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Approval Workflow

Approval Phase - Introduction

Often, you need to obtain written acknowledgment or formal authorization from other members of your organization to advance a particular document or activity in its lifecycle.

With the use of the approval phase in cases, it is possible to automate approval requests and combine human decision-making with workflows. Some popular use cases for approvals include:

  • Approving the hiring of a new supplier.
  • Approving vacation requests.
  • Approving expense reports.
  • Approving documents that require approval.

When submitting an approval in a workflow, approvers are notified and can review and act on the request.

Approval Actions

Actions are the events you want the workflow to execute after a trigger starts a flow. You can build an approval workflow using actions already mapped in our Legal Service Models. We provide four basic templates:

Approval Configuration

Different grouped approval steps. Depending on what your organization has parameterized in the case’s playbook, you can concatenate more than one step for the approval phase to be executed sequentially. For example:

Multiple approval moments. It is also possible to add more than one approval phase (with one or multiple steps) in the same lifecycle. For example, your organization may require a document to be approved before a negotiation and then require it to be approved again before proceeding to the signing phase:

Ad hoc approvals. Finally, users can add special approval flows in the specific context of a lifecycle. However, this capability is reserved only for (a) users explicitly granted this ability in their access profile and (b) document templates configured to offer this option.

Note: Ad hoc approval flows created by users cannot suspend the process to request information. In other words, only “Approve/Reject – all must respond” or “Approve/Reject – first to respond” options are allowed, as suspensions might risk SLA breaches and deadline losses.

Key Considerations

With great power comes great responsibility! When configuring approval workflows, keep the following points in mind:

Excessive approvals. A high number of approvals can create excessive bureaucracy, overload employees’ task schedules, and delay the delivery of other organizational work and priorities. Carefully consider when one or more approval phases are truly necessary, how many people need to be involved, and how many steps are required.

Suspensions. Suspending approvals or rejections to await an information request can be an important compliance and flow mechanism in your organization. However, suspensions may risk SLA breaches or missed deadlines, especially in workflows with tight deadlines. Consider whether this option is the best path for the case.

Assign Approvals to Any User

The approval phase is an internal part of your lifecycle workflow. Therefore, you can assign approvals to users (including guest users) in your Looplex account but cannot assign these tasks to external individuals not registered as system users.

Once an approval task is assigned to a user, they can respond directly via email.

Additionally, the user can check all their approval tasks directly in their agenda in the Looplex Cases system. However, they need to have a Looplex Cases license assigned to them. Email approvals do not require an additional Cases license—any user can do so with their general content creation license. However, to track the lifecycle of projects and legal services, a Looplex Cases license is required.