Signal is a work intelligence platform that analyzes captured work activity to provide firm leaders with objective insights into profitability, delivery efficiency, capacity, and how work actually gets done across your organization. Understanding Signal helps you make better decisions about pricing, staffing, resource allocation, and identifying operational risks before they impact your bottom line.

Signal transforms the work activity data that Laurel captures into aggregate insights about your firm's operations, performance, and profitability. Unlike traditional reporting tools that rely on manually entered time data, Signal analyzes actual work patterns to reveal how engagements are being delivered, where costs are accumulating, and where risks or opportunities exist.

Signal is not just another dashboard or business intelligence tool. Traditional BI tools visualize existing data through predefined reports. Signal is designed to answer specific operational and strategic questions using a unique dataset that doesn't exist in your billing system—objective, real-time information about how work actually happens, not just what gets recorded after the fact.

Think of Signal as creating a new data foundation for your firm—one that captures the atomic unit of work and enables you to understand costs, measure efficiency, and make data-driven decisions in ways that weren't previously possible.

Signal addresses critical gaps in how professional services firms understand and manage their operations.

Provides objective visibility into work patterns. Traditional systems rely on reconstructed time entries that are delayed, incomplete, and subject to bias. Signal shows you what's actually happening in real time based on captured work activity, not what people remember or choose to report.

Enables proactive decision-making. Instead of discovering profitability problems after an engagement closes or learning about capacity issues after burnout occurs, Signal surfaces early warning signs so you can intervene while there's still time to course-correct.

Closes the measurement gap. Most firms make critical decisions about pricing, staffing, and investments using incomplete data. They know what was billed but not what was actually delivered. Signal reveals the full picture of effort, cost, and delivery patterns.

Creates a foundation for AI-era operations. As firms move toward value-based pricing, fixed-fee engagements, and AI-powered delivery, understanding the true cost of work becomes essential. Signal captures the atomic unit of time and work patterns needed to navigate this transition successfully.

Signal creates insights by collecting, labeling, and analyzing work data across multiple dimensions.

Signal combines multiple data sources to create comprehensive insights:

Captured work activity. Laurel's assistant tracks digital work activity continuously, capturing metadata about who performed work, when it occurred, what applications were used, and what type of activity took place. This creates the foundation of objective activity data.

Time entry data. Signal incorporates the time entries users create and submit through Laurel's timekeeping system. This allows Signal to compare captured activity with recorded time, revealing gaps and patterns in how work gets documented.

Billing system information. Signal pulls in data from your practice management system to enrich activity data with client, matter, billing rate, project budget, and other contextual information.

Firm configuration. Signal uses your organizational structure, role definitions, department hierarchies, and staffing information to enable filtering and comparison across different segments of your firm.

Signal analyzes patterns and metadata, not content. It doesn't capture keystrokes, read message text, or take screenshots. The system focuses on understanding work patterns at an aggregate level while respecting individual privacy.

Signal is designed to surface organizational and engagement-level insights, not to surveil individuals. Firms control who has access to Signal, what views are available, and how insights are applied within the organization.

Signal provides insights at multiple levels of your firm, each designed for different decision-making needs.

The organization view provides firm-wide visibility across all practices, offices, and roles. This is typically used by senior leadership, operations teams, and finance leaders who need to understand overall firm performance and identify systemic patterns.

Summary dashboard. The organization summary provides key metrics at a glance: total billable hours, captured hours, submitted hours, and the gap between them. It also shows activity composition across work types (client deliverables, business development, administrative work, training, internal projects) and reveals the true distribution of effort across your firm.

Billables: Allows firm leadership to visualize the firm’s utilization rate and trend of utilization by week, month, 6 months, and annually. Find patterns that you can cure or that can inform your forecasting

True Time analysis. One of Signal's most powerful features is comparing captured activity to submitted time. This reveals revenue leakage, under-recording patterns, and helps you understand the accuracy of your time data. The wider the gap between captured and submitted hours, the more opportunity exists to improve billing realization.

Projects view. Signal provides visibility into how specific engagements, matters, or projects are progressing. You can see staffing patterns, effort distribution, and early warning signals about scope creep or margin risk before they become write-downs.

People view. Understand how time is allocated across roles, seniority levels, and departments. This view helps with capacity planning, identifying workload imbalances, and ensuring appropriate leverage across engagements.

Tools view. See which applications and technologies your firm is using, how much time is spent in each tool, and which departments or roles rely on specific technologies. This becomes especially valuable for understanding AI adoption and measuring return on tool investments.

Activation insights. Track Laurel adoption and usage across your firm. Signal shows which teams or offices have strong adoption (ensuring data quality) and where additional support or encouragement might be needed to achieve wall-to-wall usage.

Velocity metrics. Understand how quickly work flows from activity to time entry to billing system. Signal identifies bottlenecks in your time entry process and helps you improve the speed at which work becomes billable revenue.

The team view enables partners, practice leaders, and people managers to see insights specific to their teams or the projects they manage. This middle layer provides visibility into the groups and engagements they're responsible for without exposing firm-wide data they don't need.

Team-level access will be carefully controlled through a permission system that ensures managers only see data relevant to their scope of responsibility.

Signal also provides personal insights to individual timekeepers, helping them understand their own work patterns, track progress toward goals, and create more accurate time entries. These individual insights encourage adoption and help timekeepers see Signal as a tool that benefits them directly, not just firm leadership.

When timekeepers see value in their personal insights, they're more motivated to maintain good Laurel usage habits, which in turn improves the quality of aggregate data that powers organizational insights.

Signal surfaces several categories of insights designed to help firm leaders make better operational decisions.

Revenue leakage identification. By comparing captured activity to submitted time, Signal reveals how much potential billable work isn't making it into your billing system. This helps you understand realization gaps and identify opportunities to improve revenue capture.

Margin risk detection. Signal can identify when engagements are consuming more senior time than budgeted, when utilization patterns suggest profitability problems, or when effort is exceeding expectations in ways that threaten margins.

Cost of delivery analysis. Signal helps you understand the true cost of delivering work by showing actual time investment (not just billed time) across roles, matters, and work types. This is especially valuable for fixed-fee engagements where understanding cost is critical to protecting profitability.

Leverage patterns. See how work is distributed across seniority levels and whether you're using the right mix of roles on engagements. Signal reveals when partners are doing associate-level work or when engagements lack appropriate senior oversight.

Scope and delivery monitoring. Track how engagements are progressing relative to budgets and scope definitions. Signal can surface early warning signs of scope creep, helping you address issues before they result in write-downs or client disputes.

Capacity and workload visibility. Understand where your firm has capacity constraints, which teams or individuals are overloaded, and where burnout risk exists. Signal reveals workload imbalances that might not be visible through traditional utilization reports.

Process efficiency. Signal shows how long it takes for work to move through your system—from activity to time entry to billing. Identifying bottlenecks in this flow helps you improve operational efficiency and accelerate cash flow.

Work pattern analysis. Understand the non-billable "tax" that affects productivity—how much time goes to administrative work, internal meetings, business development, and other activities that compete with client deliverables.

AI and tool ROI (coming soon). Signal lays the foundation for understanding return on investment from new technologies. By tracking tool usage patterns and correlating them with productivity changes, Signal helps you measure whether AI tools and other investments are delivering value.

Benchmarking capabilities. Signal enables comparison of similar engagements, matters, or projects to understand typical delivery patterns, identify outliers, and improve future scoping and pricing decisions.

Practice intelligence. Analyze work patterns across practice areas, offices, or client types to identify best practices, understand what drives efficiency, and spot opportunities for improvement or innovation.

Here are realistic scenarios that demonstrate how Signal helps firm leaders:

A mid-sized accounting firm uses Signal to monitor a large audit engagement. Three weeks into the project, Signal's project view reveals that senior manager time is running 30% higher than budgeted while staff accountant time is 20% lower than planned. This inverted leverage pattern is eroding margins. The practice leader uses this early warning to rebalance the team, bringing in additional staff support and reducing senior manager involvement in routine procedures. The adjustment protects profitability on the engagement and prevents what would have been a significant write-down at completion.

A law firm's operations team notices in Signal's True Time analysis that captured hours consistently exceed submitted hours by 15-20% across the firm. By drilling into the data, they identify that attorneys are working on emails, quick document reviews, and brief research tasks but not recording this work because it feels too small to track. The firm implements a practice of reviewing Signal data before creating weekly time entries, encouraging attorneys to account for all captured activity. Over the next quarter, submitted hours increase by 12% with no change in actual workload—pure revenue recovery from work that was always being performed but never recorded.

A firm invests in AI-powered legal research and document drafting tools. Using Signal's tools view, leadership tracks adoption patterns and correlates tool usage with productivity changes. Signal reveals that associates using the AI tools spend 25% less time on research activities while maintaining similar output quality. This data helps the firm calculate concrete ROI on the technology investment and supports decisions about expanding AI adoption to other practice areas.

Signal's people view shows that three senior associates in the litigation practice are consistently working 30% more hours than their peers at the same level, with very little time going to professional development or non-billable activities. The practice leader uses this data to have proactive conversations about workload, redistribute some matters, and ensure these high performers aren't on a path to burnout and attrition.

Keep these key points in mind when implementing and using Signal:

Access to Signal is role-based and controlled by your firm. Typically, senior leadership, operations teams, and finance leaders have access to organization-level views. Your firm controls who can access Signal and determines how insights are applied within your organization.

Individual timekeepers have access to their own personal Signal insights, which helps drive adoption and ensures users see direct value from the system.

Signal is being developed in phases, with new capabilities rolling out throughout 2026 and beyond.

At launch, Signal provides organization-level and individual timekeeper views with insights focused on time allocation, goals, leverage, and activity patterns. The initial release is most suitable for accounting firms, with legal firm capabilities coming next.

Team-level views. The middle layer of insights for partners and people managers will enable visibility into specific teams and projects without exposing firm-wide data.

Project scope and budget integration. Enhanced capabilities for monitoring engagements against budgets, detecting out-of-scope work, and providing early warnings about profitability risk.

Legal-specific insights. Purpose-built visualizations and metrics designed around the specific needs of law firms, including matter profitability, leverage patterns, and practice-specific benchmarks.