what's next?

From now up to Feb 2022

We're currently focusing on publishing the following taxonomy materials in early Feb 2022:

1. legal places 
2. legal work 

Our intention is for the publication to include

• Material in machine-readable form
• User-friendly guides to the why, what and how (to implement)
• Suggested design patterns

We decided in October 2021 to focus our effort on these rather than on the legal contexts taxonomy because we concluded that

• many of the needs of commercial law firms to record such context can be met via the various sectoral and industry taxonomies which they already use - though there may be scope for agreeing some best practices for these in future
• it is necessary to involve a wider range of stakeholders before progressing non-commercial contexts if our work on that is to be relevant and widely adopted

What comes after Feb 2022?

We expect to focus as a priority on

• Adoption of legal places and legal work
• Continuously improving the why, what and how guides in light of early adoption experience
• Seeking feedback on the taxonomy and design patterns and starting to develop v2 of these

We also expect to explore

• Extensions of legal places and legal work once initial adoption is under way 
• Appetite for developing legal contexts once we have enough committed people involved with sufficient perspectives to give an acceptable prospect of achieving something useful
• Looking at other projects - we are in the early stages of one non-taxonomy project already. Another project has also been proposed and we are considering it. See the hello world article for how we assess these.

Topics we plan to avoid

Topics which we don't currently intend to develop include

• legal conceptual distinctions of the types found in textbooks and legal research databases - there are plenty of those and our focus is different
• classifications of local or sectoral interest - though we're happy to coordinate with groups interested in doing so
• time recording codes and related topics within the US LEDES / UTBMS schemes and their English litigation offshoot -  though again, happy to coordinate

One thing we can't emphasise enough is that we want to collaborate fruitfully with other similarly motivated projects so that we can all achieve useful things together.