PULSE (Protocol for Unified Legal Services) protocol is a way to enable the discovery and engagement of various legal services through an interoperable API specification to scale citizen access to justice. It eliminates the need for multiple integrations and facilitates seamless information exchange among justice delivery institutions and legal service providers.
Discovering information and services that are contextual, localized, and issue-specific within the legal domain is complex and inefficient. Recognizing this, a group of volunteers has designed the PULSE protocol, an adaptation of the Beckn Protocol, to enable the discovery and engagement of various legal services through an interoperable API specification. PULSE is openly available and community-owned. It enables seamless access to justice by allowing ecosystems to and institutions to connect with multiple legal service providers. Implementing PULSE reduces the need for multiple one-to-one integrations, ensuring continuous sharing of status and updates between service providers and users. The first use case for PULSE has been created using inputs from the Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) community to enable the discovery of multiple Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) from a single window. ODR is a mechanism to resolve disputes through the use of electronic communication technology. It often uses alternative dispute resolution (ADR) tools such as mediation, conciliation, and arbitration. This mechanism not only provides citizens access to efficient and effective dispute resolution mechanisms, it also supports the formal court system by reducing the number of disputes that go to court, in turn helping address pendency in courts.ODR is a wide field and can be applied across sectors, dispute types, and jurisdictions for speedier, affordable, accessible dispute resolution. Although the current version of PULSE enables easy discovery and engagement with multiple ODR service providers, it has been designed to be adaptable for making discovery and engagement interoperable across categories of legal services.
| Version | Release Date | Adaptation to Core Spec Version | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.1.1 | 26th September, 2023 | 1.1.0 | Ravi Prakash |
| 0.1.0 | 24th September, 2023 | 1.1.0 | Ravi Prakash |
| Name | Role | Github Username |
|---|---|---|
| Ravi Prakash | Maintainer, Protocol Architect | @ravi-prakash-v |
| Pramod Varma | Maintainer, Reviewer | @pramodkvarma |
| Keerthana Medarametla | Subject Matter Expert | @kee1912 |
| Smrithi Sundararajan | Subject Matter Expert | @simi-sundararajan |
| Aishwarya Dixit | Subject Matter Expert | - |
| Dr. Sravani Reddy Kuncharam | Subject Matter Expert | - |
| Rajeesh Menon | Volunteer, Global Ecosystem Enablement | - |
To understanding how to implement the specification click here
The author(s) of this specification would like to thank the following volunteers for their contribution to the development of this specification
- Keerthana Medarametla - Agami
- Smrithi Sundararajan - Agami
- Aishwarya Dixit - Deloitte
- Dr. Sravani Reddy Kuncharam - Deloitte