Court Code Contribution Helps to Promote Industry Innovation and Access to Justice

CHICAGO, June 27, 2019 — The Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry (SALI) Alliance and Free Law Project announced today the contribution of a U.S. court taxonomy to the SALI Alliance for use in emerging legal industry standards. The SALI Alliance is developing the Legal Matter Specification Standard (LMSS), a free, open standard, which seeks to provide a common language that buyers and sellers of legal services can use to enable more efficient delivery of legal services, and better access to justice.

"Lack of standards adds friction and costs to the delivery of legal services," said Mike Lissner, President of Free Law Project. "We are happy to work with the SALI Alliance and contribute the court codes to foster innovation and efficiency that can expand access to legal services to more people." Free Law Project taxonomy defines unique codes for all U.S. federal courts and top-level state courts.

"A challenge for any standard is getting adoption. Free Law Project court codes are used by millions of publicly available documents that can be freely accessed through from the CourtListener website and RECAP Archive," said Adam Stock, Cheif Information Officer at Allen Matkins and SALI LMSS Committee Co-Chair. "The adoption of this code set adds value to anyone adopting the SALI coding standard and removes an impediment to using available court case information.”

The SALI Alliance is an independent standards organization of law firms, companies, legal industry service providers, legal industry associations, and academic institutions. The SALI Alliance was formed to ensure that all stakeholders important to legal industry had a voice in solving the industry’s problems.

"Our goal is to build and maintain an authoritative set of free codes for courts internationally," said Toby Brown, Chief Practice Management Officer at Perkins Coie and SALI Alliance Board Member.  "Free Law Project court codes will form the foundation of this effort."

Any company or organization can become a member at www.sali.org. Members can participate in defining the legal services market through regular SALI standard committee meetings. Membership tiers are offered for clients, law firms, solution providers and other industry stakeholders.

About Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry (SALI) Alliance

The Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry (SALI) Alliance promotes an inclusive industry neutral standard for the progress of legal industry transparency, efficiency and innovation. It was founded by Legal Marketing Association and Association of Legal Administrators. Its mission is to create a common language for all participants for the delivery of modern legal services. Learn more at www.sali.org or on Twitter at @SALIalliance.

About Free Law Project

Free Law Project is a California non-profit public benefit corporation and a federally-recognized 501(c)(3) public charity whose goal is to make the legal ecosystem more efficient through technology and information. Among other efforts, Free Law Project hosts the CourtListener website and the RECAP initiative. Together, CourtListener and RECAP make millions of legal decisions and documents available to the public via a simple website, uploads to the Internet Archive, APIs, database sharing, and custom data services.

For more information, contact

• Kat Seiffert, Legal Marketing Association at kseiffert@legalmarketing.org or 312.673.4742, or
• Oliver Yandle, J.D., CAE, Association of Legal Administrators at OYandle@alanet.org or 847.267.1570
• Mike Lissner, Free Law Project, mike@free.law