February 15, 2022

By Betsi Roach

Page Reading Time: 2 minutes

This month, the SALI Alliance has two exciting announcements to share.

First, we are delighted to welcome the following new members:

• Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP
• Mind-Alliance
• Ogletree Deakins
• OpenText
• Sidley Austin LLP

Second, after significant development, feedback, and iteration, we will be releasing the next version of the LMSS on March 9, 2022, in connection with Legalweek in New York.

LMSS 2.0 builds on and extends 1.0 in exciting new ways:

• It provides a deep dive into litigation, including causes of action, document types, phases, and more, enabling robust definition and categorization of a wide variety of key aspects of disputes.
• Engagement terms define a matter’s business arrangement such as fee structure and scope
• Use Events to identify key milestones in a matter.
• Hundreds of additional new state court codes have been added.
• Additions and tweaks to areas of law have been made at the recommendation of our Canada working group.
• We now provide mapping to existing standards including UTBMS and PACER Nature of Suit.
• IRIs, unique identifiers for each node in the standard, allow for greater efficiency in machine reading of the codes, scalability, and flexibility as we grow the standard.
• The number of data points that LMSS is counting has increased by 6x: from ~1,500 legally specific items (January 2020) to 9,700+ items today.

As always, all additions to the LMSS retain prior nodes and categories, along with mapping guidance. If you would like to view our development site to explore the updates, please email driehl@fastcase.com or jhannigan@coblentzlaw.com. 

We will be holding a meeting on March 9 in connection with the release in New York. If you are local to New York or plan to be at the conference, please reach out to Kelly Harbour at kharbour@goulstonstorrs.com to be added to the event invitation list. Note: You do not need to be registered for Legalweek to attend the SALI Alliance meeting!

ABOUT THE SALI ALLIANCE

The SALI Alliance seeks to improve the legal industry by moving it towards standardizing how we describe legal work. We will simplify and improve the description of legal services by providing a common language represented in an open-source taxonomy. This will provide all players with greater transparency and increase the effectiveness of budgeting and resourcing. Providing a common language for the industry serves as the catalyst for better outcomes and value.

Our work is to produce a Legal Matter Standard Specification (LMSS) and gain adoption in the ecosystem. LMSS is, in essence, an extensive taxonomy, with almost 10,000 nodes. It is actually more than a taxonomy: it not only describes areas of law, services, industries, and player roles, but also captures the relationships among those.

HOW CAN I LEARN MORE?

We welcome your input and your involvement! The most complete, practical standard can only be realized by continued contributions and adoption from organizations throughout the legal industry, particularly legal operations professionals and in-house counsel teams.

A link to the standard, which anyone can use at no cost, can be found at SALI.org.

In addition, there are several active and pending conversations to join, including:

• International working groups
• Area of law working groups
• Open forums for questions, feedback, and discussion among current and potential adopters

For more information on the standard, adoption, or getting involved, please contact Kelly Harbour at kharbour@goulstonstorrs.com.