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 Laurel's desktop and cloud assistants quietly track your emails, documents, calls, and web browsing in the background, the Work Activity section of the 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 section?
The Work Activity section 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 section displays a detailed, chronological list of all your work items for a particular day, plus thoughtful AI-powered groupings of related activities. 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 section 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" (three vertical dots) in your timesheet header.
Select "Show Work Activity" from the dropdown. 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.
Two Core Views: Groups and All
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 suggest which matter/initiative each 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 collected that day in chronological order, exactly as it happened.
Organizing Your Work Activity
Sorting Work Groups 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
Filtering in the All Section You can filter by eight different activity types:
Unaccounted Time: Activities not yet added to time entries (most useful filter)
Meetings: Scheduled meetings and calendar events
Phone Calls: All telephone communications with duration and participants
Emails: Composing, reading, responding, and organizing emails
Documents: Creating, editing, and reviewing Word docs, PDFs, spreadsheets
Research: Web-based research, case law searches, legal database queries
Timers: Activities tracked through manual timer usage
Other: Miscellaneous activities that don't fit standard categories
Using the Search Function In the All section, you can search for activities by keyword using the search bar next to the activity filters.
Handling Overlapping Activities
Work Activity intelligently handles multitasking.
Within Groups
Laurel automatically prevents double-counting. If you're on a 30-minute call while reviewing a 15-minute document about the same matter, 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 Filter button (three horizontal lines with dots) at the top of the Work Activity panel. From here, you can choose two key preferences:
Duration Minimum preference
Sets 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.
Important Considerations
Things to keep in mind:
Work Activity surfaces time tracked by Laurel 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 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.