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Legal billing and predictive coding

A fresh way to assess your legal spend

In recent years, many corporate law departments and law firms have been challenged with the task of reducing the costs of delivering services. Similar to other businesses, in-house and outside counsel have sought to streamline activities and improve efficiencies. In order to do that, counsel needs to be able to assess their past and current billing activities.

Uniform task-based management system (UTBMS) codes

 

Since their introduction more than 20 years ago, uniform task-based management system (UTBMS) codes have brought some clarity to the billing and analytics process, even as the codes have suffered from significant limitations. However, innovations in analytics and predictive coding have introduced new possibilities to traditional UTBMS coding and reporting metrics. With the information that attorneys routinely provide within line-item descriptions in billing invoices, text analytics can be utilized to delve into the informational content of the task descriptions to predict what appropriate codes should be used.

This may allow law firms and legal departments to:

  1. Develop more meaningful metrics at a much lower cost
  2. Gain more insight into cost-to-deliver services, which allows for a more strategic use of alternative billing arrangements 
  3. Improve partnerships between in-house and outside counsel