The noslegal taxonomy gives organisations a shared language for describing legal work, giving legal, compliance and risk teams a structured, standards-based foundation and a practical answer to the “IA before AI” challenge.

Co-Flo Enterprise, the cloud-native operations management suite built for corporate service teams, and noslegal, the not-for-profit open source legal data standards community, today announced that Co-Flo Enterprise can deploy the noslegal taxonomy as a native standard within its platform. The move means that legal, compliance and risk teams using Co-Flo Enterprise can now deploy a recognised, internationally neutral data structure from the outset, without the overhead of building one from scratch.

Co-Flo Enterprise can embed the noslegal taxonomy directly into its template architecture. Organisations have the ability to deploy noslegal-aligned work types, lookup tables, metadata fields and dashboards as a ready-to-use structure within Co-Flo Enterprise, removing the need to start from a blank sheet and ensuring that data is consistent and well-structured from day one.

The Case for Structure First

There is a growing consensus that AI is only as useful as the data it works with. Inconsistently labelled, poorly structured information produces unreliable outputs, regardless of how capable the underlying model is. For legal and compliance teams, where accuracy and auditability matter, this is not a theoretical risk.

The principle of “Information Architecture before Artificial Intelligence” (IA before AI) reflects this directly. Before organisations can measure, automate or accelerate legal work, they need a shared language for describing it. noslegal provides that language. Co-Flo puts it to work.

Graeme Johnston, founder of noslegal, said, “The noslegal taxonomy was built to give organisations a practical, neutral starting point for describing legal work. One that is simple enough to be useful across different legal systems, sectors and organisation types. The modular design means you can adopt what is relevant, extend where needed, and keep things mapped to a shared standard. Seeing it available in a platform like Co-Flo, where it can be deployed into a working environment rather than just downloaded and left to one side, is exactly the kind of real-world adoption we are excited about.”

The noslegal taxonomy covers the key facets of legal work: work types, areas of law, sectors, participants, jurisdictions, information assets and more, in a way that is deliberately simple, jurisdiction-agnostic and freely available to all. It has been developed collaboratively since 2020, with input from major law firms, in-house legal teams and technology companies across the world. Version 4 of the taxonomy was released on 7 May 2026, with refinements to work types, areas of law, roles and information types among the highlights.

How It Works in Co-Flo Enterprise

Co-Flo Enterprise’s architecture is built on top of iManage, around a hierarchy of entities, work types and workspaces that mirrors the way legal and compliance work progresses from intake through execution to outcome. The noslegal taxonomy maps naturally into this structure.

Organisations interested in Co-Flo Enterprise can deploy noslegal-aligned templates that include the relevant work types, metadata fields, lookup values and associated dashboards. The result is a working environment that is structured, reportable and ready to connect to AI-enabled processes from the outset, with the flexibility to extend or adapt the taxonomy to suit specific organisational needs, while keeping it mapped to the noslegal standard.

Because Co-Flo Enterprise extends iManage Work, the industry leading work management platform, trusted by 80% of the world’s leading law firms and over 1,400 leading legal and compliance departments, the noslegal taxonomy sits within an environment that already underpins how legal teams store, manage and secure their most important work.

Matteo Pagani, CEO and founder of Co-Flo, said, “We think of legal as sitting at the centre of everything in a corporate organisation. It is the work that lawyers do that connects a business process to a vendor, a customer, an employee, or a regulator. Without structure around that work, risk accumulates and inconsistency creeps in. A shared taxonomy gives every team a common language, and that uniformity is what turns legal into a function that actively manages risk rather than just reacts to it. The noslegal taxonomy gives teams a solid, accepted starting point for getting that structure in place and Co-Flo Enterprise makes it straightforward to deploy.

AI is a capability within a broader business process. It shortens cycle time on specific tasks. But without a well-structured process and well-structured data underneath it, AI cannot deliver what it promises. This is about getting that foundation right.”

The In-House Perspective

The problem noslegal and Co-Flo Enterprise are addressing together is one that in-house legal teams have faced for years. Building a working taxonomy for matter management or legal operations has typically meant starting from nothing, with results that rarely transferred across organisations or stood up over time.

Elizabeth (Libbie) Evans, noslegal contributor and former Head of Legal Operations, said, “When I was building a taxonomy for matter management at a large financial institution, there was no recognised standard to work from that connected legal work to its business purpose. Every organisation was inventing its own and the results were rarely consistent or transferable. noslegal changes that. The fact that it can now be deployed in Co-Flo Enterprise, with the right structure, metadata and reporting built in from the start, is a real step forward for in-house legal teams who want to spend less time on data housekeeping and more time on the work that matters.”

About noslegal

noslegal started in 2020 as an informal group of people who believed their work, their organisations, and the legal sector more broadly would benefit from better, but simple, ways to categorise legal work and related things. It operates on a non-commercial, open source basis and its motto is ‘open source legal for all of us.’

The noslegal taxonomy is freely available to download, use, adapt and redistribute with no strings attached. All content is licensed under Apache 2.0 permissive open source terms. The community includes contributors from major law firms, in-house legal teams, legal technology companies and data governance consultancies across the UK, Europe and beyond.

For more information visit www.noslegal.org