The Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) is a set of codes designed to standardize categorization and facilitate the analysis of legal work and expenses. UTBMS was produced through a collaborative effort among the American Bar Association Section of Litigation, the American Corporate Counsel Association, and a group of major corporate clients and law firms coordinated and supported by Price Waterhouse LLP (now PricewaterhouseCoopers). UTBMS codes are now maintained and developed by the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) Oversight Committee.
UTBMS coding is reflected in legal bills sent from a law firm to its corporate clients. [1] Law firms will usually use coding on time and expenses only for those clients who explicitly request it. Most clients who use UTBMS also require electronic billing, usually with an invoice in a LEDES e-billing format.
Fees, which are attorney and legal assistant time charges, are coded with task and activity codes. There are five sets of task codes: Litigation, Intellectual Property, Counseling, Project and Bankruptcy. The set used for a given matter (i.e., case or transaction) depends upon the nature of that matter. Tasks may be summarized into phases. Tasks are often reported without reporting the phase, as this can be deduced from the task. The phase/task hierarchy is uniform in the Litigation, Intellectual Property and Bankruptcy task code sets. In the Project set, only the second phase contains multiple tasks. The Counseling set has only a single level. (In such situations, a code may be considered both a phase and a task, and it may be necessary to program the time and billing software this way.) There is a single set of activity codes, which is used in conjunction with each of the four task code sets. There is also a single set of expense codes, which are independent of phase, task and activity codes.
The codes themselves are composed of a letter (the first letter of the task code set), followed by a three-digit number. Tasks sharing the same letter and first digit belong to the same phase.
From time-to-time, the LEDES Oversight Committee (LOC), the administrative body that oversees these codes, adds and changes codes. In 2007, a set of Intellectual Property codes (for patents and trademarks) were finalized and ratified. [2] In 2011, a set of "eDiscovery" codes were ratified. [3] [4] In 2015, the LOC ratified a set of Governance, Risk and Compliance codes based on the Open Compliance & Ethics Group (OCEG) GRC Capability Model.
In late 2013, the Activity Code set was updated and ratified.
In late 2013, the Expense Code set was reworked and ratified.
An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as an expert. The judge may consider the witness's specialized opinion about evidence or about facts before the court within the expert's area of expertise, to be referred to as an "expert opinion". Expert witnesses may also deliver "expert evidence" within the area of their expertise. Their testimony may be rebutted by testimony from other experts or by other evidence or facts.
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention. In most countries, patent rights fall under private law and the patent holder must sue someone infringing the patent in order to enforce their rights.
A lawsuit is a proceeding by one or more parties against one or more parties in a civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used with respect to a civil action brought by a plaintiff who requests a legal remedy or equitable remedy from a court. The defendant is required to respond to the plaintiff's complaint or else risk default judgment. If the plaintiff is successful, judgment is entered in favor of the defendant. A variety of court orders may be issued in connection with or as part of the judgment to enforce a right, award damages or restitution, or impose a temporary or permanent injunction to prevent an act or compel an act. A declaratory judgment may be issued to prevent future legal disputes.
In United States law, a motion is a procedural device to bring a limited, contested issue before a court for decision. It is a request to the judge to make a decision about the case. Motions may be made at any point in administrative, criminal or civil proceedings, although that right is regulated by court rules which vary from place to place. The party requesting the motion is the moving party or movant. The party opposing the motion is the nonmoving party or nonmovant.
In law, a settlement is a resolution between disputing parties about a legal case, reached either before or after court action begins. A collective settlement is a settlement of multiple similar legal cases. The term also has other meanings in the context of law. Structured settlements provide for future periodic payments, instead of a one time cash payment.
Discovery, in the law of common law jurisdictions, is a phase of pretrial procedure in a lawsuit in which each party, through the law of civil procedure, can obtain evidence from other parties by means of methods of discovery such as interrogatories, requests for production of documents, requests for admissions and depositions. Discovery can be obtained from nonparties using subpoenas. When a discovery request is objected to, the requesting party may seek the assistance of the court by filing a motion to compel discovery. Conversely, a party or nonparty resisting discovery can seek the assistance of the court by filing a motion for a protective order.
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.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure govern civil procedure in United States district courts. They are the companion to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Rules promulgated by the United States Supreme Court pursuant to the Rules Enabling Act become part of the FRCP unless, within seven months, the United States Congress acts to veto them. The Court's modifications to the rules are usually based upon recommendations from the Judicial Conference of the United States, the federal judiciary's internal policy-making body.
Patent prosecution describes the interaction between applicants and their representatives, and a patent office with regard to a patent, or an application for a patent. Broadly, patent prosecution can be split into pre-grant prosecution, which involves arguing before, and sometimes negotiation with, a patent office for the grant of a patent, and post-grant prosecution, which involves issues such as post-grant amendment and opposition.
Under United States patent law, a provisional application is a legal document filed in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), that establishes an early filing date, but does not mature into an issued patent unless the applicant files a regular non-provisional patent application within one year. There is no such thing as a "provisional patent".
The United States is considered to have the most favorable legal regime for inventors and patent owners in the world. Under United States law, a patent is a right granted to the inventor of a (1) process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, (2) that is new, useful, and non-obvious. A patent is the right to exclude others, for a limited time from profiting of a patented technology without the consent of the patent-holder. Specifically, it is the right to exclude others from: making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, inducing others to infringe, applying for an FDA approval, and/or offering a product specially adapted for practice of the patent.
The multinational technology corporation Apple Inc. has been a participant in various legal proceedings and claims since it began operation and, like its competitors and peers, engages in litigation in its normal course of business for a variety of reasons. In particular, Apple is known for and promotes itself as actively and aggressively enforcing its intellectual property interests. From the 1980s to the present, Apple has been plaintiff or defendant in civil actions in the United States and other countries. Some of these actions have determined significant case law for the information technology industry and many have captured the attention of the public and media. Apple's litigation generally involves intellectual property disputes, but the company has also been a party in lawsuits that include antitrust claims, consumer actions, commercial unfair trade practice suits, defamation claims, and corporate espionage, among other matters.
This is a list of legal terms relating to patents and patent law. A patent is not a right to practice or use the invention claimed therein, but a territorial right to exclude others from commercially exploiting the invention, granted to an inventor or their successor in rights in exchange to a public disclosure of the invention.
Electronic discovery refers to discovery in legal proceedings such as litigation, government investigations, or Freedom of Information Act requests, where the information sought is in electronic format. Electronic discovery is subject to rules of civil procedure and agreed-upon processes, often involving review for privilege and relevance before data are turned over to the requesting party.
Virginia Mary Kendall is an American attorney and jurist serving as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. President George W. Bush appointed her to the bench on January 3, 2006. In addition to serving on the bench, Judge Kendall is also a noted expert on child exploitation and human trafficking, as well as an adjunct professor and author.
The Leahy–Smith America Invents Act (AIA) is a United States federal statute that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on September 16, 2011. The law represents the most significant legislative change to the U.S. patent system since the Patent Act of 1952 and closely resembles previously proposed legislation in the Senate in its previous session.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to patents:
The British Post Office scandal involved faulty Post Office accounting software, called Horizon, creating false shortfalls in the accounts of many subpostmasters. Between 1999-2015, over 900 subpostmasters were convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting, with 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. By January 2024 nearly 100 of these convictions had been overturned in court, and plans for a blanket exoneration were announced by the government. Those wrongfully convicted became eligible for compensation from the Post Office. Other subpostmasters who had been forced to cover Horizon shortfalls with their own money or had their contracts terminated also received compensation from the Post Office; by January 2024 there had been over 2,750 eligible claims. Although many subpostmasters had reported problems with the new software, the Post Office had insisted that Horizon was robust and failed to disclose its knowledge of faults in the system while securing convictions. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts and bankruptcies, took a heavy toll on the victims and their families, leading to stress, illness, divorce and, in at least four cases, suicide. In 2019 the high court ruled that there were bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon software, paving the way for subpostmasters' convictions to be overturned, and for victims to receive compensation. Subsequently, a statutory public inquiry was established.
Brown v BCA Trading Ltd [2016] EWHC 1464 (Ch) is an important England and Wales case management − in which the Companies Court allowed the use of predictive coding in an electronic disclosure process involving the contested party for the first time − for the underlying case of “unfair prejudice” petition based on section 994 of the Companies Act 2006. It is also the first reported judgment to endorse the landmark decision in Pyrrho Investments Limited v MWB Property Limited [2016] EWHC 256 (Ch), whereby the main difference is both parties have approved the utilisation of predictive coding.
Peter v. NantKwest Inc., 589 U.S. ___ (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case from the October 2019 term.
The Uniform Task-Based Management System enables lawyers to budget and bill by litigation task, aiding client and counsel in understanding, managing and conducting litigations.
The LEDES Oversight Committee (LOC) Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS) eDiscovery Code Set, ratified in 2011, is based on the EDRM Metrics Code set.