An initiative to develop a standard language to describe legal matters across the industry has named Microsoft Corp. as its first official user.
The Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry Alliance announced Microsoft had begun a trial implementation of the new standard legal language during a meeting at legal tech gathering ILTACON in Orlando, Fla.
Standard Legal Language could lead to better comparisons of law firms’ pricing and performance
An initiative to develop a standard language to describe legal matters across the industry has named Microsoft Corp. as its first official user.
The Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry Alliance announced Microsoft had begun a trial implementation of the new standard legal language during a meeting at legal tech gathering ILTACON in Orlando, Fla.
SALI was formally established in May 2017 and has said that standard description of legal work, similar to the universal product code, will help clients better track the work being done by their in-house lawyers and outside law firms. Ultimately, it could lead to better comparisons of law firms’ pricing and performance.
At Microsoft, implementing a portion of SALI’s standard taxonomy for legal matters is seen as a way to help the tech giant better categorize its legal work, Rebecca Benavides, the company’s director of legal business, told Bloomberg Law. That could ultimately help the company match legal matters with in-house lawyers or outside law firms that have the most experience in that area, Benavides said.
“We are more and more asked to think about how we enable our teams to make data-driven decisions about how they engage with outside counsel and how they do their work,” she said. She noted SALI taxonomy will help Microsoft legal teams to the extent that it can create cleaner data models for them to leverage. [read more]
