Types of Billing Codes and the Changing Standards

If you’re charging corporate clients, then it’s inevitable that you’ll need to use the Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) code system. It was a standard developed to set rates for the tasks charged by firms. This coding system is a part of the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES), which was developed by several law firms and corporate clients. It’s essentially a classification system for billing that allows your clients to know more details about their invoices. As I mentioned in my previous article—The Options of Syncing your Calendar, Contacts, and Mail—standards are important for collaborating between different systems.

Recently though, in the midst of everything else happening in the world, they updated the UTBMS codes. They specifically expanded the activity and expense codes. For those of us not familiar with these codes, an activity code (A-code) further describes a litigation code (L-code). It’s a code that allows your firm to give more information about how much each part of the process cost the corporate entity. Since the litigation codes are categories of the legal process (case assessment, trail proceedings, etc.), the activity codes describe the various aspects in each of those categories (research, draft, etc.). The expanded activity codes include medical records and billing management (A115), processing (A120), and exhibit creation (A126). Altogether they added sixteen more to the activity codes.

Similar to activity codes, they added more detailed expense codes, except they also switched the notation from E-codes to X-codes. These additional codes account for housing costs, such as eviction (X118) and foreclosure costs (X119), intellectual property (X200-207), eDiscovery (X300-X308), as well as medical record (X130) and analysis (X131) costs. Furthermore, they reserved a hundred codes (X900-X998) to be designated by the user. The standard was changed at the end of this year and we can expect to see the industry to begin using the X-codes within the next year. Altogether they added more than forty more codes to expense codes.

If you need to add more codes in your ledgers, then it’s likely it’s already in Merus but not added to your available billing codes. We don’t want to overwhelm you with too many billing codes, many of which you may not use, and give you the option of adding more.  We also give you the option to set how each case uses billing codes. You might only need UTBMS codes for some cases, but use non-UTBMS codes for other cases. We have options for you in any case.