Standards for Legal Data

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Connecting legal data with universal standards.

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About SOLI

What is SOLI?

SOLI is an open, CC-BY licensed standard designed to represent universal elements of legal data, improving communication and data interoperability across the legal industry.

What is an ontology?

An ontology, often referred to as a knowledge graph, is a structured representation of concepts and their relationships.

What is a taxonomy?

A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system that organizes concepts into categories and subcategories.

SOLI's approach

SOLI combines the power of ontology and taxonomy to create a comprehensive way to describe legal information.

Key Features

The SOLI Standard

Comprehensive

The SOLI standard includes over 18,000 standardized concepts covering a wide range of legal concepts, including both common and specialized terms.

Unique Identifiers

Every concept in SOLI is assigned a unique IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier), ensuring unambiguous identification and consistent data representation.

Multilingual Support

Translations and country-specific spellings for global accessibility and cross-border legal work, including support for the ten most common languages.

Open Development

The SOLI standard is developed collaboratively in the open by legal professionals, technologists, and domain experts, ensuring broad industry input and adoption.

SOLI Users

Who Benefits from SOLI?

Law Firms

Law firms can standardize information across their matter management, document management, and timekeeping systems and share this information with clients and partners.

Corporate Legal Departments

Corporate legal departments can use SOLI to harmonize their systems of record, to improve data quality and consistency, and to facilitate better information sharing with their service providers.

Legal Service Providers

Legal service providers can use SOLI to improve the quality of their services, to streamline their operations, and to enhance their ability to integrate with their clients' systems.

Legal Technology Providers

Legal technology providers can use SOLI to improve the interoperability of their solutions, to safeguard the results of their generative AI, and to create innovative new products and services.

Courts

Courts can use SOLI to improve the quality of their case management systems, to facilitate data sharing between jurisdictions, and to enable the development of e-filing systems.

Legislators and Regulators

Legislators and regulators can use SOLI to improve the quality of their drafting, to facilitate the interpretation of their laws, and to enable the development of regulatory technology solutions.

Legal Educators

Legal educators can use SOLI to improve the quality of their teaching materials, to facilitate the development of legal tech curricula, and to enable the development of legal tech research projects.

Researchers

Researchers can use SOLI and SOLI-annotated data to improve the quality of their research, to facilitate the sharing of their data, and to enable the development of new tools like legal search engines or AI models.

Use Cases

SOLI Use Cases

SOLI is designed to be immediately useful and usable for many use cases.

Contract Management

Yes, SOLI can be used to standardize data with CLM systems. SOLI can even be used to annotate the text of contracts themselves, making them machine-readable and directly linked to CLMs or other relationships available through the SOLI knowledge graph.

Greener Acres Lease

This Lease Agreement (the "Agreement") is made and entered into as of January 3rd, 2020 , by and between:

Acme, Inc. , hereinafter referred to as the "Lessor",

and

Emca LLC , hereinafter referred to as the "Lessee".

WITNESSETH:

WHEREAS, Lessor is the owner of certain real property being, lying and situated in the County of Anytown, State of ST, and legally described as follows: real property having a street address of 123 Main Street, Anytown, ST 12345 .

The term of this Lease shall begin on February 1st, 2020, and shall continue until January 31st, 2021, unless earlier terminated as provided herein.

Case Management

SOLI can also be used to standardize data with case or matter management systems, either at record level or in the text of documents like complaints, motions, or orders.

Case Number: 2020-12345
Case Status: Smith v. Jones
Areas of Law:
  • Franchise
Role:
  • Appellant
  • Plaintiff
Actions:
Case Number: 2019-3456
Case Status: Doe v. Acme et al.
Areas of Law:
  • Employment
Role:
  • Defendant
Actions:

Generative AI

SOLI is also useful in generative AI applications, where its rich, expert-vetted knowledge graph can be used to improve the quality and coverage of AI-generated results.

# Types
<TYPES>
{"C Corporation", "S Corporation", ...}
</TYPES>
          
          
# Instructions
Please classify the Entity below as exactly one of the TYPES provided above.

# Entity
bobs hotdogs llc d/b/a bobs hamburgers

# Classification
```json
...

Implement SOLI

Explore

Learn about SOLI through our documentation, tutorials, GitHub, or WebProtege platform.

Integrate

Use the SOLI OWL data or API to integrate legal data standards into your systems and services.

Collaborate

Share your experiences, feedback, and contributions with the SOLI community to help improve the standard.

SOLI Implementation Steps

Frequently Asked Questions

Learn more about SOLI and its impact on legal technology.

What is the SOLI knowledge graph?

The SOLI knowledge graph is a comprehensive ontology providing over 18,000 standardized tags for legal concepts. It serves as the foundation for all work involving SOLI, enabling consistent representation of legal information.

How does SOLI ensure data consistency?

SOLI uses unique identifiers (IRIs) for each tag, which are used consistently across API calls and responses in the legal tech ecosystem. This ensures that different systems can accurately interpret and exchange legal data.

Is SOLI suitable for small law firms or legal tech startups?

Absolutely! SOLI is designed to benefit public and private organizations of all sizes. For small firms and startups, it provides a robust, pre-built framework for organizing legal information, saving time and resources in development while ensuring compatibility with other legal tech solutions.

How can I contribute to SOLI's development?

SOLI follows an open development process on GitHub. During public review periods, you can submit suggestions, report issues, or propose new concepts to be included in the taxonomy. This collaborative approach ensures that SOLI continues to meet the evolving needs of the legal industry.

What makes SOLI more than just a list of legal terms?

SOLI provides a structured knowledge graph that includes authoritative definitions, recognizes synonyms, supports multi-language translations, and establishes relationships between related legal concepts. This comprehensive approach promotes clarity and consistency in legal data, facilitating global collaboration and communication.

How does SOLI support advanced AI in legal technology?

SOLI's knowledge graph enables a hybrid approach between human-curated top-down ontologies and neural networks like Large Language Models (LLMs). This combination helps improve the reliability and relevance of AI-generated legal insights, leveraging both structured knowledge and advanced machine learning techniques.

Who is involved in developing and maintaining SOLI?

SOLI is the collective work of expert volunteers and contributors whose discussion and work are conducted in the open on GitHub, WebProtege, and our community forums. This diverse group includes legal professionals, technologists, domain experts, and other stakeholders who share a common goal of improving legal data standards.

How can I access and implement SOLI updates?

All SOLI standards are made available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License. This permissive open source model allows organizations to easily use, integrate with, and contribute to SOLI.

18,000+
Standardized Tags
10+
Supported Languages
100+
Industry Adopters

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