In today’s environment, where transparency and digital efficiency are fundamental to public institutions, decision-making bodies must ensure that their rulings are easily accessible, complete, and equitable.
The Washington Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) embraced this commitment to openness in partnership with Lexum, transforming how it disseminates its administrative decisions online.
By adopting Norma, Lexum’s all-in-one legal publishing platform, the PERC has modernized its decision management process and reinforced its public service mission — to facilitate understanding and application of public sector labor law.
💡 Note
PERC is the agency responsible for administering the State of Washington’s public sector labor relations laws. It oversees mediation, arbitration, and collective bargaining between public employers and unions.
By making its decisions publicly accessible online, PERC plays a vital role in conflict prevention, the development of public labor law, and the dissemination of consistent administrative jurisprudence.
Restoring Coherence and Visibility to a Fragmented Body of Decisions
Before adopting Norma, Washington PERC’s decisions were scattered across multiple sections of its website, sometimes with only basic or no search capabilities. Users often had to browse through several pages and document collections to find the information they needed — with no guarantee of completeness.
This fragmentation undermined the PERC’s core mission: to provide comprehensive and equitable access to the administrative decisions shaping public sector labor relations in Washington State.
To consolidate several decades of scattered decisions into a unified, searchable, and coherent system — without compromising the agency’s publishing autonomy.
A Technological Solution Centered on Accessibility and Autonomy
To meet this challenge, Washington PERC chose Norma, the platform developed by Lexum for courts and administrative bodies.
This solution enabled PERC to centralize, standardize, and publish all its decisions through a modern, high-performance website that it administers entirely on its own.
- Real-Time Publishing and Full Autonomy
Through Norma’s intuitive administration interface, PERC clerks and analysts can publish decisions directly online.
Official texts are made available as soon as they are rendered, and any correction can be applied instantly — ensuring both authenticity and timeliness.
- Comprehensive and Searchable Repository
All decisions issued since the mid-1970s have been consolidated into a single centralized portal, available at decisions.perc.wa.gov.
Users can now conduct comprehensive legal research across the entire historical corpus of the PERC.
- Powerful and Intuitive Search
Norma’s full-text search engine offers dynamic highlighting, autocomplete, and spell-correction features.
Searches can be refined using eight metadata fields: decision number, date, parties, decision-maker, case type, appeal status, cited legislation, and collection.
- Personalized Workspace and User Accounts
In addition to its advanced search capabilities, Norma provides PERC users with a personalized workspace through user accounts and the myNORMA environment. Users can save their queries, organize them into thematic folders, activate custom alerts, and track updates to the decisions that matter to them.
This intuitive interface allows users to stay informed, centralize their research, and tailor their experience to their needs — all while improving the efficiency of their legal information workflows.
- Flexible Formats and Neutral Citations
Each decision is available in HTML for interactive browsing, and in PDF to preserve the authentic appearance of the signed version.
A neutral citation (e.g., Decision 12563-A (PECB, 2016)) accompanies every document, ensuring standardized and long-lasting references.
- Universal Accessibility
The site complies with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA, ensuring equitable access for all users, including those with functional limitations.
Main interface of the decisions.perc.wa.gov website, powered by Norma by Lexum. It provides centralized access to Washington PERC’s decisions, allowing users to perform full-text searches, browse by decision type (arbitration, advisory opinions, etc.), and view recently added content.
Tangible Results for the Public Sector Labor Law Community
The implementation of Norma has significantly improved how PERC disseminates and enhances the value of its decisions.
- Greater Transparency and Democratic Access
Unions, public employers, legal professionals, and citizens now enjoy direct, fast, and comprehensive access to the PERC’s decisions.
This transparency fosters a better understanding of the decision-making process and strengthens trust in administrative institutions.
- Strengthening Administrative Law
By making decades of decisions fully searchable, PERC contributes to the development of a coherent body of public sector labor law.
Whether precedential or not, these decisions now serve as an essential reference source for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers alike.
- Efficiency and Institutional Independence
PERC now manages the entire publication process independently, from drafting to online publication, without relying on external vendors.
This autonomy results in a more agile, reliable, and sustainable management of its public data.
Detailed view of a Washington PERC decision displayed in the Norma interface. Each decision includes structured metadata (collection, date, case number, decision-maker, case type, and applicable law) and provides simultaneous access to HTML and PDF formats.
A Reference Public Agency
By adopting Norma, the Washington Employment Relations Commission has established itself as a model of innovation and transparency among U.S. administrative agencies.
This initiative demonstrates that even with limited resources, it is possible to modernize legal information dissemination using purpose-built tools and a user-centered approach.
By embracing best practices in legal publishing — completeness, accessibility, and responsiveness — PERC is setting the standard for a modern, open, and efficient public administration.
Access Washington PERC’s decisions:
