ADDRESS BOOK: TYPES AND ENTITIES

INTRODUCTION

In previous versions of LegalSuite, you only specified the ‘Type’ of a Party as either Male, Female, Close Corporation, Advocate, Sheriff etc.

Having just one field to record the Party Type proved to be too restrictive because an Advocate, for example, could be a Male or a Female or even a Partnership. Likewise, a Sheriff could be a Male, Sole Proprietor, CC, PTY or even a Trust. A Developer could be a CC, PTY or even a Public Company and so forth.

The old system did not allow one to separate the type of Party (e.g. Sheriff) from its legal or commercial status (e.g. CC) – what is now called the “Entity” in LegalSuite.

This document will describe how to use the Entity and Party Type fields in LegalSuite to accurately describe the legal status and function of the Parties in the Address Book.

PARTY TYPES & ENTITIES

A new field called Entity has been added to the Address Book which must be used to record the legal status of an entry in the Address Book.

There are two pull down menus at the top of the Address Book:

Entity - the legal persona of the Party (e.g. Partnership)

Type - the type of Party (e.g. Estate Agent).

As you will see below, the Type of the Party can take on a different meaning depending on which Entity is chosen.

Examples

· If the Entity is a Person, the Type will refer to the gender of the Person.

· If the Entity is a Close Corporation, the Type will refer its commercial role (e.g. Developer or Estate Agent).

· If the Entity is a Govt Body, the Type will refer to its regional status (e.g. National, Provincial or Local).

Fig 1: List of Entities

The Entity and Type fields are each linked to one another, i.e. the Type that can be chosen by the user is limited to only a (logical) subset depending on what Entity has been chosen beforehand.

For example, if you chose “Adult” as the Entity, the program will offer you “Male” or “Female” as the Type (Fig 2)

Fig 2: Choosing a type of Adult is limited to Male or Female

If, however, you choose, “Close Corporation” as the Entity, the program will then offer you to choose from a list of types of businesses (Fig 3)

Fig 3: Choosing a type of Close Corporation

Here is a complete listing of the Entities and their corresponding Party Types:

Entity	Party
Adult Minor	Male Female
Sole Proprietor Partnership Close Corporation Private Company Public Company Incorporation	Advocate Attorney Business Developer Estate Agent Financial Institution Hospital Hotel Insurance Company Medical Aid Mortgage Originator Pension Fund Other Business
Trust	Trust
Estate	Deceased Estate Insolvent Estate Other Estate
Government Body	Local National Provincial Other Govt Body
NGO	Charity Club Political Party Religious Body School Trade Union Other NGO
Statutory Body	Body Corporate Co op University Other Statutory Body
Court Official	Clerk Judge Registrar Sheriff Other Court Official
Other	Other Type
Unknown (Adult) Unknown (Juristic)	Unknown Type
Reserved1 Reserved2 Reserved3	Reserved

Note: If the details of Party are largely unknown to the user, it is more important to specify the Entity than it is to specify the Type. A lot of the information the LegalSuite program requires is stored in the Entity table (e.g. to check if it is a Juristic Party or not) so as long as the Entity is correctly specified, the program should be able to function correctly when assembling documents etc.

Tip: If the Entity is obviously a business of some sort, but you are unsure of its commercial role, simply choose “Business” in the Type drop down list. As long as you have specified its Entity correctly (e.g. Private Company), the program will function correctly.

THE ROLE OF THE PARTY

When taking on a Party in the Address Book, it is important not to confuse the Role the person will be playing in the Matter with his or her Entity and Type. Although you can specify a “Default Role” in the Address Book, the Role a person or company plays is only defined when you link the Party to a Matter. This is best explained by means of an example.

Example #1: An Advocate

When capturing the details of an Advocate, Mary Smith, she is an Adult (Entity) and a Female (Type).

In some Matters (probably most) she will play the role of Advocate. But.... if Mary Smith sells her property or registers a bond, she will play the role of Seller and Mortgagor in these Matters.

When adding Mary Smith to the Address Book, you could give Mary Smith the default Role of “Advocate”.

Fig 4: Specifying the Default Role of a Party

This serves two purposes:

Firstly, it allows you to categorise the Address Book by the main function or role a Party normally plays. This makes it easy to find, say, all the Advocates (Default Role) in Western Cape (Province) using the pull down menus in the Address Book (Fig 5)

Fig 5: Filtering the Address Book

Secondly, the Role of Advocate will be pre-selected whenever Mary Smith is added as a Party to a Matter.

Fig 6: Assigning a Role the Party plays on a particular Matter

You can obviously change the role at this time, but it will speed up data capture if Mary Smith is the Advocate on 99% of all the Matters.

Example #2: An Attorney

Another confusing situation may be when one takes on an Attorney (e.g. Piet Van Niekerk) in the Address Book. If Piet is a Partner in a firm of attorneys called Smuts & Smuts, it can be a bit confusing: Which one do we take on, the person or the firm?

The answer really depends on whether you need the individual, the firm or both in the Address Book. If Piet is selling his house in his personal capacity, for example, you only need to capture his details. If, however, he is acting as the opposing attorney in a number of Matters, it would be better to add him and the firm he represents:

In this case you would make two entries in the Address Book

1) Piet Van Niekerk is an Adult (Entity) Male (Type)

2) Smuts & Smuts is a Partnership (Entity) and a firm of Attorneys (Type)

If you really want to use the LegalSuite program to its full potential you would add a relationship between Piet Van Niekerk and Smuts & Smuts (Employer/Employee) and then make Piet Van Niekerk the default contact at Smuts & Smuts. The benefits of using Contacts are handled in another white paper.

Example #3: A Company

Acme Tools PTY Ltd becomes a client. Henry Mathews is their MD

Just like the example above, you need to make two entries in the Address Book

1) Henry Mathews is an Adult (Entity) Male (Type)

2) Acme Tools is a Private Company  (Entity) and a Business (Type)

Likewise you would add a relationship between Henry Mathews and Acme Tools and then make Henry the default contact.

PROGRAMMING IMPLICATIONS

Party Types and Entities are used in various areas of the program as conditional switches, e.g. in Document Display Criteria (only display this document if the Party is a Trust) and Fields (only insert this phrase if the Party is a Male).

The phrases in these examples would look like this

PAR:EntityID = CTL:TrustEntityID

PAR:PartyTypeID = CTL:MaleTypeID

The Control file (CTL:) contains a list of all the valid Entity and Party Type IDs (which is in fact the RecordIDs of each item in each of the tables). To avoid having to look up these RecordIDs all the time, the Control file contains these identifiers in easy to remember names:

Identifier	RecordID	Entity
CTL:AdultEntityID	1	Adult
CTL:MinorEntityID	2	Minor
CTL:SoleProprietorEntityID	3	Sole Proprietor
CTL:PartnershipEntityID	4	Partnership
CTL:CloseCorporationEntityID	5	Close Corporation
CTL:PrivateCompanyEntityID	6	Private Company
CTL:PublicCompanyEntityID	7	Public Company
CTL:IncorporationEntityID	8	Incorporation
CTL:TrustEntityID	9	Trust
CTL:EstateEntityID	10	Estate
CTL:GovernmentBodyEntityID	11	Government Body
CTL:NGOEntityID	12	NGO
CTL:StatutoryBodyEntityID	13	Statutory Body
CTL:CourtOfficialEntityID	14	Court Official
CTL:OtherEntityID	15	Other
Note: Use PAR:EntityID = CTL:xxxEntityID

Identifier	RecordID	Party Type
CTL:MaleTypeID	1	Male
CTL:FemaleTypeID	2	Female
CTL:BusinessTypeID	3	Business
CTL:EstateAgentTypeID	4	EstateAgent
CTL:MortgageOriginatorTypeID	5	MortgageOriginator
CTL:FinancialInstitutionTypeID	6	FinancialInstitution
CTL:InsuranceCompanyTypeID	7	InsuranceCompany
CTL:MedicalAidTypeID	8	MedicalAid
CTL:PensionFundTypeID	9	PensionFund
CTL:HotelTypeID	10	Hotel
CTL:AdvocateTypeID	11	Advocate
CTL:AttorneyTypeID	12	Attorney
CTL:HospitalTypeID	13	Hospital
CTL:DeveloperTypeID	14	Developer
CTL:OtherBusinessTypeID	15	OtherBusiness
CTL:TrustTypeID	16	Trust
CTL:DeceasedEstateTypeID	17	DeceasedEstate
CTL:InsolventEstateTypeID	18	InsolventEstate
CTL:OtherEstateTypeID	19	OtherEstate
CTL:LocalTypeID	20	Local
CTL:ProvincialTypeID	21	Provincial
CTL:NationalTypeID	22	National
CTL:OtherGovtBodyTypeID	23	OtherGovtBody
CTL:ReligousBodyTypeID	24	ReligousBody
CTL:CharityTypeID	25	Charity
CTL:PoliticalPartyTypeID	26	PoliticalParty
CTL:SchoolTypeID	27	School
CTL:TradeUnionTypeID	28	TradeUnion
CTL:ClubTypeID	29	Club
CTL:OtherNGOTypeID	30	OtherNGO
CTL:BodyCorporateTypeID	31	BodyCorporate
CTL:UniversityTypeID	32	University
CTL:CoopTypeID	33	Coop
CTL:OtherStatutoryBodyTypeID	34	OtherStatutoryBody
CTL:JudgeTypeID	35	Judge
CTL:SheriffTypeID	36	Sheriff
CTL:RegistrarTypeID	37	Registrar
CTL:ClerkTypeID	38	Clerk
CTL:OtherCourtOfficialTypeID	39	OtherCourtOfficial
CTL:OtherTypeTypeID	40	OtherType
Note: Use PAR:PartyTypeID = CTL:xxxTypeID

Important: These numbers are now to remain static. The user is unable to delete an Entity with a RecordID less than 21 (i.e. 1- 20 are reserved for program use) and they are unable to delete a Party Type with a RecordID less than 51 (1-50 are reserved).

Users can modify the wording of these entries and add their own Entities and Party Types, but the entries described above must be present and in this sequence for the program to function correctly.

USAGE IN DOCUMENTS

The main usage in Document Assembly would be to insert specific text based on the Entity of the Party (very similar to the way that is done for the Party Type). There are similar built-in functions which allow you to extract the Entity information for a Party.

Function	Result
EntityDescription(‘role,whichone’)	The Description of the Entity Table (e.g. ‘Adult’)
EntityLangDescription(‘role,whichone’)	The Description in the correct language (i.e. it is retrieved from the the EntityLang Table) (e.g. ‘Maatskappy’)
EntityJuristicFlag(‘role,whichone’)	The setting of the JuristicFlag column in the Entity Table (E.g. 1)
role = the Party you are referring to (e.g. Buyer or Defendant) whichone = the Rank (e.g. 1)

Examples:

[[IF(EntityDescription(‘Client,1’)=’Close Corporation’)]]

Please get all the members of the [[EntityLangDescription(‘Client,1’)]] to sign the document

[[ELSE]]

Please sign the document

[[ENDIF]]

[[IF(EntityJuristicFlag(‘Defendant,2’)=1)]]

The second Defendant is a juristic person

[[ELSE]]

The second Defendant is a [[EntityLangDescription(‘Defendant,2’)]] and they are not a juristic person.

[[ENDIF]]

DATABASE CONSIDERATIONS

(Note: This section is for technical staff only)

There is a new column in the Party (PAR:) table called EntityID

If you take on a new Party in the Address Book and choose ‘Close Corporation’ as the Entity, this Party will have an PAR:EntityID of 4. This is the RecordID of the ‘Close Corporation’ in the Entity table (see below). That is how LegalSuite ‘knows’ that this Party is a Close Coporation.

There is also a new table called Entity (ENT:)  which stores the Entity Descriptions and it has the following columns:

Column	Type	Description
RecordID	Int	Unique Record Identifier (this is linked to the Party via PAR:EntityID)
Description	VarChar(99)	Description of the Entity (eg ‘Male’)
JuristicFlag	TinyInt	Flag to indicate if this entity is a Juristic entity or not (either 0 or 1)

For example, if you issue this SQL command
Select * from Entity
you would see something like

RecordID	Description	JuristicFlag
1	Male	0
2	Female	0
3	SoleProprietor	0
4	CloseCorporation	1

There is also a sub-table called EntityLang (ENTL:) which stores the language descriptions of each Entity. It has these columns:

Column	Type	Description
EntityID	Int	The RecordID of the Entity (this is the link between the two)
LanguageID	Int	The Language (1 = English, 2 = Afrikaans)
Description	VarChar(99)	The Description in this Language

For example, if you issue this SQL command
Select * from EntityLang Where EntityID = 1
you would see

EntityID	LanguageID	Description
1	1	Male
1	2	Manlik

Adding a Party programatically

When adding a Party to LegalSuite from a programming or importing point of view, it is important to assign the appropriate EntityID and PartyTypeID to the Party so that the Address Book entry reflects the correct legal persona and type of the entry.

Within the Clarion language and the LegalSuite program, one could use the CTL:xxxEntityID and CTL:xxxTypeID identifiers described above, but if the Parties are being added from an external application, one can now confidently use the actual RecordID numbers because these will not change as they are hard-coded into the LegalSuite program.

One could also add the Default Role (PAR:DefaultRoleID) but this is optional and will default to CTL:ClientRoleID (1) if left blank. If, however, you know the Party you are adding will be the Seller, you can assign the DefaultRoleID to the value of CTL:SellerRoleID or look up the corresponding RecordID in the Role table.

CONCLUSION

This will make it easier for both users and program designers to add Parties to the Address Book which accurately reflect their status in the real world and ensure the program functions appropriately based on these settings.