Structuring Litigation Intelligence: Using SALI Claim Tags to Refine Your Radar Alerts

The landscape of litigation intelligence is changing—driven by a growing recognition that better data leads to better decisions.

When courts use inconsistent or highly general classifications—as is often the case across our fractured state court system—searching for relevant matters becomes a time-consuming and unreliable process.

That’s why Law.com Radar integrates the SALI civil claims taxonomy, a standardized system for classifying commercial civil litigation. By applying structured SALI tags across both federal and state court filings, Radar gives users a clearer, more actionable view of newly filed cases—making it easier to find what matters and filter out what doesn’t.

The Value of Standardized Claim Tags

State court data is notoriously inconsistent. A case that would be labeled “employment discrimination” in one jurisdiction might appear as simply “civil tort” in another. Even neighboring counties often use different naming conventions—or omit case types entirely. This lack of uniformity makes it difficult to rely on traditional search terms or court-supplied labels when setting up alerts or running litigation trend analyses.

SALI claim tags solve this problem.

SALI—the Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry—developed a shared taxonomy for describing legal matters in a consistent, machine-readable format. By applying these standardized labels to newly filed cases, Law.com Radar creates a structured foundation for searching, filtering, and integrating litigation data across jurisdictions.

Why SALI?

The decision to adopt the SALI civil claims taxonomy was not a difficult one. As long-time proponents of the SALI Alliance, the Law.com Radar team recognized its value: a structured, granular, and intuitive classification system for commercial civil litigation.

The SALI taxonomy offered several clear advantages:

• It was comprehensive enough to address a wide array of practice areas
  
  
• It was flexible enough to be implemented in a real-time alerting system
  
  
• It aligned with the Legal Matter Specification Standard (LMSS), a growing framework used by legal operations and technology systems to support interoperability

With those characteristics, SALI provided a foundation for Radar to standardize case types across state and federal courts—and offer new levels of search and filtering precision.

How SALI Tags Are Applied to Radar Case Data

Every new case in Law.com Radar is processed through an enrichment pipeline that combines machine learning, symbolic logic, and editorial review.

• A custom-trained machine learning model analyzes complaint text to identify relevant claims.
  
  
• A robust rule set is used to map court metadata to the appropriate SALI claim labels, providing standardized classification.
  
  
• Two rounds of editorial oversight ensure quality control and consistency, allowing Radar to deliver trustworthy, high-precision alerts.

Because Radar leverages the full text of complaints, users benefit from deeper and more reliable tagging than would be possible using docket metadata alone.

What the Integration Enables for Users

The inclusion of SALI labels directly improves the speed, relevance, and clarity of every interaction with Radar:

• More targeted alerts: Users can configure alerts using SALI claim types, ensuring they see only the categories of litigation that matter to them.
  
  
• Cleaner results: Users can easily exclude low-value or high-volume case types, reducing alert fatigue and sharpening focus.
  
  
• Quick-scan insight: SALI tags appear in alert emails and search results, helping users understand a case at a glance without needing to open the full complaint.
  
  
• Workflow integration: Because SALI is part of the LMSS (Legal Matter Specification Standard), Radar data can be more easily integrated into CRMs, dashboards, or other legal ops tools.

Together, these features support business development, litigation tracking, competitive monitoring and knowledge management activities.

Precision Without Compromise

For legal professionals, the promise of litigation monitoring has always been to act faster and smarter. But when alerts are built on unstructured, inconsistent data, that promise often goes unfulfilled.

SALI claim tags bring structure to litigation intelligence. And with Law.com Radar’s machine learning and editorial systems behind them, users gain a tool that’s not only more accurate—but also better aligned with how legal teams actually work.

Whether you’re tracking key clients, exploring emerging litigation trends, or scanning for new business opportunities, structured claim tagging gives you the clarity you need to move with confidence.