Getting started

1. Find the tag

Start from the branch browser if you know roughly where a concept sits, or search if you have a phrase. Search covers labels first and synonyms on request, which matters because much of the standard’s usefulness is in its 63,137 alternative names — Motion to Dismiss also being Demurrer and MTD.

Every tag has a permanent page. The one you want looks like:

https://lmss.io/tag/R8AC0Iq3zua7VGgBd0jCBtz/

That page shows the definition, every synonym, every ancestry path, the children, and the IRI to store.

2. Pull it into your system

Each tag page has a JSON twin:

https://lmss.io/api/v2/tag/R8AC0Iq3zua7VGgBd0jCBtz.json

For anything beyond a lookup, take the branch or the full dump instead of fetching tags one at a time — see the API. A typical first integration loads one branch, usually Area of Law, into a local table with iri, label, parent and definition columns.

3. Store the IRI

Add a column for the IRI on your matter table, or a join table if a matter can carry several tags from the same branch, which it usually can. Keep the label alongside it for display, and treat that copy as a cache you refresh, not as the key.

4. Query it back

Expand the hierarchy before you match. This is the step that gets missed. Someone asking for Corporate Law matters expects everything underneath it too. Build a descendant lookup from the children arrays in the JSON, then match against the expanded set.

Without that expansion, a matter tagged Business Organizations Law will not appear in a search for Corporate Law, and the tagging will look broken when it is not.

5. Keep it current

The standard moves. Pin a version, record which one you loaded, and refresh deliberately — every JSON response here carries the exact upstream commit it was generated from, so you can tell what you are running against.

If you are migrating data tagged under LMSS 1.0, start at the crosswalk.