Looplex Dataverse
Data is essential for the activities of a legal department or law firm and determines the decisions it will make in the future. To thrive and grow, lawyers need to collect, analyze, forecast, present, and process data with a high level of agility.
However, creating your own infrastructure to manage and use data is time-consuming, expensive, and frankly a distraction from your priorities, which should be delivering and coordinating quality legal services.
Data from contracts, cases, policies, and other documents are often stored in an unstructured manner across various devices, applications, systems, services, and cloud software, with different APIs, non-standard metadata, and a mix of security models that make management and LGPD compliance challenging.
Looplex Dataverse addresses these concerns by offering a data service specifically designed for legal activities on our platform; it’s easy to use and manage, compliant, secure, scalable, and globally available.
Work with any type of data
Looplex Dataverse is where we securely store and manage the data used by any Legal App running on the Looplex platform, whether it’s a Document Template, a BI Template, a Case, or a Legal Analysis Service.
The Dataverse was designed to work with any type of data and incorporates all major categories of data technologies required by your organization: legal logic templates, BI dashboards, smart documents and traditional files (docx, xlsx, pptx, pdf, jpeg, etc.), images, research, and more.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about standardized or customized, relational or non-relational data. The Dataverse includes a set of visual interfaces to create, edit, and interact with data produced in the context of Looplex usage, making it easier to quickly define tables, relationships, business rules, forms, and workflows that represent your business.
As a result, a wide variety of corporate integration scenarios can be easily achieved, from retrieving data sent in a spreadsheet attached to an email to generating a new document from a Looplex legal logic template and even emerging scenarios such as using data in a blockchain smart contract.
For organizations looking to integrate Looplex Dataverse data with other applications or create legal logic templates using custom code, the Dataverse provides a powerful API in the Looplex Graph, a developer SDK, and a growing list of examples for common use cases.
Why use Looplex Dataverse?
Both custom and standard tables within the Dataverse provide a secure cloud-based storage option for your data. Tables enable you to create a business-focused definition of your organization’s data for use in legal logic templates.
- Easy to manage – Both metadata and data are stored in the cloud. You don’t need to worry about how they are stored.
- Easy to keep secure – Data is securely stored so users can only view it if you grant them access. Role-based security allows you to control access to tables for different users within the organization.
- Advanced metadata – Data types and relationships are used directly in Legal Apps.
- Logic and validation – Define calculated columns, business rules, workflows, and business process flows to ensure data quality and drive business processes in legal services.
Common Data Service
Within Looplex Code, the Common Data Service stores standardized information for Document Templates, BI Templates, Cases, and Workflows, as well as their implementation models or schemas1.
One of its functions is to store and manage data that can be consumed by automated document generation services (Looplex Builder), case management services (Looplex Cases), data visualization tools such as Power BI, and more.
The Common Data Service is the data framework engine of Looplex Dataverse, with two instances:
- Looplex Flows2, which contains relational data where transactions occur, and where business rules, workflows, and logic can be applied to support user activities.
- Storage instance, where data and objects are stored for (a) knowledge management (Legal Data Models, Document Templates files, BI Templates, etc.) and (b) storing responses and inputs of variables for instantiated content (contracts, petitions, cases, dashboards, etc., from real legal transactions).
Similar to SQL Server where tables separate columns and data, data within the CDS is stored in legal logic entities, with a set of properties and attributes that assist in storing and modeling information. Looplex provides a series of entities by default within the CDS (following our Common Data Model), with the option for clients to expand and extend or create new entities.
All data and communication with the CDS occur through an API of the Looplex Graph, which allows you to implement code and control task automation.
Legal logic entities
Looplex has created, within our Common Data Model, legal logic model entities that support the storage of structured data for clauses, theses and claims, preliminary matters, conceptual structures of contracts, and other legal services, enabling the instantiation of contracts, petitions, reports, dashboards for analysis and insights, and much more.
Information about each entity is stored in the CDS metadata and can be accessed via API. All security, access control, auditing, and logging features are linked to entities by default.
Business Rules
Data validation rules can be applied to entities, providing warnings and alerts for correction. Combined with Flow, they create automation rules for processes, which are recorded in Legal Playbooks.
Integrating data in the Dataverse
Automating a document or other complex legal content often involves accessing data from multiple sources. Although this is often done at the application level (e.g., through dynamic interviews or external collaboration forms), integrating and ingesting inputs from data already uploaded to other tables or files is crucial in many cases.
To support this, Looplex offers a set of common logic and structures to import and operate data from external sources through:
- Data Connectors, integrating with other applications natively or through integration services like Zapier and Azure Data Factory.
- Data extraction from external legal documents (semi-structured or even unstructured) via Intelligent Data Extraction.
- SQL queries, enabling data ingestion and export from other systems through API Queries in the Looplex Graph.
Interacting with tables
When developing a Template, you can use standard, custom, or personalized tables, declare variables and operations in code within the Template, or any combination of these options.
Looplex Dataverse prefers using standard tables, aligned with our Legal Common Data Model. These are created based on best practices to capture the most common concepts and use cases in the legal services market.
You can extend the functionality of standard tables by creating one or more custom tables to store your organization’s unique information. This partially breaks compatibility of Legal Data Objects between different legal logic applications.
Finally, you can create fully personalized tables that need transformation and adjustments before use. However, these completely break compatibility between legal logic applications, requiring manual data sharing between Templates, a more expensive and time-consuming process.
Looplex Copilot
Tables within Looplex Dataverse can leverage advanced logic and validation rules to ensure data quality and reduce repetitive code in each Template that creates and uses data.
- Business rules validate data across multiple columns and tables, providing warnings and error messages for legal logic, regardless of the application used to create the data.
- Business process flows guide users to ensure they input data consistently and follow the same steps every time3.
- Automated workflows allow you to fully automate various LegalOps processes and tasks without user interaction (e.g., filing, signature collection, contract compliance auditing, procedural monitoring of legal disputes, etc.).
- Business logic with code supports advanced legal engineering scenarios, extending the application directly through code.
Security
Dataverse uses Azure Active Directory access and identity management mechanisms to ensure only authorized users can access the environment, data, and documents, with data encryption at rest and in transit to maintain confidentiality.
Looplex Dataverse employs role-based security to group collections of access privileges. These security roles can be directly associated with users or linked to teams and business units within the platform.
Security policies in Looplex define permissions and authorizations for Documents, Cases, Processes, and Tasks. Within a case or document model, a security policy model can be selected to define the permissions used for that specific case or document model.
Security policy models can also be selected for specific user task permissions through automated process models (Flows).
Footnotes
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These include Legal Data Models and Legal Service Models. ↩
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Implemented by RPA services such as JS Box, Azure Functions, Vercel Functions, and the Flowable platform, which has an internal proprietary execution instance in Looplex. ↩
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Currently, business process flows only support model-driven applications (free-text fields, for example, are not validated). ↩