June 13, 2022

By Betsi Roach

Page Reading Time: 2 minutes

Attending the CLOC Global Institute was great fun. Is there much better than seeing old friends and making new ones — all while enjoying Las Vegas in unseasonably comfortable 72-degree weather?

Over the past several years, SALI has ridden the wave of CLOC members’ emphasis on usable data and analytics to fuel business objectives. SALI provides 10,000+ tags that turn information into insights, and the need for SALI’s legal-data standards became clear through our conversations with various stakeholders at CGI.

Some highlights:

• At CGI, Thomson Reuters announced that they are fully adopting SALI’s LMSS (Legal Matter Specification Standard) in all TR products. The Legal Tracker implementation is complete, next is HighQ, and Thomson Reuters will continue working its way to map SALI tags to all TR products. Thomson Reuters’ commitment to the SALI open standard is a welcome milestone. TR’s adoption is also a bellwether to firms, vendors, and other organizations: The SALI open standard is here, it’s useful, and it’s solving problems — permitting better data transfers across organizations.
• Microsoft and Intel have also announced their intent to adopt SALI through various implementations, including developing and mapping tags for government regulators, regulations, jurisdictions, and patent litigation tags. This commitment from some of the largest legal departments sends a strong signal that for law organizations, commitment to open standards is essential to law-department interoperability.
• Contract Lifecycle Management dominated the discussions at the CGI.
  • Appropriately, SALI is currently building (into its next version of LMSS) tags for:
    • Document Types (e.g., License, Loan, Employment Agreement)
    • Document Clauses — 650+ clauses (e.g., Force Majeure, Choice of Law)
  • SALI is working with some of the largest CLM companies in the world, normalizing tags that relate to contracts and contractual content.

In short, we’re grateful for CLOC and its Global Institute for allowing SALI to further accelerate wide adoption by its three primary stakeholders:

1. Legal Service Buyers (e.g., Law Departments)
2. Legal Service Providers (e.g., Firms)
3. Legal Tech Vendors

If you’d like to talk with SALI about how the LMSS and API standards — and SALI’s 10,000+ tags describing legal work — can help your organization, please feel free to email info@sali.org.

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.