Work Activity is a key feature of the Laurel Web App where you can view and manage all the digital activity that Laurel has collected throughout your workday. While the Laurel Desktop and Cloud Assistants quietly track your emails, documents, calls, and web browsing in the background, the Work Activity section of the Laurel Web App is where you access this information to quickly create accurate time entries and submit them to your firm's practice management system (PMS).
What is the Work Activity panel?
The Work Activity panel in the Laurel Web App is where you'll find all the digital activity that Laurel has collected as you went about your work day. This panel displays a detailed list of all your work items for a particular day, plus thoughtful AI-powered groupings of activities that are likely to belong in the same time entry. It transforms the raw activity data into an organized interface that makes time entry creation fast and accurate.
Why is the Work Activity section important?
Your work rarely happens in neat, isolated blocks. You might research a case, draft an email about your findings, review a contract, and take a phone call about strategy—all related to the same matter but scattered throughout your day. The Work Activity panel takes all these scattered items that Laurel has tracked, organizes them intelligently, and lets you pull them together seamlessly to create comprehensive billing entries for clients.
How It Works
Accessing Work Activity
You can open the Work Activity panel in two ways:
Option 1: "More Options" Menu
Click the "More Options" button (three dots arranged in a vertical line) in your Timesheet Header.
Select "Show Work Activity" from the drop-down menu. The Work Activity panel will open on the right side.
Option 2: Right-Side Toggle
Look for the small gray caret (<) on the far right of your screen.
Click this caret to open the Work Activity panel directly.
Three Views: Groups, All, and Insights
Groups View: AI-Powered Clusters
The Groups view shows related activities pulled into sensible, coherent groups by Laurel's AI. For example, if you spend the morning researching a motion, emailing about your findings, reviewing a related contract, and having a strategy call, Laurel predicts these activities are related and clusters them into one group.
Key features of Groups:
Groups speed up entry creation. By automatically grouping related work, Groups make it fast and easy to create time entries.
Groups predict matters or initiatives you're likely to bill work to. Every work group suggests which matter/initiative the group should be billed to, making it even faster and easier to create time entries. Note that predictions are dismissible; hover over any prediction and click the "Dismiss Prediction" button (it looks like a circle with a line through it) if it's inaccurate.
Groups improve as you release time. The more you use or dismiss initiative predictions and accept or edit groups, the more accurate they become as you release your time through Laurel.
All View: Complete Timeline
The All view shows every individual work activity Laurel has collected for you that day. It can be viewed in chronological or reverse chronological order.
Organizing Your Work Activity
Sorting Work Groups In the Groups tab, click "Sort by" at the top of the panel to choose from six options:
AI Ranking: Shows groups the AI is most confident about first (default)
Predicted Matter/Initiative: Prioritizes groups with matter predictions
Start Time (First to Last): Earliest activities first
Start Time (Last to First): Most recent activities first
Duration (Longest First): Longest work sessions first
Duration (Shortest First): Brief activities first
Sorting in the All Section
In the Work Activity All tab, you can sort activities in either chronological or reverse chronological order. Click the "Sort Activities" button, which contains three horizontal lines and a downward-pointing arrow, to access these options.
Start time (first to last): This option sorts activities in the All tab in chronological order, with the oldest work activities in your day at the top of the list.
Start time (last to first): This option sorts activities in the All tab in reverse chronological order, with the most recent work activities at the top of the list.
Filtering in the All Section
In the Work Activity All tab, you now have three main sections to filter the work activities you see. You can use any combination of these filters to customize your view. Click the button marked with a funnel icon to access these options.
1. Status
Assigned: Activities that have already been added to a time entry.
Unaccounted Time: Activities that have not yet been added to a time entry (very useful for reviewing work that needs to be accounted for).
2. Activity Types
All: Displays every tracked activity.
Phone Calls: All telephone communications with duration and participants.
Documents: Creating, editing, and reviewing Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets.
Emails: Composing, reading, responding, and organizing emails.
Meetings: Scheduled meetings and calendar events.
Web Research: Web-based research, case law searches, legal database queries.
Chats: Instant messages and chat conversations.
Timers: Activities tracked through manual timer usage.
Other: Miscellaneous activities that don't fit another activity type category.
Unknown: Activities where the type could not be determined.
3. Applications
Filter by the specific application used, such as Chrome, Word, Outlook, etc., to see only the activities associated with that software.
You can select one filter, multiple filters, or no filters at all. Use these filters to quickly find and organize your work activities, making it easier to manage and allocate your time accurately.
Activity Threading: See related work
Activity Threading is a time-saving feature that automatically links related work—such as work done on a single email thread or work activity in the same document—and consolidates them into a single, “stacked” view in your Work Activity panel. This makes it faster and easier to pull all related work into a single time entry.
Managing Activity Threading
Turning Activity Threading on/off: You can manage Activity Threading using the toggle in your Work Activity Preferences.
Locate preferences: Click into your Work Activity Preferences (the access button looks like three horizontal lines with dots/sliders) at the top right of the Work Activity panel.
Toggle Activity Threading On/Off: Find the Activity Threading preference toggle to turn the feature on or off.
When Activity Threading is toggled “On”: Related Outlook emails, Microsoft 365 documents, and PDFs are automatically “stacked” into a single thread in your Work Activity panel. You can find an Activity Thread by looking for activities with a number on the corner of their activity icon. You can also click on this "numbered" activity to expand the thread and see all of the work activities in it; in the expanded view, you can remove any work activity from the thread by clicking the "X" next to it.
Note: Activity Threading is only available in the All view, not in Groups.
When Activity Threading is toggled “Off”: All activities are displayed individually (unthreaded). Clicking on a single activity that is related (threaded to) others will automatically select all activities in the thread. You’ll need to uncheck activities you don’t want to pull into an entry with other related activities.
Supported work activities
Right now, Activity Threading is available for Outlook emails, Microsoft 365 documents, and PDF documents. Additional work activity types will be added to Activity Threading in the future.
Other features to know about in the All view
Using the search function
In the All section, you can search for activities by keyword using the search bar next to the activity filters.
Deleting work activity
It's not possible to block certain work activity (like private calendar events or personal emails) from appearing in your Work Activity panel.
If there is work activity that you do not want to see, you can delete it by hovering over it and clicking the red trash can icon that appears on the far right. Deleting work activity is a permanent action and cannot be undone, so please be very careful to only delete work activity that you're certain you don't want/need.
Insights view: Get a summary of your day
To the right of the All view in your Work Activity panel, the Insights view offers a quick snapshot of how you’ve spent your time each day. Click on the Insights tab to see a summary of how much time you’ve spent each day in meetings, on calls, in documents, doing research, and more.
Please note that the Insights view is view-only, and cannot be edited.
Handling Overlapping Activities
Work Activity intelligently handles multitasking.
Within Groups
Laurel automatically prevents double-counting. If you spend 15 minutes reviewing a document while on a call that lasts 30 minutes, the total group time shows as 30 minutes, not 45.
In the All Section
When creating entries from overlapping activities, Laurel reconciles the overlapping time periods automatically. The same 30-minute call plus 15-minute concurrent document review totals 30 minutes in your time entry.
Work Activity Preferences
You can customize your Work Activity settings by clicking the "Filters" button (three horizontal lines with dots) at the top of the Work Activity panel.
From here, you can choose three key preferences:
Duration Minimum preference
Under Duration Minimum, you can set the minimum activity length to display. Laurel recommends 10 seconds or more ("10s+") to capture the most activity possible.
Open Time preference
Open Time represents time spent on non-digital work or in untracked applications. Laurel recommends setting this preference to one minute or more ("1m+") to see as much open time as possible, helping you account for offline meetings, phone calls, and other non-digital work.
Please note that, unlike other work activity, Open Time cannot be deleted.
Activity Threading preference
Toggle Activity Threading on or off to show activities threaded or un-threaded in the All view. Please see the details above about what toggling Activity Threading on or off means for how your work activity appears.
Important Considerations
Things to keep in mind:
Work Activity surfaces time tracked by the Laurel Desktop Assistant and Laurel Cloud Assistants throughout your day.
Always remove filters when finished using them to avoid masking activities you might need later.
The Unaccounted Time filter is commonly used; it allows you to filter for Work Activity that has not been allocated to a time entry yet.
Your interaction with predictions and groups helps train Laurel's AI model for better future accuracy.