New eDiscovery Billing Codes from Ledes Committee

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2011-02-21 09:00:45  As eDiscovery transitions from fire drill to business process, corporations and law firms are struggling to measure and manage the time and cost associated with the EDRM lifecycle. Up to this point, we have only had ONE standardized billing code in the ABA’s Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) litigation codes, L390 Other Discovery to be exact. Last year, the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard Oversight Committee (LEDES) reached out to the EDRM Metrics Project to participate in the formation of a revised set of new L600 series UTBMS eDiscovery billing codes. The draft code set has been posted to the LEDES site for comments until May 2^nd. I highly encourage you to review the new codes and to contribute your perspective.Before you run off and cry in despair that 34 new codes are far from adequate for a granular coverage of eDiscovery activities, let me set some context for you. First and foremost, the UTBMS Litigation codes are intended to cover attorney task times only. The next step in 2011 will be to tackle the associated Activity (A) and Expense (E) codes that should give us dramatically more coverage. The first step was to align the top level UTBMS codes with the EDRM Metrics Cube in a way that would give legal departments the ability to track critical attorney tasks and/or tasks associated with the EDRM lifecycle. To keep the proposed codes in alignment with the other litigation code sets, we created EDRM phase catch-all codes (L600 – Identification, L610 – Preservation, L620-Collection, etc). Realize that the EDRM Metrics code set version 1 is over 1,400 codes covering time, cost, volumes and item counts. It is great source material for creating a process to measure, analyze and manage your eDiscovery world, but even as one of the principal creators, I realized that we had made an unwieldy monster.

The current Metrics Project team is working on a more condensed, usable version of the code set that should eliminate duplicate codes and create a better syntax that better relates to the Metrics Cube structure. All of this is primarily to set your expectations with the new L600 series eDiscovery litigation task codes. They are a great start and I am proud to have contributed to them. The billing codes are a further sign that eDiscovery has become a necessary and manageable part of litigation and business. So please comment on the Ledes site and on eDJ. We want your perspective.