Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard

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The Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard is a set of file format specifications intended to facilitate electronic data transmission in the legal industry. The phrase is abbreviated LEDES and is usually pronounced as "leeds". The LEDES specifications are maintained by the LEDES Oversight Committee (LOC), which started informally as an industry-wide project led by the Law Firm and Law Department Services Group within PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1995. In 2001, the LEDES Oversight Committee was incorporated as a California mutual-benefit nonprofit corporation and is now led by a seven-member Board of Directors.

Contents

The LOC maintains four types of data exchange standards for legal electronic billing (ebilling); budgeting; timekeeper attributes; and intellectual property matter management.

The LOC also maintains five types of data elements in the LEDES data exchange standards: Uniform Task-Based Management System codes, which classify the work performed by type of legal matter; activity codes, which classify the actual work performed; expense codes, which classify the type of expense incurred; timekeeper classification codes; and error codes, which assist law firms with understanding invoice validation errors.

The LOC has also created an API that allows for system-to-system transmission of legal invoices from law firms and other legal vendors required by their clients to ebill, to the third-party ebilling systems. Other functionality is also supported in this very complex standard, which is intended to ease the burden at the law firm for managing client-required ebilling.

Electronic billing formats

The electronic billing data exchange format types provide a standard data format for electronically transmitted invoices, typically from a law firm to a corporate client. The LEDES e-billing format currently has the following variations: [1]

Other data exchange formats

The other LEDES data exchange formats are as follows:

UTBMS

The Uniform Task-Based Management System is a widely used system for coding legal work. [7]

In April 2006, the UTBMS Update Initiative voted to merge into the LEDES Oversight Committee. Shortly thereafter, the LEDES Oversight Committee established www.UTBMS.com as the global reference for all known UTBMS standards, regardless of the organization that established the standard.

See also

Notes

  1. Wirtz, Scott (1 Sep 2006), "Electronic Legal Invoice Delivery", Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, Mountainside, NJ: Metropolitan Corporate Counsel, p. 22, retrieved 26 Feb 2016
  2. Hodge, Jeff (March 2005), "LEDES on Steroids: 2K Is Coming!", Finance: Accounting in the Electronic Age, Austin, TX: International Legal Technology Association, pp. 15–16, retrieved 27 Feb 2016
  3. Bennitt, Jane A. (March 2012), "Global E-Billing and the LEDES Oversight Committee", Peer to Peer, Austin, TX: International Legal Technology Association, pp. 96–98, retrieved 27 Feb 2016
  4. Plonsker, Larry, ed. (December 2014), "Invention Disclosures—A Standard Is Needed" (PDF), LES Global News, Wellington, FL: Licensing Executives Society International, vol. XLIX, no. 4, pp. 7–8, ISSN   0270-174X , retrieved 26 Feb 2016
  5. Sikand, Sunjeev (17 Apr 2015), "Merits Of An XML-Based Invention Disclosure Standard", Law360, New York, NY: Portfolio Media, retrieved 28 Mar 2016, In 2014, the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) Intellectual Property Matter Management (IPMM) subcommittee proposed an extensible markup language (XML) invention disclosure standard. An XML-based invention disclosure standard can fulfill a critical need that conventional invention disclosure forms fail to address, namely validation of invention data and automated data analysis. An invention disclosure that conforms to the IPMM standard will receive initial data quality checks and be readable by any conforming application and structured for further handling and analysis.
  6. Hunziker, Robin (2017). "Invention Disclosure Standard" . The SciTech Lawyer. Chicago: The American Bar Association. 13 (2): 24–25. ISSN   1550-2090. OCLC   663373112 . Retrieved 18 Apr 2017.
  7. "The Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) Finalizes Code Sets for Intellectual Property Expenses". Business Wire. Berkshire Hathaway. October 23, 2007. Retrieved 26 Feb 2016.

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