Your groceries were scanned with a bar code, but how about your legal services? Metaphorically speaking, that's what the Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry (SALI) Alliance is attempting to do. The association seeks to standardize legal language to help the legal industry spend less time deciphering organization-specific descriptions of services.

On Dec. 10, SALI announced the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) joined SALI as a managing member. ILTA says there's a great opportunity for wider adoption when pairing the new standard with legal tech implementation.

SALI seeks to standardize how outside and in-house counsel define a legal service's practice, jurisdiction of matter and process, while still accommodating a matter's complexity. They want to standardize that language to allow corporate clients to better track and measure the work performed by their counsel.

"Standardizing keeps people on the same page about what you are talking about," said ILTA operations vice president Corey Simpson. Without it, "you end up spending the billable hour level settling what you are talking about."

ILTA joins the Association of Legal Administrators and Legal Marketing Association as SALI founding members. According to Simpson, adopting new standards represent "a kismet opportunity" to improve legal services and "legal tech is at a point that the standards, change and adoption, lines up pretty well."

Simpson explained that adopting new standards for legal services doesn't generate revenue or lower costs by themselves, which may prevent organizations from investing time into implementing them. Instead, the easiest route to widespread adoption to a new standard is to pair it with another change, specifically rolling out a new legal tech system. 

"When mirroring up an activity with rolling out the standards, there's a greater chance of success in it being implemented," Simpson said.

For legal tech developers, standard legal language could also eliminate technical discrepancies, he added.

"From a tech perspective, as systems become more integrated, by having a standard already in place, others are using it and increasing the interoperability between those systems."

One of the first legal tech systems that could be standardized could be matter management technology, Simpson said.

He added that less common technology might face two significant hurdles in becoming standardized. First, resources are limited, which is a challenge insofar as standardization doesn't lower costs or generate revenue. Secondly, one needs to convince and demonstrate to staff why they should have a vested interest in a standard, Simpson noted.

If there's buy-in, standardized legal language could improve a common process in a law firm and an emerging trend in corporate legal departments.

SALI committee member and Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass legal project management director Jim Hannigan noted law firms have traditionally housed most in-depth data regarding legal services provided and their outcome. In contrast, corporate legal departments are just beginning to collect detailed data on legal services.

"What we've seen is the resources internally tend to be billing analytics [and] invoice analytics," Hannigan said. "It's taking some time to understand the containers for all this stuff and it needs to be defined well."