The Laurel Assistants – the Laurel Desktop Assistant and the Laurel Cloud Assistants – are the core technology that automatically track your work activity throughout the day. These intelligent systems capture everything you do across different platforms and applications, then organize this information to help you create accurate time entries for billing. Understanding how the Laurel Assistants work will help you maximize your activity tracking to ensure you never miss billable time.
What are the Laurel Assistants?
The Laurel Assistants are automated capture technologies that capture your digital work and convert them into activities you can use to create time entries. Think of them as your personal work activity recorder that runs quietly in the background, capturing every email you send, document you edit, meeting you attend, and website you visit for work purposes - letting you keep your focus on what you do best, the work itself.
Why are the Laurel Assistants important?
Laurel Assistants eliminate the guesswork from time tracking by automatically capturing your work activities as they happen. This means you can focus on your actual work instead of constantly watching the clock or trying to remember what you did hours or days later. The system ensures accuracy in your billing while reducing the administrative burden of manual time entry, ultimately helping you capture more billable hours and improve your productivity insights.
How the Laurel Assistants work
The Laurel Desktop Assistant
The Laurel Desktop Assistant is software installed directly on your computer that captures time spent on your desktop device. Specifically, the Laurel Desktop Assistant will capture:
Email interactions: Reading, composing, and sending emails. Subject lines will be collected, too. Note: Laurel does not yet capture "new" Outlook. Please use classic Outlook for the best capture experience.
Document work: Creating, editing, and reviewing files, with document names included in the capture.
Research sessions: Website visits on your firm's approved research sites with URLs and context included in the capture.
Application usage: Time spent in programs that are configured to be tracked by your firm, with window titles and activity details.
Note that you can install the Laurel Desktop Assistants as many times as you need to across your desktop devices and virtual environments. For example, if you work from home and the office on separate computers, simply install the Laurel Desktop Assistant on both devices and log in to ensure no activity capture is lost.
The Laurel Cloud Assistants
The Laurel Cloud Assistants work through API integrations with third-party platforms to capture activities that happen outside your desktop environment.
Phone Calls
Cisco Integration: Direct integration captures call start times, duration, and participant information
Teams VoIP: Tracks calls made through Teams’s voice service, including meeting details and participants.
Meetings
Zoom Meetings: Automatically records meeting attendance, duration, and participant lists when you are both logged into your Zoom account, and are using a meeting hosted by your company.
Microsoft Teams: Captures Teams meeting participation and details when signed into your Teams account, and are using a meeting hosted by your company.
Outlook Calendar: Collects calendar events (excluding all-day or multi-day events).
Mobile Email
Emails sent from mobile devices are captured through cloud integration, though exact duration cannot be measured. These work activities are set to a default 3-minute duration as a billing reminder.
Examples and use cases
Example 1: Document review project
During a contract review, the Laurel Desktop Assistant captures time spent opening and editing Word documents, researching relevant case law on approved legal websites, and participating in Zoom calls with colleagues. All these related activities are automatically tracked and can be grouped together for comprehensive project billing.
Example 2: Client communication
While managing client relationships, the Laurel Desktop and Cloud Assistants track Outlook emails sent and received, phone calls made through Cisco, and calendar meetings attended. Mobile emails sent during travel are also captured with default durations, ensuring complete communication time is accounted for.
Example 3: Multi-platform research
Research projects involving desktop document creation, web-based database searches, and video conferences with experts are all captured across different platforms, providing a complete picture of research time investment.
Monitoring your Laurel Assistant status
Checking the Laurel Assistants' status
You can monitor the status of all your Laurel Assistants directly in the Laurel Web App. The Assistant Collection Status panel shows you which services are currently active and capturing your work activities. Simply click the Laurel logo in the top left corner of the Laurel Web App and look for the following:
Green checkmarks indicate that an Assistant is properly connected and actively collecting data.
Loading indicators show Assistants that are connecting or processing.
Warning indicators alert you to connection issues that may need attention.
This real-time status display helps you ensure all your capture methods are working properly, so you don't miss any billable activities.
Real-time capture guidance
For an at-a-glance view of your Laurel Desktop Assistant's status, you can pin the Laurel Desktop Assistant icon to your Windows system tray (the notification bar in the bottom-right corner of your screen). When pinned, the Laurel Desktop Assistant icon provides real-time visual indicators showing when activities are being captured. Pinning the icon to your system tray also helps ensure proper desktop capture.
To pin the Laurel Desktop Assistant, drag the Laurel icon in your system tray and drop it next to the other apps you have pinned to it. This gives you instant visibility into capture activity without interrupting your workflow.
Important considerations
Things to keep in mind:
The Laurel Desktop Assistant only captures activities from firm-approved applications and websites (including email). You must remain logged in to the Laurel Desktop Assistant throughout the day to get completely accurate activity tracking.
The Laurel Cloud Assistants capture activity via cloud integrations with third-party applications. Cloud integrations require you to be logged into your user accounts at your firm.
Mobile email capture uses standardized 3-minute durations since exact timing cannot be measured.
Activities are only tracked during active work periods - passive background time is not recorded.