As at early July 2026. Developments are currently moving fast – this article is updated on an ongoing basis.
Anyone still using Juris-M will probably have noticed by now: synchronisation with the Zotero servers no longer works. This means that the Zotero fork for legal and multilingual citation has finally reached the point that many have feared for years. At the same time, for the first time, there is a concrete prospect of key Juris-M functions returning to the current version of Zotero – in the form of a plugin that has been developing rapidly over the last few weeks. But let's start at the beginning.
What happened
Juris-M (formerly known as Multilingual Zotero, MLZ) is a fork of Zotero that Frank Bennett has been developing for many years. It introduced two features that Zotero still lacks today: genuine support for legal sources, including jurisdictions and courts, and multilingual fields for names and titles. This was made possible by the CSL-M style language, an extension of the standard CSL.
The problem: the latest version of Juris-M was released years ago, and the developer has withdrawn from the project. As long as the client was still able to communicate with the Zotero server, it was manageable. That is now no longer the case – in two stages:
- January 2026: With Zotero 8, new fields were introduced into the data model. Older clients – which, for all intents and purposes, includes Juris-M – were no longer able to download changes from the server from that point onwards.
- June 2026: Zotero 9 introduced a new authentication method. Since then, older clients have been unable to log in to Sync at all – with the brief exception immediately following a password reset.
Consequently, the Zotero forums are seeing an increasing number of threads from Juris-M users whose libraries are becoming disorganised – for example, this thread on whether Juris-M is still active at all. The Zotero developers are clear on this point: unless a new release is issued, Juris-M should be considered abandoned.
Is the project still alive?
A little bit. On the Juris-M Discord server discussions are still ongoing, but no new Juris-M release has emerged from them for years. As things stand, anyone waiting for a “Juris-M for Zotero 9” will be waiting in vain. The exciting developments are taking place elsewhere instead – specifically right there, on that Discord server: as a plugin for the standard version of Zotero.
Indigobook-Phoenix: Juris-M functions as a Zotero plugin
With the release of indigobook-phoenix we now have a plugin (in alpha) that replicates the central Juris-M functionalities in Zotero (Version 8 and up). It started as a purely US-focused project being based on the IndigoBook, the freely available US citation standard for legal sources. However, the name is now somewhat misleading: since the end of June, the developer has been working alongside the European style maintainer Georg Duffner (which, amongst other things, maintains the Juris-M versions of the Austrian AZR) is working on making the plugin multi-jurisdictional – and the progress is remarkable. As of early July, the following is already working:
- Free choice of jurisdiction: A picker in the entry window allows you to select any jurisdiction, including the corresponding court – no longer limited to US courts. This is the core feature of CSL-M.
- Juris-M styles, including style modules: The jurisdiction-specific style modules from the Juris-M repository have been bundled and are being applied correctly. In tests, for example, JM AZR (Austria) and JM IBFD (international tax law) are already producing correct citations – including English court names in the IBFD style (“AT: OGH [Supreme Court], …”).
- Parallel citations: The same decision cited in several sources is correctly consolidated (“OGH 2 Ob 328/97t = ecolex 692 = JBl 54 = SZ 71/21”) – using Zotero’s standard “Related Entries” function.
- Annotated decisions: The CSL-M participant type ‘Commenter’ (comments on decisions by glossators) is supported.
- Juris-M data remains accessible: The data saved by Juris-M in the ‘Extra’ field
mlzsync1is read and kept synchronised. Existing libraries are therefore not lost. - Abbreviation data and custom overrides: Legal abbreviations (courts, journals) are resolved using the Juris-M databases; a settings panel allows you to add your own entries or import entire abbreviation files.
- Westlaw and Lexis+ import via the included Translators (primarily relevant for US users).
An honest assessment
The plugin is expressly alpha software, even though the developer has promised an initial beta release soon. The alpha versions are available as ready-to-use packages on GitHub (0.5.0 being the latest as of July '26); however, development is currently noticeably ahead of the releases. And the ‘alpha’ phase should be taken literally: during testing, an early version overrode the jurisdiction data for all case entries with US values – the bug has been fixed, but this illustrates why testing should only be carried out with synchronisation disabled and using a copy of the Zotero data directory.
There is still quite a lot missing. Several CSL-(M) entry types simply do not exist in Zotero (Treaty, Regulation, legal commentary), various entry types still require the ‘Jurisdiction’ field (Act, hearing, draft bill, report), and a number of special CSL-M fields have not yet been implemented. The multilingual fields for names and titles – for which many users outside the legal profession have used Juris-M – are not actually part of the plugin at all; Cite Non-English offers a separate solution for this (more on this below). It also remains to be seen who will maintain the Juris-M datasets (abbreviations, jurisdiction data, style modules) in the long term – this is currently being sorted out on Discord as well.
Why this is still very good news: for the first time in years, there is an actively developed way to incorporate jurisdiction-specific legal citation into a current, well-maintained version of Zotero – rather than into a frozen fork that breaks further with every Zotero update. The plugin approach is structurally the right one: Zotero continues to evolve, and the plugin builds on top of it. And the fact that a US developer and a European style maintainer are fixing bugs and adding features on a daily basis represents more activity than the Juris-M ecosystem has seen in years.
What should Juris-M users do now?
In short: don’t put off switching to Zotero any longer. The data is in a Zotero-compatible format; the transfer is usually carried out via synchronisation with your Zotero account. As synchronisation from within Juris-M only works briefly immediately after a password reset, the sooner you do this, the easier it will be. Anyone who has continued to work in Juris-M since January 2026 should check which entries have not made it onto the server before discarding the local library. The CSL-M supplementary data (jurisdiction, court, etc.) is transferred to the extra field – and that is exactly where Indigobook-Phoenix comes in later.
For the actual citation work in Zotero, standard CSL variants have long been available for many legal styles – such as OSCOLA or AGLC. If you need a style that does not yet exist, you can also have one made.
And what about the second Juris-M issue – multilingual citations? There is now a plugin alternative for this too: we have explained how the Cite Non-English plugin replaces, at least in part, the multilingual fields in Juris-M, described in a separate article.
As soon as Indigobook-Phoenix moves beyond the alpha stage, we will update this article.
