Now Live: Standardised Matter Plans, Streamed Straight Into Your Practice Management System

For as long as the Open Matter Plans Network has existed, our matter plans have lived on a website. You could read them, search them, suggest changes to them, and pull them one at a time through the API. But the plan and the place you actually run your matters - your practice management system - were still two separate worlds. Today we close that gap. Matter plans now stream directly into your practice management system, so the standardised, community-reviewed workflow for a matter type appears where you open the matter, not in a browser tab beside it.

We have spent years answering one question: how should a legal matter be run? The registry now maps the stages, tasks, deadlines, and practitioner traps of hundreds of matter types across five countries, each one tagged to the SALI taxonomy and kept current by the practitioners who use it. Streaming is the step that puts all of that work inside the systems firms already sit in every day.

What We Have Launched

A keyed API now streams the full registry into any practice management system that connects to it. It is not a one-off export or a nightly dump you have to reconcile. Your system holds an account key, asks the network for plans, and receives them structured and ready to use. Each plan arrives carrying more than its stages and tasks:

• The guidance that tells you when to reach for it - the "use this plan when" description that distinguishes one matter type from its near neighbours
• A link straight back to the plan on the network, so anyone in the firm can open the full public page in a click
• A deep link to suggest a change, so the practitioner who spots a problem can raise it from inside the system they are working in
• Its lineage - whether a plan was forked from another, and how many forks it has spawned, so you can see the parent and its variants at a glance
• The SALI area of law, process, and party role tags that let your system file, filter, and route the plan correctly

Plans stream in, but the conversation flows back out. A plan that lands in your PMS is not a dead copy - it points home. When practice changes and the plan needs to catch up, the link to raise a suggestion travels with it, so the feedback loop that keeps the registry honest reaches all the way into the systems where the work happens.

One Field Vocabulary, Shared by Every Plan

A matter plan is only as useful as the data it can bind to. If "property address" means one thing in one plan and something subtly different in the next, every integration becomes a translation exercise. So alongside the plans, we now stream a shared field vocabulary - the standardised set of matter variables each plan expects, defined once and reused everywhere.

The vocabulary is layered, not flat. A base set defines the fields common to every matter - the parties, the dates, the identifiers. A practice-area layer adds the fields a whole area of law needs, such as the lot, plan, and settlement details that every conveyancing matter shares. An individual plan can then add or refine the handful of fields unique to it. Each layer extends the one above it, and a more specific layer overrides a more general one, so a plan inherits everything sensible by default and only states what makes it different.

Built for Any PMS, Proven with EPMS

The streaming API is vendor-neutral by design. Any practice management system, e-billing tool, or legal AI workflow that can hold a key and speak JSON can consume the registry - list the catalogue, pull the latest version of a plan, resolve a field set, and link its users back to the network. We proved it against a live practice management system first, so the endpoints are shaped by real integration rather than a whiteboard, but nothing about them is specific to one vendor.

Why This Matters

For too long, the workflow for a matter has been whatever a PMS vendor happened to build - proprietary, static, and impossible to shape from the outside. Streaming flips that. The plans your firm runs on can now be the open, peer-reviewed, SALI-aligned ones the whole profession maintains, delivered into the system you already use, and answerable to the practitioners who rely on them.

• No more rebuilding the same matter workflow inside every new system - pull the community-reviewed plan and run it
• No more plans drifting out of date in a vendor template nobody owns - your system asks for the latest version and gets it
• No more translating matter data plan by plan - one shared, layered field vocabulary maps it once
• No more choosing between a workflow you control and one that stays current - the feedback loop reaches into your PMS, so you get both

“The shape of a matter should not be dictated by whichever system you happen to open it in. Now it is not. The same plans, the same standard, and the same community that keeps them honest, delivered wherever you do the work.”

- OMPN Team

This is the roadmap arriving on schedule. Matter plans and their field mappings are live and streaming today; the precedents and document assemblies we launched for conveyancers ride the same rails; and the long-term goal is unchanged - the whole of legal work, standardised and interoperable, owned by the profession rather than any one vendor.

Want to see what streams before you build against it? Browse the plans in the registry, or explore the shared field vocabulary your integration will bind to.

And if you run these matters every day, the feedback loop is yours to drive. Join the community that governs the registry and tell us where a plan needs to catch up with practice - now from inside your PMS as well as on the site.