A systematic introduction to all eight facets — scope, content, key distinctions, implementation notes and development plans.
The noslegal taxonomy is organised into seven1 facets, each describing a distinct dimension of legal work: Work types, Areas of law, Participants, Roles, Sectors, Places, Process elements and Information types. This section introduces each facet and explains the relationships between them. For full detail, please refer to the release notes and to the facets themselves.
The facets are designed to be used together, and much of their power lies in combination. A matter or knowledge item described across multiple facets can be retrieved and analysed along any of those dimensions individually or in combination. This is what enables the practical capabilities described in section 2 — from identifying relevant experience for a pitch, to surfacing knowledge at the moment it is needed, to understanding patterns across a portfolio of work. The diagram in section 3.2 illustrates this.
The Work types facet is, for many practical purposes, of central importance. Five others cover dimensions central to legal work characterisation (Areas of law, Participants, Roles, Sectors, Places). The other two address the internal structure of law-related activity and its artifacts (Work elements, Information assets). But the ordering is for presentational purposes — they are all important, with the precise relevance depending on context.
This table summarises the size and content of each facet. The rest of this chapter summarises the approach taken in each of the seven facets.
| Facet | Indicative size |
|---|---|
| Work types | 8 categories, 42 types, numerous topics within types. 1 extension pack for UK-specific topics. |
| Areas of law | 16 general and 17 sectoral categories — 33 in total. 68 general and 52 sectoral types — 120 in total. Numerous topics within types. 2 extension packs for UK- and EU-specific topics. |
| Participants | 3 groups (person, property, obligation), each with 3 principal types and a total of 7 sub-types. 2 extension packs — 1 for person features, 1 for UK law organisation types. |
| Roles | 16 groups of roles — anchored to work types (8 groups, 44 roles), areas of law (6 groups, 26 roles) or more general (2 groups, 4 roles). |
| Sectors | 16 core sectors with 65 sub-sectors. 2 extension packs: 1 with 17 additional financial services sub-sectors, 2 with 11 older NACE sectors. |
| Places | 249 core areas. 10 extension packs covering (1) non-English names, (2) UN regions, (3) super-regions, (4) legal systems for core areas, (5) legal systems for selected core areas' sub-divisions, (6) legal system types, (7) over 5,000 area subdivisions, (8) subdivision types, (9) over 1,700 treaty and international organisation memberships and (10) 55 treaties and international organisations. |
| Process elements | Glossary with 4 sections and 44 concepts. 8 process maps. |
| Information types | 4 dimensions — type, use, status and audience together with a grid illustrating type × use combinations. |
The Work type facet classifies legal activity by its purpose, independent of the law, sector or place engaged.
Since v3, the categories have been sharpened into eight, each with a distinct purpose.
| Category (alphabetical) | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Development | Creating or building something new or substantially amending or transforming it. |
| Dispute resolution | Resolving a dispute over rights, obligations, liabilities and remedies. |
| Enablement | Enabling someone to achieve personal, business, policy or other goals with reference to a particular legal context. This is a residual category: if another work type is applicable, it should be used instead. |
| Finance | Handling the financial aspects of a transaction, development, dispute or other matter. Often used in conjunction with another work type but also independently (for example, a refinancing or fund formation with no underlying transaction). |
| GRC and policy | Managing or supporting governance, risk, compliance and law-related policy issues and initiatives. |
| Investigative process | Finding out or demonstrating what has or has not happened, including through formal inquiries, investigations and prosecutions. |
| Dissolution and restructuring | Winding up an organisation or relationship. Also restructuring and turning things around after financial or other problems. Also winding up a relationship or estate of an individual. |
| Transaction | Changing status, ownership, rights and obligations. Includes contracting and working through the legal consequences of such changes. |
The primary distinction between the above categories is their purpose, as stated above. In practice, many also have a process with common characteristics, though this varies with context (jurisdiction, sector, organisation and more). The fact that the distinctions drawn are relevant both by way of purpose / type-of-value and by way of the type of process (and thus by way of skill / experience) makes them relevant across delivery, knowledge, pipeline and people.
As described in section 3.5, Work types has a three-level structure. The categories above can be combined differently if useful (for example by introducing super-categories). Types (the second level) are the most important for mapping between organisations and should be used without modification where possible. For the third level, noslegal suggests some examples, but organisations are encouraged to extend these to reflect their own context.
We have created an extension pack at topic level for the UK. The coverage is modest in this release — essentially a proof of concept — but we may expand it for the UK and to other places if there is demand. When implementing, simply add these topics to the ones in the work types core if these UK topics are relevant to your organisation.
We recommend giving each matter a single second-level work type. Where a matter develops a substantial element of a materially different work type (for example, where a corporate transaction gives rise to significant litigation), a new sub-matter or linked matter should be opened for that work. Mixing materially different work types in a single matter undermines financial reporting, like-for-like comparison and knowledge management. A sensible materiality threshold should be defined. The third level need not be mandatory and may usefully allow more than one tag, with the emphasis on knowledge and experience capture rather than financial reporting.
We hope not to change the first or second levels of v4 significantly, at least over the next few years, and consider this facet sufficiently mature to prioritise stability. The third level is deliberately looser and likely to expand over time. Extension packs may also be added to cover specialist work types in particular countries, sectors or other contexts (for example, different types of arbitration).
The Areas of law facet classifies the legal subject matter engaged by the work, independently of the work type, sector or place.
The Areas of law facet classifies legal work by the body of law engaged, rather than by the purpose, process, industry context or linked places of legal work or materials.
The facet is organised into two broad groups.
The distinction does not need to be reflected in your implementation unless it is useful, and both groups can be treated as parts of a single facet. We have made it nonetheless because separating sector-specific from general areas reduces complexity in the general categories, allows organisations to disregard sectoral laws of no relevance to their practice, and — for law firms in particular — provides a second route to identifying sector context where that has not been captured directly in the Sectors facet.
The distinction between work type, general area of law and sectoral law — and why separating them matters — is well illustrated by financing activity. Finance is a work type: it classifies the kind of activity being undertaken. Financial law is a general area of law: it classifies the body of private law doctrine governing the obligations between lenders, borrowers and counterparties — the law of credit, security and financial market contracts. Financial services law is a sectoral area of law: it classifies the regulatory framework applicable to authorised firms in the financial services industry. A syndicated loan to a corporate borrower involves Finance as the work type, financial law as the primary general area of law, and may or may not engage financial services law depending on whether regulatory issues arise. A regulatory investigation of a bank involves a different work type entirely — GRC and policy, or investigative process — with financial services law as the primary area of law. Each combination accurately describes the matter without forcing any one concept to carry more than it should.
There are 17 categories in the general areas of law. Full definitions are provided in the taxonomy itself, but some short notes here are intended to help grasp the structure and the cross-facet relationships of some categories.
Brackets give the number of types in each category.
| Category (alphabetical) | Notes |
|---|---|
| Corporate law (5) | This has been reworked since v3 as five types covering important dimensions of the topic. |
| Cross-border laws (4) | The private international law type will likely be used together with other areas of law to describe a matter. |
| Evidence and procedural law (2) | This is new in v4 and addresses the legal issues (e.g. the procedural and evidential law on disclosure of documents) as opposed to the purpose and process of related work. |
| Family law (4) | |
| Financial law (6) | Finance is pervasive in much legal work. Our taxonomy now handles it in three ways. Substantive law relating to financial matters is here in Areas of law. This is contrasted with work done for a financial purpose (see Work types) or financial services-sector-specific law and regulation (see Sectoral laws). |
| Information law (5) | This covers some areas of law of great and growing significance, divided into five major types. It has been clarified and slightly reworked since v3. |
| Insolvency and restructuring law (3) | Substantive law relating to insolvency as opposed to insolvency process (see Work types). Public insolvency has been added since v3. |
| Intellectual property law (8) | Indication of origin has been added since v3. |
| Labour law (3) | Modestly restructured by v3 by merging employee benefits and private pensions law. |
| Land law (3) | In v4, law relating to land, including environmental law, is now separated out from real estate sector-specific law for similar reasons as for finance (above) — reflecting the pervasiveness of the topic. The precise distinction is defined via the types. Note that the Development type within Work types will often be relevant in connection with Land law but is not confined to land-related contexts. |
| Obligations law (4) | This is law of obligations in the civilian law sense of contract, delict / tort and restitution / unjust enrichment. In v4, we have separated out agency as a separate topic in view of its importance, and its distinctiveness from the law of contract. Equity is not separated out, though, as this is rather system-specific. |
| Personal affairs (3) | Capacity and care in v3 have been narrowed to Personal capacity in order to eliminate an overlap with Care in Sectoral laws. |
| Personal property law (2) | Goods and intangible property (including digital assets, but not intellectual property) have now been split out from Obligations law. |
| Public law (2) | This covers constitutional / administrative law in its institutional and process aspects with a separate type for rights. Note that aspects of this are covered in Information law instead (notably, freedom of expression and privacy). |
| Regulatory (7) | This is somewhat residual, containing major types of regulation (e.g. competition law, climate law) which do not fall into other categories. |
| Tax law (2) | |
| Wrongdoing (5) | This is a residual category to cover wrongdoing which does not arise in a more specific category. Categorisation of the particular type of law involved in a particular case (e.g. criminal or civil) is achieved by using the relevant work type (e.g. prosecution, litigation or, in the event of no formal process, the enablement > advice type with a suitable topic tag for criminal, civil etc). |
This is a new extension pack within v4. Its categories map one-to-one to those in the Sectors core. In addition, there is a category for professional services law mapping to a Sectors extension pack, as that area is quite significant for some law firms even though not significant at the scale of whole economies.
Sectoral law taxonomies are in some cases broken down in a way which mirrors the sub-sectors. For example, for transportation law the economic breakdown between marine, air etc seemed the best fit for the legal breakdown. Likewise with real estate breaking down by commercial, residential and rural in both contexts. In the case of manufacturing we concluded that a split into product safety, industrial operations and chemicals made most sense as legal subdivisions. Financial services law contains a hybrid of sub-sectoral and sector-level legal types.
At the third level — topics — the distinctions are very much legal ones.
As with Work types, Areas of law uses a three-tier structure of category, type and topic. The general/sectoral split sits at category level. Within each category, types represent the core interoperable layer: concepts such as Contract law within Obligations law, or Banking law within Financial services law.
We suggest treating first- and second-tier alignment as close to non-negotiable: every departure generates a cost to manage downstream. The third tier (topics) is where highly specific sub-areas naturally live, and can be modified more flexibly.
We have provided four extension packs for areas of law covering general and sectoral topics for the UK and EU. These are relatively small so far but may be expanded in future if there is demand. Simply add them to the topics in sheets 2.0 and 2.1 when implementing if these UK and EU aspects are relevant to your organisation.
Unlike Work types, a one-and-only-one requirement at the second tier may be artificial for Areas of law, since multiple areas often apply to a single matter in complex and entangled ways that cannot readily be separated into sub-matters.
A corporate restructuring, for example, may simultaneously engage corporate law, insolvency law, tax law and financial services regulation in ways that are not unbundleable in the sense of "I am currently working on X not Y."
One practical approach for financial reporting purposes may be to seek to capture a single primary area of law — the one most central to the matter as a whole — while allowing additional areas — for knowledge purposes — to be tagged at any level. This is imperfect, but selecting a primary area at a fairly high level (type or even category) provides a basis for financial reporting and portfolio analysis; the additional tags enrich the knowledge and experience record without the rigidity that a one-to-one rule would impose.
Third-tier topics are best treated as optional for matter- and document-tagging purposes. They are not intended to be taxonomically watertight in the way that the first two levels seek to be. They should be used primarily for knowledge and experience purposes. Where the same topics are used across matter records, knowledge assets and people profiles, the interoperability benefit described in section 3.5 can be obtained.
The sectoral laws categories add a practical point about field design. Where a matter falls within a sectoral laws category, it will often also engage one or more general areas of law (for example, a banking regulation matter will often engage obligations law and perhaps public law as well). The two work together to give a complete picture.
The general areas of law categories are now sufficiently mature that significant change at category or type level is not anticipated over the next few years.
Sectoral laws are more likely to expand: sector-specific law has in recent decades often developed faster than more general, foundational legal categories. Expansion in sectoral laws will, as elsewhere in the taxonomy, be managed at topic (third) level first, but may lead to creation of additional types (second level) over time. Extension packs may also be added to cover areas of particular local relevance that do not warrant inclusion in the internationally applicable core.
The Participants facet covers the persons, property and obligations typically involved in legal work. It provides vocabulary for describing who and what is involved in a matter, beyond the type of work being done and the areas of law engaged, allowing important distinctions to be captured without overloading the Work types or Areas of law facets.
Two extension packs are available. One covers features particularly relevant to legal services providers for classifying clients and other entities. The other covers incorporated and unincorporated bodies recognised under UK law, illustrating the kind of local extension that can usefully be built out from the core.
As with Work types and Areas of law, stability is now a priority. Where further conceptual growth is needed, extension packs are the preferred route, to avoid overloading the core and the Roles extension pack.
The Roles facet classifies the position of persons involved in a legal matter (for example, claimant or defendant in litigation, buyer or seller in a transaction, employer or employee in an employment matter). Implementation guidance for Roles, including how to link role availability to work type or area of law, is available in section 6.1.
The Sectors facet classifies the area of economic activity relevant to a matter or client. It is derived from version 2.1 (2022) of the NACE standard (European Union), itself an extension of the ISIC standard (United Nations), structured as two levels and mapped to NACE. We have made several modifications for more convenient use in legal work:
The aim is a convenient core that can readily be adopted, with the extension packs available for additional concepts where useful.
The Sectors facet should be used to classify both matters and clients, and these are distinct data points. A matter concerning an energy company leasing a new office is more usefully classified in the real estate sector than the energy sector, because the relevant experience and knowledge concerns real estate rather than the client's industry. The client's sector is captured separately on the client record.
For legal services providers, it is worth classifying clients by their sector or sectors of activity. Where conglomerates are active across multiple sectors, client record design should allow for this. Consider applying sector classification not only at client group level but also to the particular entity or department involved in a specific matter.
We have no current plans for significant development of this facet but welcome suggestions. One possibility would be adding a mapping to the NAICS standard, which is derived from the former US SIC standard and covers the needs of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA). We chose ISIC and NACE as the primary basis for their broader international relevance, but a NAICS mapping could be a useful addition for organisations operating primarily in North America.
The Places facet classifies the geographic and jurisdictional dimensions of a matter. It is the largest noslegal facet by number of concepts, most of which are derived from the ISO 3166 standard covering countries, their subdivisions and the global regions to which they belong.
We have built on ISO 3166 to meet legal work needs in several respects:
In v4, we have confined ourselves to updating the facet to incorporate ISO 3166 updates and changes in membership of treaties and international organisations already covered in v3.
Places is an area where lax guidance frequently produces ambiguous and unreliable data. This is because place can mean several materially different things in a legal context. We suggest distinguishing and capturing separately at least:
Conflating these produces data that is not useful for either knowledge or reporting purposes.
Further nuances within the above broad concepts may be captured in specific contexts if useful e.g. multiple governing laws applying to different issues and nuanced concepts of personal location e.g. registered office, residence and domicile.
The Process elements facet (called Work elements in v3) addresses the phases, key steps, work and deliverables commonly involved in particular types of legal work. It has two components.
The first component is a core vocabulary of concepts used to describe and manage legal work in practice: matters, phases, objectives, milestones, tasks, assumptions and related financial and process concepts. This provides a shared language for legal project management that connects directly to the taxonomy. With the advance of language models, this will be useful for guiding extraction and translation of process information.
The second component is a set of process maps, which are worked examples showing how that vocabulary applies to particular types of legal work. Process maps set out typical phases, objectives, tasks, milestones and assumptions for a given work type, and may be further defined by area of law, participant type, role, sector, place or other context. Where useful, more specific process maps are nested within broader ones, to support comparability across jurisdictions and contexts. Together, the core vocabulary and process maps provide a basis for more consistent planning, pricing and reporting of legal work, and for building the matter data that supports knowledge reuse and process improvement over time.
We released initial process maps in v3, addressing finance, commercial real estate and dispute resolution work. In v4 the format has been updated in several respects: the former "Key steps" column has been reframed as "Phase objectives" to sharpen its focus; "Work commonly includes" has been renamed "Tasks"; a "Matter objectives" field has been added; and each phase now includes columns for milestones, assumptions and phase type. The "Notes" column has been removed as unnecessary given the additional structured columns.
We anticipate that Process elements will grow significantly in future releases, both in the core vocabulary and in the range of process maps available.
The Information types facet defines concepts for describing categories of document and other material in which legally relevant information is found. Tab 5.0 of the taxonomy spreadsheet contains the core.
The facet works across two orthogonal dimensions, each captured in a separate extension pack.
A document's use classification is not fixed at creation. A final advice letter might be classified initially as work record > key; if later reviewed and endorsed by a knowledge lawyer, it becomes knowledge > good practice. This progression is a feature of the design, not an anomaly. The governance notes in XP5.1 address when and how promotion between use levels should be authorised.
The grid in tab "Grid 5.1 Type × Use" illustrates which type/use combinations are significant, using colour coding to indicate where meaningful examples exist and where a combination is unlikely to arise in practice.
To take one example: a final executed agreement is legal document (inf-1) by type. At matter level it is work record > key (inf-use-2). If subsequently curated as a useful precedent, it also carries knowledge > good practice (inf-use-4). The two use classifications coexist; the type does not change.
Two further extension packs cover status (draft, final, fluid) and intended audience (internal and external with sub-types of each).
We suggest enforcing:
The type and use classifications have a particular value in AI-assisted retrieval that goes beyond what the other facets provide. Work type, area of law and sector tell a retrieval system what kind of matter a piece of material relates to. Type and use tell it what kind of material it is and how much weight to give it.
This enables more discriminating pre-filtering of the corpus before a model processes it. A query about how to approach a particular transaction type can be directed first at canonical and good practice materials — the organisation's validated guidance — rather than across the full document store. A query that is specific to a client relationship or other context (e.g. a product line) can draw on contextual knowledge for that client alongside broader good practice material. Without use classifications, a model has no structured basis for making these distinctions and must either process everything or rely on its own judgement about what is authoritative.
The progression from contextual to good practice to canonical also means that the quality of the AI-accessible corpus improves incrementally as human review accumulates. Each endorsement decision enriches the structured layer from which the model draws. This is one of the more direct ways in which investment in knowledge governance compounds into AI performance over time, without requiring any change to the underlying model.