Overview
External meetings with clients are one of the most common BD activities at a law firm. Nexl lets you convert any meeting, past or upcoming, into a key activity so it surfaces across the platform: on contact and company records, the key activity dashboard, workspaces, and BD reports.
This article covers how to log a meeting as a key activity, and the options you have for editing attendees after the fact.
This update will be available in late June 2026 as part of our general feature release. Learn more →
Why log meetings as key activities
When you mark a meeting as a key activity, it does two things. It creates a key activity record that appears across Nexl, and for past meetings, it also creates an interaction record that drives stats like Count of Interactions, Last BD Activity, and Who Knows data on contacts and companies.
Because of that, the meeting date stays locked once a key activity is created. Editing the date on a past meeting would mean recalculating relationship stats across the platform, which isn't supported. However, you can edit the contacts and staff on the key activity after creation, which covers most of the real-world scenarios where the inherited attendee list doesn't reflect what actually happened.
How to mark a meeting as a key activity
There are three places you can convert a meeting to a key activity in Nexl:
From the meeting list — find the meeting in your meetings list and select Mark as Key Activity from the actions menu.
From the slide panel — open a meeting's slide panel and use the Mark as Key Activity option there.
From the meeting edit window — open the edit view for any meeting and use the Mark as Key Activity action directly from that screen. This is useful if you're already reviewing or updating a meeting and want to log the key activity without navigating away.
In all three cases, the key activity form pre-fills with the meeting's date, duration, attendees, and subject. Once saved, the key activity is linked back to the meeting and will appear across the platform.
Logging a key activity from the Outlook Add-in
If you're working from the Outlook Add-in, you can log a key activity directly from a calendar event. The key activity date will pre-fill with the meeting's actual date, so if you're logging a past meeting, you won't need to manually correct the date.
Editing contacts and staff after conversion
Attendees are inherited from the calendar event when a meeting is converted to a key activity. You can now add or remove contacts and staff after conversion to reflect who actually participated, rather than who was on the original invite.
Common reasons to edit the attendee list:
A contact attended but wasn't on the calendar invite
Someone on the invite didn't show up and shouldn't be on the BD record
A staff member played a role in the activity and should be included, even if they weren't in the meeting
To edit, open the key activity record and update the contacts or staff fields as needed.
What happens to Outlook sync after a manual edit: When you manually update contacts or staff on a meeting-derived key activity, Nexl flags the record so that Outlook sync will no longer overwrite those fields on future syncs. The meeting's date and time will continue to stay in sync with Outlook. A note on the record will indicate that the attendee list has been manually edited and may differ from the original calendar event.
What key activities drive in Nexl
Once a meeting is logged as a key activity, it contributes to:
Contact and company activity feeds
Count of Interactions and Last BD Activity stats
Who Knows relationship data
Key Activity dashboard reporting
Workspace BD tracking
For upcoming meetings, the key activity appears as a future record. Once the meeting date passes, it becomes an interaction and the two entries consolidate into one on the activity feed. Learn more about key activities in Nexl →