Legal Help Commons

Standards and Specifications

The shared vocabularies, data standards, and document specifications that every workflow and every tool in the Commons builds on. The functional agenda and the conformance standards for a particular workflow live with that workflow, and the ones for a particular tool live with that tool.

Vocabularies and data standards Document specifications Where the workflow and tool documents are
Vocabularies and data standards

The Shared Infrastructure Underneath

These standards define how legal help data is organized, how legal issues are classified, and what tasks providers and users perform. Every workflow and tool in the Commons depends on them.

Legal Help Knowledge Standard v0.1 Draft

How to organize information about legal help organizations, the services they offer, and the content available to the public. Shared field names, categories, and values so one organization's data can be found and used by another. Use this to structure your articles, guides, FAQs, and service directories so AI tools can use them reliably.

Read the Knowledge Standard →
Taxonomy Crosswalks → Content Index Standard → Organizations schema → Services schema →

LIST: Legal Issues Taxonomy

A standardized vocabulary of the specific legal problems people experience: eviction, wage theft, child custody, debt collection, and hundreds more. Used to classify what kind of help someone needs and to connect them with the right resources and services.

See the LIST taxonomy at taxonomy.legal ↗

Legal Help Task Taxonomy

A catalog of the specific activities that providers and users perform when dealing with a legal problem: answering questions, classifying issues, reading documents, calculating deadlines, preparing filings, and more. Use this to identify where AI can help and what to measure.

See the Task Taxonomy on JusticeBench ↗
Document specifications

What Each Kind of Document Is

A working group writes the same two documents for every workflow it takes on, so a builder reading one knows how to read the next. These pages say what each kind of document contains, how it is versioned, and how to comment on one.

About functional agendas

What a functional agenda is, what belongs in it and what does not, how capabilities are numbered and cited, what the levels mean, and how a version is published and superseded. Read this before writing one or before reviewing one.

Read about functional agendas →
Where the rest of the documents are

The Agenda and the Standards for One Workflow

The functional agenda and the conformance standards for a particular workflow sit on that workflow's page, beside the rest of its package, so somebody working on eviction notices reads them in context rather than hunting through a list. The same is true for a shared tool.

See the workflows and their documents → See the shared tools and their documents →
How these standards work together. The Knowledge Standard defines how legal help content is organized. The LIST taxonomy classifies the legal problems people face. The Task Taxonomy catalogs what providers and users do. The functional agendas define what tools should do to help with those tasks. The conformance standards test whether the tools do it well enough. Each layer builds on the others.
Open specifications, not vendor endorsements. The Commons does not approve or rank products. It defines what the field needs, publishes the specification, and tests whether implementations meet it. Any builder, vendor, or organization can build to the specification. Conformance results are published on JusticeBench.