Who we are, why noslegal exists, and the problems it addresses. A plain-language explanation of what a taxonomy is and why a monohierarchical design is right for this context.
We are an open source community of lawyers, software and data specialists, legal business and knowledge professionals founded in 2020.2 Our largest project so far has been the taxonomy addressed in this guide.
Our ethos is "open source legal for all of us", reflected in five principles:
Since we released v1 of our taxonomy in 2022, substantial elements have been adopted or used as a starting point by a growing number of law firms, legal departments, and technology providers around the world.
The reason is a structural problem familiar to most legal organisations. Legal work generates enormous amounts of data across matters, knowledge, people and business development. But it typically sits in silos, organised inconsistently if at all. The practical costs are significant: time wasted searching for information that exists but cannot be found; decisions made without access to relevant experience; pricing and planning based on personal experience and intuition rather than historical data; missed opportunities to identify patterns, anticipate demand or demonstrate credentials.
Private taxonomies have mostly failed to solve this. Huge numbers have been created over the years, but they tend to be over-fitted to particular contexts, fragmented by function or geography. They deteriorate over time as design stagnates or accumulates inconsistencies. They're often poorly implemented. And their diversity makes it impractical to map them one-to-one between organisations (e.g. law firm to client).
Modern technology (such as search, graphs, machine learning and language models) holds out the promise of helping significantly, but only when built on an appropriate data foundation. With that foundation in place, the practical benefits compound quickly: better search, better analysis, better knowledge reuse, and the conditions for AI to operate effectively across and between organisations. These improvements in turn open up better outcomes across quality, pricing, service, accessibility and sustainable business models. Our taxonomy provides an important part of that foundation.
A taxonomy is a tree of concepts addressing a particular topic. Ours is monohierarchical: every child concept has a single parent. The diagram below illustrates the structure and standard terminology.
Structure and standard terminology of a monohierarchical taxonomy, illustrated using Work types
We believe a monohierarchical taxonomy is the right choice for the practical purposes addressed in this guide. Its tree structure is more powerful than a flat list of words, definitions and synonyms for most relevant purposes. But it is more accessible to more people and organisations than a full ontology (i.e. flexible relationships, not just monohierarchical ones). See section 3.1 for further discussion of this.