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. This page covers the ones worth knowing before you dive in.
You don’t need to memorize any of this. Come back here whenever you hit a word in the app or the docs 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 (which tracks what stage it’s in), an assignee (who’s responsible), contacts (the people involved), tasks (the actual work), and potentially trust transactions, documents, and notes attached to it.
Think of a matter like an order at a restaurant. It’s not the food itself. It’s 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 a single matter can hold more than one.
Here’s why that distinction matters: a client comes in for a purchase, but they also need a mortgage discharge on their old property. That’s one matter with two services. The matter is the container. The services are what’s inside.
If you’ve ever been to a fast food restaurant: the matter is the combo meal, and 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 that a matter moves through from start to finish. A residential purchase workflow might look like: Leads, Necessary Information, Document Preparation, Signing, Requesting Funds, Closing, Reporting, Completed.
Workflows are high-level on purpose. They tell you the big picture, like “where is this transaction in its lifecycle?” The detailed work happens in tasks.
If you’re used to software where a file is either “open” or “closed,” workflows will feel like a big upgrade. Instead of binary, you get a progression that tells you something useful at every step.
A stage is one step within a workflow. “Searches” is a stage. “Closing” is a stage. Every stage belongs to one of three categories: Todo (hasn’t started), In Progress (actively being worked), or Done (finished).
These categories matter because Laminar uses them to organize your views. Matters in “Todo” stages show up differently than matters in “Done” stages. You’ll see this in the Pools view.
Pools are how Laminar displays your matters grouped by workflow stage. Picture a board with columns, where each column represents a stage, and matter cards sit inside the column that matches their current stage.
It’s the same idea as a Kanban board if you’ve seen one of those before. If not, think of it like sorting physical file folders into labeled trays: “Waiting for Searches,” “Ready to Close,” “Complete.”
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 workflow status (its own mini-progression), and optionally a scheduled date. Tasks are the engine of progress in Laminar. Matters move through stages, but tasks are where the real work happens.
Work Item
Section titled “Work Item”A work item is a task with a type. When you create a task and assign it a Work Item Type (like “Title Pull” or “Trust Receipt”), it becomes a work item. That type gives it a specific workflow and makes it visible alongside every other task of the same type across the firm.
Why does this matter? Without types, a title pull is just a task with a text description. You can’t easily see all title pulls in progress, you can’t batch them, and you can’t measure how long they take. With types, that same task becomes a recognized category of work. You can see all of them at once, spot bottlenecks, and start making informed decisions about staffing and workload.
Not every task needs a type. Simple one-off tasks (“Call client back,” “Review closing documents”) work fine as plain tasks. Work Item Types are for the repeatable, structured work that benefits from being categorized and tracked 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.
Here’s how it works: an administrator configures a fulfillment rule that says “Title Pull tasks get fulfilled by the Title Team.” From that point on, any Title Pull work item can be submitted to that team. The team sees it in their Service Channels workspace (a dedicated queue of incoming orders), claims it, works it, and marks it complete. The lawyer sees the status update in real time without having to chase anyone.
Fulfillment can be optional or mandatory. For something like a title pull, the lawyer might choose to handle it themselves if it’s urgent. For trust receipts, where accounting must always process the transaction, fulfillment is mandatory: the task can’t progress until it’s been submitted to the right team.
If you’ve ever placed an order at a restaurant, you already understand the model. The lawyer is the customer placing the order. The fulfillment team is the kitchen. The Service Channel is the ticket rail. The order goes in, gets worked, and comes back done.
Assignment
Section titled “Assignment”Every matter and every task has exactly one assignee. Always. This can be a person or a team (in which case the team lead is accountable).
This sounds strict, and it is, on purpose. When something has one owner, there’s never confusion about who’s responsible. “I thought you were handling that” stops being a thing.
Scheduling
Section titled “Scheduling”Scheduling in Laminar is not a calendar. It’s more like a “when should this come back to my attention?” system.
When you schedule a task for Thursday, it disappears from your active task list until Thursday arrives. Then it shows up, ready for you to work on. This is how Laminar keeps your daily view manageable: you only see what’s relevant right now.
If you’ve ever used the “snooze” feature in an email client, it’s that concept applied to your entire workload.
Contact
Section titled “Contact”A contact is a person associated with a matter. Clients, realtors, mortgage brokers, vendors, anyone involved in the transaction. Each contact has one or more roles on that matter (Client, Vendor, Realtor, Spokesperson, etc.), and the same person can appear as a contact on many different matters with different roles.
Contacts are not user accounts. Your client Jane Doe is a contact. She doesn’t log into Laminar (unless you give her portal access, which is a separate thing).
Trust Transaction
Section titled “Trust Transaction”A trust transaction tracks money moving through your firm’s trust accounts. There are two types: receipts (money coming in, like a deposit from a buyer) and expenditures (money going out, like a payout to a vendor).
Trust transactions have their own workflows, their own approval process, and their own audit trail. They live inside matters, and they show up in a ledger view so you can see the running balance at any time.
An asset is a file attached to an entity. PDFs, Word documents, images, whatever you need to store. Assets can be uploaded to matters, tasks, or trust transactions.
Assets are just files. 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 or update attached to an entity. You might add a note to a matter saying “Spoke with client, they confirmed possession date.” Notes are timestamped, attributed to whoever wrote them, and become part of the permanent record.
Notes are not editable after a short window (typically a few minutes). This is intentional. They’re meant to be a reliable historical record, not a living document.
Activity
Section titled “Activity”Activity is the automatic audit trail that Laminar maintains on every entity. Every status change, every assignment, every file upload, every note, every edit gets logged with who did it and when.
You’ll see 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?”