Litigation Billing Codes

litigation billing codes

LEDES and UTMBS Billing

Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) and Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTMBS) are two electronic billing standard formats for law firms in the US of A. Let’s understand both these formats in some more detail, individually.

The LEDESâ„¢ (Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard)

Overseen by the LEDES Oversight Committee or LOC, an NGO formed by a group of representatives from the legal industry, the international voluntary organization is responsible for creation as well as maintenance of specific universal and standard formats for time and billing software used by law firms and their corporate clients. The LEDES has specified use of open standards to cater uniformly to the complex needs of law professionals. These standards are based on five key principles:

1)    Keeping the standards simple

2)    Remove any ambiguity

3)    Deviate from formats in use just as much as is necessary

4)    Only ask law firms to give as much information as they can from their accounting system

5)    To meet the requirements of corporate clients, law firms and other legal industry software developers to the highest extent possible by keeping the standards simple

LEDES was brought in to ensure that a specific standard was maintained for all time and billing systems over the electronic medium. This was deemed as helpful from the perspective of the law industry professionals, the corporations, as well as the software vendors. Two formats were developed as early as in 1999. These were the ASC X 12 EDI standard for EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), and delimited ASCII standard. In 2000, a new ebilling standard in XML was introduced by the LOC. This was known as the LEDES 2000, and it contained a lot more information that the previous versions. The format was further revised to a greater extent in 2006 and LEDES XML eBilling Ver. 2 was released then.

The UTMBS (Uniform Task-Based Management System)

The UTMBS is also a billing system that has been designed to give law firms and their clients’ substantial info regarding costs involved on various legal services. One of the main areas of legal work dealt with by the UTMBS is ‘litigation.’ This legal format allows lawyers to work out the cost of the litigation work as well as bill their clients based on it. This helps counsels as well as clients to not just understand and manage litigations better, but also allows lawyers to perform litigation tasks better. Known as the Litigation Code Set, this system helps in all matters related to litigation such as communication, binding arbitration, administrative proceedings, and of course, judicial litigation itself.

The UTMBS works effectively at all the five broad phases of litigation including assessment, development as well as administration of the case; all pre-trial charges and related motions; discovery; preparing for the trail and the actual trial; and the appeal. The billing system not only allows to budget each phase mentioned above but also allows law firms to bill based on the time and expenses involved in the case.

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