Credits

OLPN started as a small experiment in 2025 and grew from there. The specification, the reference resolver, and the first implementations were built by a group of lawyers, developers, and legal-publishing people who wanted a better way to cite and verify professional claims online than the proprietary directory models that dominate the industry.

Founding contributors

• Nick Carroll — protocol, reference resolver, docs, publish.law platform.
• Jed Cain — early contributor, legal-industry perspective.
• Brandon Smith — early contributor.

Founding supporters

The OLPN Founding Supporters program recognizes early supporters who underwrote the launch of the network. The live list is at olpn.org/supporters.

Implementations in the wild

• publish.law — managed attorney-site platform, first integrated OLPN host.
• olpn.org — reference resolver and protocol home.

If you ship an OLPN implementation, open an issue and we'll add it here.

Inspiration and prior art

OLPN's back-link model is the same pattern that WebFinger, rel=me, and the Web's decentralized identity movement have used for years. The credential format borrows from the conceptual structure of Verifiable Credentials without the signature complexity. The narrow scope and file-based design draw from RSS, sitemaps, and robots.txt: formats that succeeded because they were almost trivial to implement.

OLPN exists because none of those predecessors was quite right for the legal-industry use case. Firms and bar associations needed a way to attest, individuals needed a way to be attested, and readers needed a way to check. The protocol is just the minimum set of documents and rules to make that verification possible without a central authority.

License

Protocol documents and reference implementations are open-licensed. Exact terms are in the repo's LICENSE file. The short version: use it, build on it, ship it, credit it.