Open Legal Exchange is an open protocol for describing, connecting, and exchanging legal and governance data across systems — without requiring everyone to use the same platform.
Legal and governance data is trapped in silos. Referrals between attorneys are unstructured. Credentials are unverifiable across systems. Regulatory impact is invisible to the people who write the rules. OLE is the shared language that changes this.
Every governance system — from a solo attorney's referral to a planetary governance protocol — is composed of the same six building blocks.
Rule → Institution → Actor → Action → Impact → Feedback → Rule (amended)
An authoritative directive — statute, regulation, professional rule, bylaw, or contract — that creates, constrains, or authorizes governance activity.
A body authorized by rules to perform governance functions — law firms, bar associations, courts, agencies, and HOA boards.
Any participant — human, organizational, or artificial — operating within a governance system. AI agents are first-class OLE actors.
Any event within a governance system: referral, filing, vote, inspection, decision. Actions link actors, institutions, and rules.
Aggregated, anonymized, privacy-preserving signals derived from governance actions. Impact data never contains PII.
Structured signals flowing from impact data back to rulemaking. Feedback closes the governance loop — the rarest and most valuable primitive.
CLEAR is the first OLE module. It defines a structured, trackable, interoperable exchange model for legal referrals — the smallest possible implementation of the largest possible vision.
"Roxana gets an HOA call she can't handle. She refers it to Maria. CLEAR makes that referral structured, trackable, and interoperable."
| What CLEAR Defines | Details |
|---|---|
| Referral workflow | 5-stage workflow: Initiated → Sent → Acknowledged → Accepted/Declined → Closed |
| Status model | 14 defined statuses with transition rules and fork/termination paths |
| Resource set | Referral, Prospect, MatterSummary, StatusUpdate, FeeArrangement, DocumentReference |
| Participant roles | Originating Attorney, Receiving Attorney, Client/Prospect, Supervisor, Observer, AI Agent |
| API surface | 4 REST endpoints + webhook registration + 6 webhook event types |
| Consent | ConsentRecord required before personal data exchange |
OLE is designed for incremental adoption. Each level is independently useful. v0.1 defines conformance profiles for Pre-Tier (Packet) and Tier 1 (Exchange).
| Level | Name | Description | v0.1 Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Tier | Packet | Read and write OLE JSON files | v0.1 Profile |
| Tier 1 | Exchange | Send and receive via RESTful API | v0.1 Profile |
| Tier 2 | Identity | Verified actors with portable credential-backed identities | Planned v0.2 |
| Tier 3 | Platform | Vendor conformance declaration and interoperability | Planned v0.2 |
| Tiers 4–10 | Rules → Interoperability | Rules, impact, citizens, transparency, feedback, automation, interoperability | Future |
The architecture, data model, and API surface are stable. We are seeking feedback from attorneys, practice management vendors, bar associations, government technologists, AI governance practitioners, and anyone who believes the governance loop should be open.