May 17, 2006
The Shine Wears Off Of UTBMS for Law Firm Clients
All that work by law firms to code time entries using UTBMS codes is largely going to waste—unused by most corporate clients.
Rees Morrison of Hildebrandt International reports that the UTBMS task structure fits best with litigation, which accounts for about half of the spending; the remainder of legal services never lent itself to a taxonomic approach suitable for coding. Even within litigation, the categories could be used very broadly and would not clearly distinguish what timekeepers were doing.
"On the law department side, three punctures let out a lot of UTBMS’ air. One, you need software to sort through the time entries and place them in their appropriate categories. Not every law department had that software. The bigger nail is that most law departments do not have enough similar matters to make meaningful comparisons on performance across law firms. The biggest inhibitor: Law departments do not take the time to analyze the data they could develop from the UTBMS codes."
For more on Rees’ observations about UTBMS, go to his blog Law Department Management.
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Filed under Blog by Tom Collins