Noslegal’s Open Source Legal Data Standards See Adoption

The noslegal open source data standards team has announced that its taxonomy has now been adopted by several major law firms, including A&O Shearman, and seen its community grow to include iManage along with other firms such as Clifford Chance, Herbert Smith Freehills, and Howard Kennedy.

Their next step is to plan how to further increase uptake of their legal data standards and grow the community even more, which at present includes around 100 individuals. To that end there will be a meeting in London on 2nd October.

So, what is this all about?

As one of noslegal’s founders, Graeme Johnston, CEO of Juralio, told Artificial Lawyer: ‘The noslegal motto is ‘open source legal for all of us.’

‘The noslegal standards are modular and people have used them in two ways. The first is simply to adopt one or more modules. This can include some configuration – elaborating on some concepts and leaving out others depending on your needs.

‘The second way is to refer to modules as inspirations or starting points, but to modify them so significantly that they become your own thing. Each way has pros and cons.’

Johnston added: ‘Elements from different modules can be combined with each other and with an organisation’s home-brewed concepts to build up more complex things and ideas. Such combinations do require some design to avoid overlap or contradiction, but they allow a joined-up approach across a firm or legal department’s various activities and needs. Better data standards, whether purely internal or shared, are also a foundation for all the AI and other data related efforts which many firms, legal departments and technology companies are now pursuing.’

What do the law firms think of it?

Here is what Alice Laird, Information and Metadata Manager at Howard Kennedy, said: ‘We found noslegal’s open source taxonomy material and community to be very beneficial in redesigning our taxonomy and implementing it in practice.

‘We adopted the ‘places’ facet as it is an authoritative list and will be regularly updated by the noslegal team. We’ve also followed the noslegal approach to sectors, basing our approach on NACE codes but with some additions and removals to fit our firm’s needs, including adopting the noslegal expansion pack for financial services. We’ve also been developing our work types taxonomy and find noslegal very useful for that, including its combinations methodology.’

So, there you go. Artificial Lawyer asked Johnston a few more questions to dig a bit deeper into this very useful project.

Can you please set out how the taxonomy works?

There are nine facets each covering a distinct topic. Concepts can be combined from each facet to build more complex concepts. For example, combine litigation from the Work facet with capital markets from the Sectors facet with England & Wales and the ‘involves litigation in’ concept from the Places facet to express that a matter concerns ‘capital markets litigation in the courts of England & Wales.’ But the fact that these concepts are nested mean that you can also readily vary their granularity so that the matter just mentioned also shows up when you’re looking for ‘financial services disputes in UK courts.’

Being able to do this more effectively is now increasingly recognised in law firms and beyond as having immense value across various legal use cases, including financial ones. The fact that so many law firms have become involved in noslegal, including several cases of adoption which we can now talk about publicly, is evidence of this.

The core aspects of noslegal’s legal data standards.

2. Is this similar to SALI? If not, how is it different?

I don’t want to speak for SALI or anyone else other than noslegal, but noslegal was developed from the start with an emphasis on:

simplicity
jurisdiction-neutrality, as opposed to building it upon the conceptual architecture of a particular national legal system
an emphasis on business use cases in four areas: legal operations, people, sales/marketing and practical legal knowledge
a strategic decision not to build it for legal research or academic or legal education use cases – as these tend to lead to technical and localised complications which can get in the way of the business use cases

We also have a different philosophy on licensing. noslegal’s licensing is open source (Apache 2.0) whereas SALI’s licensing (CC-BY-ND) bars distribution of derivatives. I was excited to hear a few days ago about the release of the new SOLI taxonomy in the United States, which has been announced to be open source (CC-BY). We will be speaking with SOLI’s founders to discuss how we can seek to make our efforts complementary with theirs.

P.S. re. The SALI Licence. SALI’s mission is to create standards that facilitate communication, not fragment it. So any SALI-licensed materials cannot be used to create competing standards. But any of our stakeholders (e.g., firms and legal service providers, vendors, clients, academics) can freely incorporate SALI into their systems. The public can access and use an XML implementation of our latest LSSS standard in our GitHub repository, available under the MIT License. SALI’s standard specification and associated documentation are licensed under the CC BY ND license.

3. Is this mainly of use in the KM field?

There are four major areas of use:

legal operations (for example, process improvement, legal project management and budgeting / pricing / spend)
people, organisations and resourcing
sales and marketing
practical legal knowledge – but not including legal research in the technical legal-conceptual sense exempified by, say, Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis

noslegal can be used to join up these four areas in a law firm or other organisation with a shared taxonomy, which can be extended locally for specialist needs.

The intended users are law firms and other legal services providers, legal software providers and platforms, and purchasers of legal services.

4. Do you feel that genAI tools need more, or less, data structure to work well?

AI makes taxonomy even more important, as it allows you to define the concepts, distinctions and relationships of actual business relevance to your organisation. Without the metaphorical maps and compass that good taxonomy can provide, the risk of taking wrong turns in the information woods will greatly increase.

5. If firms want to use this, how do they get it?

Go to noslegal.org and follow the links to the spreadsheets on Google Drive or the spreadsheets, csv and JSON versions on Github. The links also include detailed release notes and explanatory slide decks.

The website also contains a public draft of the additional facet which we expect to finalise and release by the end of 2024.

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Thanks, and congrats on growing this community. Coming right after the announcement of another standards project’s next steps (see oneNDA Playbook), it’s great to see how the broader standardisation movement is developing now in 2024.

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