Uniform Task-Based Management System

The Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) is a set of codes designed to standardize categorization and facilitate 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. 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 charges for attorney and legal assistant time, are coded with task and activity codes. There are four sets of task codes: Litigation, 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 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.

...
Wikipedia