You can customize how Laurel generates narratives for time entries by managing narrative guidelines or writing narrative templates for your timekeepers in Laurel Admin. This ensures that generated narratives match your firm's specific billing standards and preferences. Configuring your Narratives takes about 5-10 minutes, and changes apply immediately to all new narrative generation.
What you'll need:
Super Customer Admin or Customer Admin access to Laurel.
Knowledge of your firm's narrative standards and requirements (punctuation rules, formatting preferences, phrasing standards).
Existing narrative templates used by your firm.
Step-by-step instructions:
Step 1: Navigate to the Narratives page in Laurel Admin
Log into Laurel, click on Customer Settings, and select Narratives. This will open the Narratives interface where you can view and manage guidelines.
Step 2: Review your inferred narrative guidelines
On the Narratives page, you'll see a section called "Inferred Narrative Guidelines" that displays rules Laurel has automatically learned from your timekeepers' past behavior. These guidelines show you the patterns Laurel’s AI model has identified in your historical data. Review these to understand what standards Laurel has already picked up.
Note: These guidelines are read-only and cannot be edited.
Step 3: Add custom narrative guidelines
In the "Customer narrative guidelines" section, you can manually add specific requirements for narrative generation. Click in the text field and type your guideline, such as "Always use semicolons to separate clauses" or "Always end narratives with periods" or "Use client matter codes at the beginning of each narrative." You can add multiple guidelines by repeating this process on a new line in the text field.
You should write your guidelines as if you were writing them for a person to follow. If you’re clear and explicit with the instructions you write into the tool – the same way you would be with a human – they should be easily understood and applied.
Click Save after entering your guideline(s).
Step 4: Select your guideline application mode
Choose how you want Laurel to apply narrative guidelines using the menu in the “Narrative guideline mode” section. Your options are:
Customer only: Laurel will use only your custom guidelines and ignore inferred rules.
Inferred only: Laurel will use only inferred rules and ignore your custom guidelines (this is the default setting).
Customer then inferred (fallback): Laurel will use your custom guidelines first, then fall back to inferred rules when custom guidelines don't apply.
Disabled: Laurel will not apply any narrative guidelines.
Step 5: Add narrative templates
If you prefer to have your timekeepers use administrator-created narratives instead of Laurel generating them, you can scroll down to the Narrative Shortcuts section to add new firm-wide narratives.
Click on “Add new”, then enter a name for your narrative and its text. You can also add a narrative shortcut so that your timekeepers can call the narrative template you’ve added with a keyboard shortcut.
Step 6: Save your selections
After selecting your preferred application mode and saving your selections, your changes will take effect immediately for all new narrative generation. You can return to this page at any time to add, edit, or delete guidelines, or change your application mode.
If you're having trouble
I don't see the Narratives option in Customer Settings: Only Super Admins and Customer Admins have access to Narrative Guidelines. Check with your account administrator to confirm you have the correct permissions.
My changes aren't affecting narratives: Narrative guideline changes only apply to new narrative generation going forward. Existing narratives in your system will not be updated retroactively.
I want different guidelines for different practice groups: Narrative Guidelines are set at the firm level and apply to all narrative generation. Practice group-specific guidelines are not yet available.