Signal is your personal work intelligence tool that transforms captured work activity into meaningful insights about how you're spending your time, tracking toward goals, and distributing effort across different types of work. Understanding Signal helps you create more accurate time entries, stay on top of your billable hour targets, and make better decisions about how to focus your energy throughout the day.
What is Signal?
Signal analyzes the work activity that Laurel captures to give you clear visibility into your own work patterns. It takes the raw activity data from your day—emails, documents, calls, meetings—and transforms it into insights about your productivity, goal progress, and time allocation.
Think of Signal like a fitness tracker for your professional work. Just as a fitness tracker shows you steps taken and progress toward exercise goals, Signal shows you how your workday breaks down and how you're tracking against billable hour targets. Signal doesn't require any changes to how you use Laurel. It simply takes the activity already being captured and presents it in ways that help you understand your work patterns.
Why Signal is important
Signal matters because it eliminates guesswork from your workday and helps you work more strategically.
Provides automatic goal tracking. Signal continuously tracks your progress toward daily and weekly billable hour goals without requiring manual calculation. You always know where you stand relative to your targets.
Reveals your actual work distribution. By showing how much time goes to client work versus administrative tasks, emails, or internal projects, Signal helps you understand the hidden "tax" of non-billable work and make better decisions about where to focus your energy.
Builds confidence in your billing. When you can see objective data about the time you actually spent on activities, you're more confident that your time entries accurately reflect your effort.
How Signal works
Signal creates insights by combining several data sources and presenting them in an easy-to-understand format.
Data collection and analysis
Signal pulls together information from three main sources:
Captured work activity. Laurel's assistant tracks your work throughout the day—documents, emails, calls, meetings, and other activities. This continuous capture provides the raw data about what you actually did and when.
Time entry data. Signal compares your captured activities with the time entries you create and submit. This comparison reveals gaps between what you worked on and what you recorded, helping you identify missed billable opportunities.
Firm goals and configuration. Signal incorporates your assigned billable hour targets and firm structure so it can show progress against expectations and create meaningful peer comparisons.
Signal analyzes this combined data to identify patterns, calculate metrics, and surface insights that would be difficult or impossible to see otherwise.
Privacy and data handling
Signal focuses on patterns and metadata, not content. It doesn't capture keystrokes, read your messages, or take screenshots. Instead, it knows things like who performed an activity, what application was used, what type of work occurred, and which client or matter it relates to.
The insights you see in Signal are based on your own work activity. While firm leaders have access to aggregate organizational insights, your individual activity patterns aren't being monitored for surveillance purposes.
Your Signal dashboard
When you access Signal, you'll see insights organized into several key views:
Daily and weekly goal tracking
Signal displays your billable hour targets and current progress in two complementary visualizations:
Day-by-day progress. A calendar-style view shows whether you hit, exceeded, or fell short of your daily goal each day. This works like activity rings on a fitness tracker—you can see at a glance which days were successful and which fell behind.
Cumulative progress. A trend line shows your overall progress over time, helping you see whether you're ahead or behind pace for the week or month. This view helps you understand if a slow day is part of a larger pattern or just a temporary dip.
You can adjust your goal levels within Signal if your targets change throughout the year.
Peer benchmarking
Signal creates anonymous comparison groups based on your role, practice area, and level. You'll see how your billable hours compare to others in similar positions through visualizations that show:
Whether you're performing above or below the typical range for your role
How your performance trends over time relative to peers
Monthly breakdowns of your performance against the peer group
This benchmarking helps you understand where you stand and identify opportunities to improve productivity, without revealing individual identities within the comparison group.
Work distribution breakdown
Signal categorizes your time across different types of work, showing you how effort is distributed among:
Client deliverables: Billable work directly related to client matters
Internal projects: Firm initiatives and administrative work
Business development: Activities related to attracting and developing clients
Administrative tasks: Scheduling, expense management, and other overhead
Training and development: Learning activities and skill development
Meetings and collaboration: Time spent in discussions and planning
This breakdown reveals the "tax" of non-billable work and helps you see where your effort goes beyond client-facing activities. Understanding this distribution helps you identify areas where you might want to spend more or less time.
Activity patterns
Signal shows the types of activities you engage in most frequently—document work, emails, meetings, calls, and other tasks. These patterns help you understand what a typical day or week looks like and how your work patterns vary across different time periods.
Types of insights Signal provides
Signal surfaces several categories of insights designed to help you work more effectively:
Productivity insights
Captured vs submitted time. Signal shows the difference between work Laurel captured and time entries you submitted. This gap often reveals work you completed but forgot to bill, helping you identify missed billable opportunities and ensure you're fully crediting yourself for effort expended.
Time allocation patterns. Signal reveals where your hours actually go each day, helping you see if reality matches your perception. You might discover you spend more time on email than you realized, or that administrative tasks consume more hours than expected.
Performance insights
Goal achievement trends. Beyond showing whether you hit your daily target, Signal reveals longer-term patterns. Are you consistently falling short on Fridays? Do you typically catch up after a slow start to the week? These patterns help you adjust your work habits.
Peer performance context. Benchmarking shows whether your billable hour levels are typical for your role or whether there's room for improvement. This context helps you understand if your workload is reasonable or if you need to have conversations about capacity.
Work pattern insights
Activity composition. Understanding which applications and activities consume most of your time helps you identify efficiency opportunities. If you're spending hours in email when you should be focused on deliverables, that pattern becomes visible.
Work distribution. Seeing the balance between billable and non-billable work helps you understand your actual utilization and identify where non-client work might be consuming too much capacity.
Examples and use cases
Here are realistic scenarios that demonstrate how Signal helps timekeepers.
Example 1: Recovering missed billable time
Sarah, a senior associate, consistently submits around 7 billable hours per day but feels like she's working much longer. When she checks Signal, she discovers Laurel captured 9-10 hours of client-related activity most days. By reviewing her activity patterns in Signal before creating time entries, she identifies work she completed but forgot to record—quick client emails, brief document reviews, and short research tasks that add up to significant billable time. Over the next month, her submitted hours increase by 15% simply by ensuring she captures all the work she actually performs.
Example 2: Understanding goal progress
Marcus, a staff accountant, has a goal of 1,800 billable hours per year. Rather than manually calculating his progress, he checks Signal's goal dashboard each Friday. The cumulative view shows he's 40 hours ahead of pace for the year, which gives him confidence to take time off for a family event without worrying about falling behind. When he returns, he can see exactly how many hours he needs to average daily to stay on track.
Example 3: Identifying productivity drains
Jennifer notices in Signal that she spends 8-10 hours per week on administrative tasks—significantly more than her peers at the same level. She uses this data to have a conversation with her supervisor about delegating some administrative work or getting support from staff. After adjustments, Signal shows her admin time drops to 4-5 hours per week, freeing up capacity for billable work.
Important considerations
Keep these key points in mind when using Signal:
Things to remember
Signal complements but doesn't replace timekeeping. You still need to create and submit time entries via your Laurel timesheet. Signal helps you create more accurate entries, but it doesn't automatically generate or submit time for you.
Insights improve over time. As you use Laurel and build up more work history, Signal's insights become richer and more meaningful. The system needs sufficient data to establish patterns and create useful comparisons.
Data reflects actual activity, not billing judgments. Signal shows you what work occurred, but you still make decisions about what to bill and how to describe it. Not all captured activity should become a time entry—Signal simply ensures you're not missing opportunities.
Benchmarking provides context, not judgment. Peer comparisons help you understand typical performance ranges, but they don't account for all the factors that affect your workload, like client mix, case complexity, or firm assignments.
What Signal doesn't do
Signal doesn't capture the content of your work—no keystroke recording, screen captures, or message reading.
Signal doesn't automatically create or submit time entries on your behalf.
Signal doesn't track your physical location or activities outside your computer.
Signal doesn't send alerts or notifications about your performance.
Who can access Signal
If your firm has purchased Signal, any timekeeper with a Laurel account can access their personal Signal insights. You don't need special permissions beyond your normal Laurel access. Your individual insights are private to you, though firm leadership can see aggregate organizational insights.