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LEDES Publishes UTBMS Intellectual Property Billing Codes

By William F. Heinze

The LEDES? (Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard) Oversight Committee (?LOC?) has now published the latest version of the UTBMS Intellectual Property Billing Codes. Links to the latest patent, trademark, and project codesets are available unter the UTBMS menu option in the left column of the LEDES homepage.

The UTBMS Task Force merged its efforts under the LOC umbrella in 2006. It is now a permanent LOC Subcommittee charged with considering issues on the UTBMS codes used in legal electronic billing. More about the UTBMS Task Force and Billing Codes is available here.

Ledes is an international, voluntary, not-for-profit organization comprised of legal industry representatives and is charged with creating and maintaining open standard formats for the electronic exchange of billing and other information between corporations and law firms. The LOC is dedicated to using open standards which cater to no one organization or group of organizations to uniformly satisfy the complex needs of the legal industry based on 5 basic principles: keep it simple; make it unambiguous; diverge from existing formats as little as absolutely necessary; only ask for information the law firm is typically able to provide from their financial system; and meet the needs of corporations, law firms and legal industry software vendors to the maximum extent possible consistent with the first four criteria.

LEDES is now more than just an ebilling standard.

In 2006 a budgeting standard was approved by the LOC membership. The LEDES XML budget standard accommodates the submission and revision of varying types of legal budgets, such as timekeeper or task and activity based budgets across varying time frames and also matter staffing plans.

In 2007 a standard for the exchange of timekeeper attribute information is being considered by the membership. This standard conveys information required internally by the corporate client and SEC information requirements placed on public companies in the US.

Full post as published by I/P Updates on March 24, 2008 (boomark / email).