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A Guide to Legal Task Codes and the UTBMS

LEDES 101: 10/25/2010 by Easy Legal Billing Team

The Uniform Task-Based Management System, or UTBMS, is a group of codes that were created to become a standard for categorization to help in the billing and invoicing of legal work and expenses.  The UTBMS is used for all legal invoicing between law firms and corporations and goes hand-in-hand with LEDES Invoicing and are used when creating a LEDES file.

Access task codes by navigating to the Invoices menu, then toggling to “edit.”

The tasks represent the type of fee that is being billed. There are four main types of task codes and activity codes that are used to further define the task that is being billed. The four different types of tasks are:

  • Litigation
  • Counseling
  • Project
  • Bankruptcy

The tasks are further defined by phrases which help to categorize the fee to a greater extent, and a task that contains the same first letter and first number of another task would fall into the same phrase. The main phrase does not need to be reported along with a specific task code as it can be deduced from the specific task code. The specific task or the phrase can be reported, and not all task types even have phrases (counseling does not).  When reporting, choose the task code over the phrase as it will be the most descriptive.

For your reference, we’ve included a printable and shareable PDF of the full list of task code sets.

Download the full reference list of task codes:


Click the box below to confirm your download:

Activity codes support task codes and help define the exact task at hand. These activity codes are used in conjunction with the specific task codes. If you are using an activity code, an expense code is not required.

The activity codes can be accessed by toggling to the “new item” button and selecting the “fee” type, then navigating the “fee code” drop-down:

A set of expense codes also exists and is only used for expenses and are independent of task and activity codes:

For even more information on legal codes and legal code sets, see the American Bar Association.


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Easy Legal Billing Team

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