October 15, 2022
By Betsi Roach
Page Reading Time: 2 minutesSALI at Legal Value Network’s LVNx Conference
From September 21-23, SALI participated in the inaugural LVNx conference in Chicago, hosted by the Legal Value Network. The SALI leadership team joined Chloe Carver (Microsoft) and Sharon Scenna (Intapp) to present on “Practical Implementation of LMSS 2.0.”
Damien Riehl, Kelly Harbour, Jim Hannigan, and Toby Brown discussed various approaches that legal ops teams can take to embed the SALI LMSS standard into a company’s databases and software. The presentation also included discussion of how leveraging a common taxonomy offers many advantages — including increased efficiency, fodder for analytics, and system integration opportunities.
Adding their legal-department experience with the SALI LMSS, Chloe and Sharon shared how their organizations are implementing the standard, as well as their expected ROI, benefiting their stakeholders. In short, all agreed that the SALI LMSS provides a common platform to organize all of an enterprise’s legal matter data, classifying everything into clean, well-defined, structured categories.
Chloe later reiterated, “At Microsoft, we deeply understand the critical need for good data hygiene, including standardized data. We believe aligning to legal standards like SALI will bring immeasurable value across the industry and we encourage others to take a look at the SALI standard and consider whether it makes sense for their organization to adopt or align to.”
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.