Tracking Matter Progress
Once a matter is open and work is underway, you need to keep track of where it stands. This guide covers how to monitor your matters, spot problems early, and advance deals through their workflow stages.
The Pools View
Section titled “The Pools View”The Pools view is your primary tool for tracking matter progress across your caseload. It shows your matters arranged in columns by workflow stage.
Open Pools from the sidebar under your workflow. You’ll see your matters organized by stage, with counts showing how many matters are at each point in the pipeline.
Each column represents a stage, and the cards inside are your matters currently at that stage. The column counts tell you immediately where your work is concentrated. If Searches has 5 matters and Closing has 1, you know where the bottleneck is.
Reading a Matter Card
Section titled “Reading a Matter Card”In the Pools view, each matter card gives you a quick summary without having to open the matter:
- Title tells you which deal it is
- Assignee shows who’s responsible
- Expected completion helps you gauge urgency and spot matters that might be running behind
- Scheduling indicator shows whether the matter needs attention now or is deferred
If a card has been sitting in the same column for a while, that’s worth investigating. Either the work is blocked, the assignee is overloaded, or the matter needs to be advanced.
Advancing a Matter Through Stages
Section titled “Advancing a Matter Through Stages”When you’re confident a matter is ready to move to the next stage, open the matter and change its workflow status. Select the next stage, and the matter moves immediately. The Pools view updates in real time.
When to advance is a judgment call. There’s no checklist the system enforces. Here are some signals that a matter is ready:
Task completion. If the tasks associated with the current stage are done, that’s a strong indicator. But task completion alone isn’t necessarily sufficient. If a title search came back with an issue, you might keep the matter in “Searches” even though the task of ordering the search is technically complete.
External triggers. Some transitions are driven by external events: conditions were met, the mortgage was approved, the closing date was set. When the real-world milestone happens, advance the matter.
Professional judgment. Sometimes you just know. You’ve been doing this long enough to recognize when a deal is ready to move forward. That instinct is valid, and it’s exactly why Laminar doesn’t automate stage transitions.
Spotting Stuck Matters
Section titled “Spotting Stuck Matters”A matter that isn’t moving is a matter that needs attention. Here are some practical ways to spot stuck work:
Long residence time. If a matter has been in “Searches” for two weeks when searches typically take five business days, something is wrong. You don’t need a report to notice this: the card sitting in the same column day after day is the signal.
Overdue tasks. Open the matter and look at its tasks. If several are overdue, the matter probably isn’t progressing because the underlying work isn’t getting done. Figure out why: is the assignee overloaded? Is something blocked? Is there a dependency on an external party?
No recent activity. Check the activity timeline on the matter. If nothing has happened in a week on an active matter, it’s stagnating. Someone needs to poke it.
Expected completion approaching. If a matter’s expected completion date is coming up and it’s still in an early stage, that’s a red flag worth investigating sooner rather than later.
The Matter Detail View
Section titled “The Matter Detail View”For a deeper look at any matter, click into it from Pools (or search for it with Cmd+K). The matter detail view shows everything:
Status and workflow at the top, showing where the matter sits and the full stage progression.
Tasks section lists all tasks on the matter, organized by status. You can see what’s done, what’s in progress, and what’s still pending. This is where you get the granular picture of progress.
Contacts shows everyone involved and their roles.
Trust shows the financial picture: receipts, expenditures, and the running balance.
Notes shows the timeline of updates and comments.
Activity shows the complete audit trail of everything that’s happened.
Tracking Across Your Whole Caseload
Section titled “Tracking Across Your Whole Caseload”If you manage many matters, a few habits help you stay on top of things:
Review Pools daily, even briefly. A 30-second scan of the columns tells you if anything looks off. You’re looking for matters stuck in the same stage, columns getting overcrowded, or expected completion dates that are approaching fast.
Use the context selector. If you manage a team, switch the context to your team’s view to see their matters alongside your own. This gives you the full picture without having to check each person’s workload separately.
Act on stuck matters quickly. When a matter looks like it’s stagnating, it’s cheaper to address it now than to let it become a problem. A phone call this afternoon is usually better than a scramble next week.
Advance matters promptly. When a deal is genuinely ready for the next stage, advance it. Leaving matters in stages they’ve outgrown muddies the Pools view and makes it harder to see where your real bottlenecks are. The Pools view is only useful if it reflects reality.
What Good Looks Like
Section titled “What Good Looks Like”A well-tracked caseload in Laminar has a few characteristics:
Matters flow through stages at a predictable pace. You can look at Pools and see a healthy distribution: some matters early in the pipeline, some in the middle, some approaching close.
Tasks are scheduled, worked, and completed on a regular rhythm. Nobody has 30 overdue tasks they’re silently ignoring.
Notes provide context at key moments so that anyone looking at the matter can understand what’s happening without having to ask.
The activity timeline on each matter tells a clear story: you could hand the file to a colleague tomorrow and they’d know exactly where things stand just from reading the history.
That’s the goal. Not perfection, but a system that keeps you informed without requiring heroic effort to maintain.