Looplex LKM - Legal Knowledge Management
Understand Looplex’s strategy for knowledge management, including our process of creating, storing, using, and sharing knowledge.
What is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge Management (KM) is the process of identifying, organizing, storing, and disseminating information within an organization. When knowledge is not easily accessible, it can be incredibly costly for a company or law firm, as valuable time is wasted searching for relevant information or reinventing the wheel instead of focusing on tasks that deliver results.
Our Legal Knowledge Management (LKM) system leverages Looplex’s internal collective knowledge and reorganizes the legal and operational knowledge of our clients, which was previously analog, stored in unstructured text, and based on non-automated, often undocumented work practices.
Looplex LKM is supported by a knowledge base, providing a centralized location for storing and quickly accessing information.
Types of Knowledge
In the legal market, we encounter three levels of knowledge: explicit knowledge (“know what”), implicit knowledge (“know how”), and tacit knowledge (“know why”). These types of knowledge are differentiated by the way information is encoded.
Explicit Knowledge – Explicit knowledge is captured in various types of documents, such as manuals, guides, databases, templates, white papers, and case studies. This “know what” is essential for retaining intellectual capital and facilitating knowledge transfer to new team members, but it is insufficient on its own for an organization’s operational needs.
Implicit Knowledge – Implicit knowledge refers to information that can be formalized and documented (explicitly), but hasn’t been yet. This knowledge typically exists in the daily practice of business processes (LegalOps) and within legal documents (e.g., the best defense strategy for a claim, why to use certain clauses, the offer to make in a case, or the legislation and case law that inform the applicability of a provision). Implicit knowledge is often referred to as “know-how.”
Tacit Knowledge – This is the highest level of knowledge, the “know-why,” and is typically acquired through experience and understood “intuitively.” At this level, a legal professional deeply understands causal relationships, interactive effects, and the levels of uncertainty associated with real-world cases. This often involves an understanding of underlying theory and/or a range of experiences that includes many anomalies, interactive effects, exceptions to norms, and expertise in their field.
Challenges of Legal Knowledge Management
The fundamental challenges of legal architecture and engineering processes can be divided into stages, which our Looplex team has progressively mastered and disseminated to our community of partners and content creators:
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Transforming explicit legal knowledge into code so it can also be understood and executed by a computer. We start by absorbing what the client has already organized and documented, such as templates, manuals, and tagged documents.
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Making implicit legal knowledge explicit, enabling organizations using Looplex to improve their own knowledge management by formalizing attorneys’ know-how into a system of representation and access.
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Mapping behaviors and strategies with specialists in a field so tacit knowledge becomes a set of heuristics executable in Legal Logic Templates. The better this highest level is mapped, the more decoupled the specialist who created the models and workflows is from the user consuming them on the platform.
Knowledge Management Process
An effective knowledge management system typically goes through three main stages:
Knowledge Base Architecture
Looplex’s data structure defines the format for organizing, managing, and storing legal content data for access, handling, and execution through computational law systems.
It is a collection of data values, the relationships between them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data. Essentially, it is an algebraic structure applied to legal data.
The Looplex data structure is the Looplex Dataverse, which models and stores digital legal content from three different perspectives:
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Conceptual Model: Describes the semantics of the legal domain and defines the scope of the model for creating digital legal services. We specify the types of content, documents, facts, or propositions that can be expressed using our model and define the expressions allowed in an artificial “language,” limited by the scope of the model.
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Logical Data Model: Describes the semantics represented by specific data manipulation technologies. This includes descriptions of tables and columns, object-oriented classes, XML and JSON tags, and more.
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Physical Data Model: Describes the physical means by which data is stored. This involves partitions, CPUs, databases, tablespaces, and similar elements.
Within the general principle of modularization adopted by Looplex, these three perspectives are relatively independent of each other. For example, the storage technology can change without affecting the logical or conceptual model. Similarly, the table/column structure of a model can change without (necessarily) impacting the conceptual model.
The initial phases of digital content conversion projects should emphasize design starting from the conceptual data model, then detail the content scope using the logical data model, and finally translate and implement the result in the physical data model.