Five principles behind the taxonomy's design: monohierarchy, faceting, modest size and extensibility, stability, and the three-tier structure of Work types and Areas of law.
The noslegal taxonomy reflects a set of deliberate design choices. These are not constraints imposed for their own sake. They reflect considered judgements about what makes a taxonomy practically useful across a wide range of legal organisations and contexts. This chapter highlights five key choices.
Each concept in the taxonomy has only one direct parent. This makes the taxonomy simpler to understand, implement and maintain than a more flexible ontology. This is an important consideration given the limits on specialist expertise available in many relevant organisations.
The monohierarchical constraint is less limiting than it may intuitively sound. Nuanced characterisation of matters, knowledge items and portfolios is still possible through faceting (section 3.2) and careful field design (section 5.2). A well-designed taxonomy adds substantial value fairly simply. You can extend into something more complex later if truly beneficial compared with other options for addressing relevant needs. Complexity has a way of multiplying, so keeping it simple and taking things in stages is usually best.
The taxonomy is organised into distinct facets, each addressing a different dimension of legal work. This allows a relatively small number of concepts in each facet to express nuance when used in combination with others.
Without faceting, a monohierarchical taxonomy trying to capture "energy litigation" would need to choose whether energy or litigation was the parent concept, or duplicate concepts under two parents. A faceted approach resolves this by placing energy and litigation in separate facets, with the combination describing the full picture.
The diagram below shows how a matter involving arbitration in Singapore concerning a trade union dispute in the mining sector in Indonesia can be fully described by combining concepts across the work type, area of law, sector and place facets. This allows powerful reporting and analysis, aggregating by process, sector, legal area or geography, as well as precise search, where someone looking for credentials or knowledge on "Asia labour dispute natural resources" can retrieve a matter classified in exactly those terms.
Four facets combining to fully describe a single matter. Each facet is queried independently or in combination.
We have deliberately kept the taxonomy to a modest size for four reasons.
Where more detail is useful, the design is extensible. Several extension packs have already been published within noslegal, and anyone can produce more privately or publicly. Specialist depth can be added without over-complicating the shared higher-level concepts on which interoperability depends.
Our goal is to keep the core facets as stable as possible so that organisations can adopt with confidence. We will continue to make incremental improvements, refine and add extension packs, and introduce further facets where genuine need is demonstrated by the community. More significant changes will be highlighted in the relevant release notes together with the reasons.
The Work types and Areas of law facets are the most conceptually contestable in the taxonomy, because their subject matter can be, and in practice is, organised in different ways across legal cultures internationally. Both are structured in three tiers: category, type and topic.
Category (first tier) provides broad groupings useful for high-level reporting. Some room for debate about allocation is inevitable, for example, where the boundary lies between Finance and Transaction. Some departure from the recommended structure at this level is acceptable if your organisation has a good reason for it or even if organisational politics make it pragmatically necessary.
Type (second tier) is the critical one for interoperability. Concepts at this level — Arbitration within Dispute resolution, M&A within Transaction — represent the core interoperable layer of the taxonomy. Consistency at this level is what makes data exchange meaningful when mapping between systems or organisations. Organisations should treat second-tier alignment as close to non-negotiable. Every departure generates a cost to manage downstream.
Topic (third tier) is intentionally flexible and illustrative rather than prescriptive. Organisations are encouraged to define their own topics to reflect their specific practice areas, provided they map back to the relevant type above. This is where customisation is expected and appropriate, and where extension packs can add further depth.
This three-tier approach applies specifically to Work types and Areas of law because of their combination of size and inherent subjectivity. The other facets are different in character: