The three types of organisation the taxonomy serves and the four areas of need it is designed for: delivery, knowledge, pipeline and people.
The noslegal taxonomy is designed to support three types of organisation:
The taxonomy is not specifically designed for legal authorities (courts, regulators, law enforcement), legal research, teaching, or theoretical and academic law. These areas tend to make jurisdiction-specific and legal-conceptual demands that would undermine the practical, internationally neutral focus of noslegal. This is not a criticism, it's just a choice we have made in order to stay focused. If you're working in these areas, or anything else, you are of course free to use, modify and extend noslegal if you do find it relevant.
Legal organisations rely on structured information about their work across four broad areas. These areas overlap and interact — and the value of a shared taxonomy is precisely that data generated in one area becomes useful in the others.
These four areas overlap and interact in ways that make it desirable for the higher-level concepts used in each to correspond.
Examples of how these needs benefit from shared concepts
A law firm will ideally target its marketing and sales activities (Pipeline) on areas which can generate significant amounts of worthwhile work (Delivery), make relevant learnings as to how to do so effectively and profitably (Knowledge) and generate credentials (People) which can support marketing and sales (Pipeline again) and help those doing the work in future (Delivery again and People).
An in-house team delivering legal work (Delivery) generates know-how and financial data (Knowledge) that can inform how similar work is planned, resourced (Pipeline), priced and managed in future (Delivery again), including how it is staffed and how career development is supported (People).
The core functions in these four areas of need are often handled by separate groups within many legal services providers, each with its own characteristic software applications. The result is that the same underlying work tends to be described differently across functions — making it difficult to connect insights, identify patterns, or reuse what has been learned.
Using a shared high-level taxonomy helps to address this. It avoids the constant mapping and remapping exercise that arises when different functions, or different organisations working together, maintain their classifications independently.
Needs will typically diverge at lower levels of detail. For example, a knowledge management function will typically have more need for more granular legal concepts and sub-concepts than a team focused on financial reporting or business development. But this can be handled by extending the taxonomy to meet such specialist needs without disturbing the shared higher-level concepts on which interoperability depends.
Legal work has always depended on finding and reusing information generated elsewhere. Digital technology has already extended this considerably in recent decades. New varieties of AI are now making new approaches feasible. All of this benefits from a reliable, consistent conceptual skeleton.
Well-established approaches, enhanced with a strong taxonomy, include:
These are useful but can be limited by the active engagement they require and a tendency to return too much. Newer approaches using non-deterministic technology such as machine learning and language models include:
Each approach has limits and risks, and in practice they work best in combination. A shared taxonomy is what makes that combination practical. Different approaches can operate over the same classified corpus without each needing its own organisational scheme.
Across the four areas of need noslegal is designed for, the approaches just listed can be used in many ways. This table gives just a few examples with a deliberate mix of ones for legal services providers and legal departments.
| At matter level | Across a portfolio | |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery | What should the plan be for this matter — work, deliverables, assumptions, budget? Where are the high-risk areas? How might fixed pricing work out here, based on previous matters? At this stage, what are the things that need to be covered? | What kinds of work have we handled for this client or business unit? What types generate the greatest cost or risk? Where do we see recurring overruns we could manage more effectively? |
| Knowledge | How should I approach this issue? What has our organisation said or decided about this before? How has it worked out in practice? | What context can we share for future work? How proportionate and up to date are our knowledge resources relative to the work we actually do? Where are the gaps? |
| Pipeline | (To help with sourcing) Have we faced matters like this before — who did them and how did it go? (To help win work) What experience can we point to for this pitch review? | What patterns are we seeing across our work? Where is demand growing or declining? Where are we under- or over-resourced? (Provider) What are our realisation rates across different kinds of work and where can we improve? (In-house) Where is demand from the business increasing and how should we plan for it? |
| People | (To help with resourcing) Do any of our lawyers have capacity and experience in this kind of matter? | (To help with people development) Are we spreading experience widely enough to support development? Where should we focus training and in-context help? |