IT consultant Neil Cameron, addressing a recent conference on legal portals, enthusiastically advocated a firm-wide taxonomy-based approach to portal implementation. The question many legal IT professionals are asking is “Which taxonomy?” Should they design their own taxonomy from scratch, or should they base it on an off-the-shelf solution?
The idea of a standardised taxonomy is not new. Many firms already take the view that a standardised taxonomy for legal subjects or topics exists. They use the Legal Thesaurus originally developed in the 1980s – primarily for the Legal Journals Index – by Christine Miskin at Legal Information Resources (LIR). The taxonomy was adopted by many City law librarians and further developed when LIR came under the aegis of Sweet & Maxwell for both Current Law and later Westlaw UK.
