”
“Order title search”
“Collect identification from client”

Keep task titles specific and action-oriented. The verb at the beginning tells you what to do at a glance.

For tasks that don’t need to happen right away, schedule them for the appropriate future date. “Order title search” might be a Day 1 task, but “Prepare statement of adjustments” isn’t needed until much later. Schedule it for when it’s relevant, and it’ll stay out of your way until then.

Setting Up Trust Transactions

If the matter involves trust money (most real estate transactions do), you’ll eventually need to create trust transactions. This doesn’t have to happen at matter creation, but for deals where you already know the financial picture, you can set up the expected receipts and expenditures early.

From the matter’s Trust section:

Create a receipt for the buyer’s deposit
Create receipts for expected mortgage funds
Create expenditures for land transfer tax, title insurance, legal fees, etc.

Each trust transaction needs a trust account (your firm’s configured trust accounts), an amount, and a type (receipt or expenditure).

Trust transactions have their own workflows and approval processes, which are covered in detail in the trust accounting documentation.

The Matter Is Ready

At this point, your matter has:

A workflow and a starting stage
An assignee and (if applicable) a Responsible Lawyer
An expected completion date
Contacts with roles
Services describing the work
Tasks for the immediate work ahead
Optionally, trust transactions for the financial side

From here, daily work happens through tasks. As tasks are completed and milestones are reached, you’ll advance the matter through its workflow stages. The matter’s activity timeline will accumulate a complete record of everything that happens from now until the deal closes.

Tips for High Volume

Develop a consistent setup routine. The five minutes you spend setting up a matter properly (clear title, right contacts, initial tasks scheduled) saves you hours of confusion later when you’re juggling 80 other files.

Don’t front-load every task. You don’t need to create every task the matter will ever need on Day 1. Create the immediate tasks, schedule them, and add future tasks as the matter progresses. This keeps things manageable and avoids cluttering the matter with work that won’t be relevant for weeks.

Use services accurately. It’s tempting to skip adding services when you’re in a rush, but services drive a lot of downstream functionality (document templates, task generation, reporting). The 30 seconds it takes to add them pays off.