Key Terms
Laminar borrows a few words from the legal world, invents a couple of its own, and uses some familiar terms in ways that might not match what you’re used to. You don’t need to memorize any of this. Come back whenever you hit a word that doesn’t quite land.
Matter
Section titled “Matter”A matter is what you’d normally call a “file” or a “transaction.” It’s the container for everything related to a single piece of client work: a home purchase, a refinance, a private sale.
But a matter isn’t just a folder. It has a workflow (what stage it’s in), an assignee (who’s responsible), contacts, tasks, and potentially trust transactions, documents, and notes. Think of it like an order at a restaurant: not the food itself, but the ticket that tracks what was ordered, who’s making it, and where it’s at.
Service
Section titled “Service”A service is the actual product your firm sells: “Purchase Representation,” “Mortgage Discharge,” “Title Insurance Facilitation.” Services get added to matters, and one matter can hold several.
Why the distinction? A client comes in for a purchase but also needs a mortgage discharge on their old property. That’s one matter with two services. The matter is the combo meal; the services are the burger and fries. You track the combo as one order, but you can see exactly what’s in it.
Workflow
Section titled “Workflow”A workflow is the series of stages a matter moves through from start to finish. A residential purchase workflow might look like: Leads, Information Gathering, Preparation, Signing, Closing, Archive.
Workflows are high-level on purpose. They answer “where is this transaction in its lifecycle?” The detailed work happens in tasks.
A stage is one step within a workflow. “Searches” is a stage. “Closing” is a stage. Behind the scenes, every stage belongs to a category (unstarted, started, completed, or canceled) that tells Laminar whether the work hasn’t begun, is underway, is finished, or was called off. Laminar uses these categories to organize your views.
Flows is the view that displays your matters grouped by workflow stage. Picture a board with columns, one per stage, where each matter card sits in the column matching its current stage.
It’s the same idea as a Kanban board, if you’ve seen one. If not: think of sorting physical file folders into labeled trays. “Waiting for Searches,” “Ready to Close,” “Complete.”
Context
Section titled “Context”The context selector at the top of the sidebar controls whose work you’re looking at: your own (Me), one of your teams, or a whole organization. Flows and Work Items follow it; My Tasks and your Overview stay personal regardless. See Switching Context.
A task is a single unit of work. “Order title search,” “Request mortgage payout statement,” “Review survey.” Tasks live inside matters and are the things that actually get done day to day.
Every task has an owner (a person or team), a status in its own short workflow, and optionally a scheduled date. Matters move through stages, but tasks are where the real work happens.
Work Item
Section titled “Work Item”A work item is any typed, trackable unit of work on a matter. Tasks are work items. Trust transactions are work items too. What makes something a work item is its type (like “Title Pull” or “Trust Receipt”), which gives it a specific workflow and makes it visible alongside every other item of the same type across the firm.
Why does this matter? Without a type, a title pull is just a task with a text description. With one, it becomes a recognized category of work: you can see all title pulls at once, batch them, spot bottlenecks, and make informed staffing decisions. Simple one-off tasks (“Call client back”) don’t need a type; types are for the repeatable, structured work worth tracking in aggregate.
Fulfillment
Section titled “Fulfillment”Fulfillment is how Laminar handles delegation to specialized teams. When a lawyer needs a title pull done, they don’t walk the hallway asking who’s available. They submit it as an order to the team that handles title pulls, and that team processes it through their own workflow.
An administrator configures a rule: “Title Pull tasks get fulfilled by the Title Team.” From then on, any Title Pull can be submitted to that team. The team sees it in their Service Channels queue, claims it, works it, and marks it complete. The lawyer watches the status update in real time without chasing anyone.
Fulfillment can be optional or mandatory per work item type. A title pull might be optional (handle it yourself if it’s urgent). Trust receipts are typically mandatory: accounting must process the transaction.
If you’ve ever placed an order at a restaurant, you already understand the model. The lawyer is the customer. The fulfillment team is the kitchen. The Service Channel is the ticket rail.
Assignment
Section titled “Assignment”Every matter and every task has exactly one assignee: a person or a team. This is strict on purpose. When something has one owner, “I thought you were handling that” stops being a thing.
Scheduling
Section titled “Scheduling”Scheduling in Laminar is not a calendar. It’s a “when should this come back to my attention?” system. Schedule a task for Thursday and it disappears from your active list until Thursday arrives. If you’ve used “snooze” in an email client, it’s that concept applied to your entire workload.
Contact
Section titled “Contact”A contact is a person or organization associated with a matter: your client, or someone speaking on their behalf. Contacts carry roles on a matter (Client or Client Spokesperson), and the same contact can appear on many matters.
Contacts are not user accounts. Your client Jane Doe doesn’t log into Laminar, though you can grant her access to the client portal, which is a separate thing.
Interaction
Section titled “Interaction”An interaction is a logged communication on a matter, task, or trust transaction: an email, a call, a meeting, a text, a fax, or physical mail. Email sent and received through Laminar files itself; the rest you log in a few fields. Interactions are permanent once saved; together they’re the file’s conversation history.
An event is a key date on a matter: the closing, a signing appointment, a conditions deadline. Events drive the deadline views and can be shown to clients in the portal, date by date. Events say when; tasks say what to do about it.
Trust Transaction
Section titled “Trust Transaction”A trust transaction tracks money moving through your firm’s trust accounts. Two types: receipts (money coming in, like a buyer’s deposit) and expenditures (money going out, like a payout to a vendor).
Trust transactions have their own workflow, their own approval process, and their own audit trail. They live inside matters, and every matter has a trust ledger showing its receipts, expenditures, and balance.
Line Item
Section titled “Line Item”A line item is a single billing entry on a matter: a receipt (something you’ll charge the client) or an expenditure (a cost incurred on their behalf). Line items are the raw material that estimates and invoices are assembled from.
Estimate & Invoice
Section titled “Estimate & Invoice”An estimate is a costs preview emailed to the client before the billing happens; an invoice is the bill itself, assembled from the matter’s receipt line items and moving one way through Draft, Finalized, and Paid. Both freeze their numbers at the moment of commitment (send and finalize, respectively).
Intake
Section titled “Intake”An intake is a questionnaire sent to a client: steps, fields, and skip logic, filled in from the client portal. The answers come back as structured data on the matter instead of a phone call’s worth of notes.
Health
Section titled “Health”Health is a status flag on work: On Track, At Risk, Blocked, or Off Track, attached via a note. Flagged work (blocked or off track) rolls up into team and firm views, so problems get seen while they’re still cheap.
An asset is a file attached to an entity: PDFs, Word documents, images. Assets can be uploaded to matters, tasks, or trust transactions. They don’t have workflows or assignments; they sit there, downloadable, with a record of who uploaded them and when.
A note is a point-in-time comment attached to an entity: “Spoke with client, they confirmed possession date.” Notes are timestamped, attributed to whoever wrote them, and become part of the record on the matter.
Activity
Section titled “Activity”Activity is the automatic audit trail Laminar maintains on every entity. Every status change, assignment, file upload, and edit gets logged with who did it and when. You’ll find the activity timeline in the detail view of any matter, task, or trust transaction. It’s the definitive answer to “what happened on this file?”