Task Classification
Far beyond content generation, many tasks related to the lifecycle of cases and documents can be automated with Looplex.
For humans and machines to understand each other and distribute responsibilities, it is essential to identify, define, and correctly map the stages and content of each business process.
When tasks are categorized, you can execute automated workflows, generate standard or ad-hoc reports for standardized comparisons by task code, and access insights in dashboards that identify your primary task codes in use, providing information about average effort and costs, charges per task category1, etc.
That’s why we have added a pre-configured classification of legal and administrative tasks on the platform, enabling you to connect your work to service models available in various Legal Service Models.
Task Code and Activity Code
Looplex employs two semantic taxonomies on its platform for task management and financial control of work by lawyers, paralegals, and legalOps. These are adapted for Portuguese and available for managing cases in English and Portuguese: UTBMS and UPBMS.
Additionally, Looplex complements this system with activity classification (as UTBMS and UPBMS do with adjustments) to describe the specific action taken in a situation.
- Task codes provide a more or less granular description (depending on the hierarchy level) of the type of service performed in that legal area.
- Activity codes identify the specific action taken, such as “writing something,” “speaking to someone,” or “researching something.”
1. UTBMS: Ideal for Billing
The Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) is a set of codes designed to standardize the categorization and facilitate the analysis of legal work in fee notes (time entries). UTBMS was developed collaboratively by the American Bar Association (ABA) Litigation Section, the American Corporate Counsel Association, and a group of large corporate clients and law firms, coordinated and supported by Price Waterhouse (PwC).
UTBMS codes are maintained and developed by the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) Oversight Committee2. UTBMS coding is reflected in narrative descriptions in fee notes sent by law firms to corporate clients when explicitly requested. Most clients using UTBMS also require billing in electronic format, usually in the LEDES standard, which Looplex can generate via its Looplex Finance module for law firms.
All UTBMS codes are divided into categories and phases. Categories are identified by the initial letter (e.g., L for ABA Litigation codes), while phases are specified by numbers (100s for phase 1, 200s for phase 2, etc.). Phases may have sub-phases, indicated by the second digit (110 for the first part of phase 1, 120 for the second part of phase 2, etc.).
L (Litigation)
L100 Case Assessment, Development, and Administration
- L110 Fact Investigation/Development
- L120 Analysis/Strategy
You can use UTBMS for work time entries or analysis or when the client paying the fee requires the LEDES format. However, since the focus is on billing hours for legal fees, UTBMS contains classifications only for purely legal work, going down a maximum of two levels of classification detail. To expand coverage to other connected but not strictly legal tasks (e.g., filing a petition or generating an automated Looplex document for the general public), we also use another classification system: UPBMS.
2. UPBMS: Legal and Non-Legal Tasks
The Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) developed an extensive classification project for legal service management work, offering a comprehensive system of codes and their taxonomy, covering a wide range of processes needed to support legal practice.
Collectively known as Uniform Process-Based Management System (UPBMS), these codes provide a standard framework for legal operations to develop, implement, and maintain successful operational and management strategies, encouraging common language and approaches across industry support operations.
2.1 UPBMS Hierarchy
All tasks in a law office or legal department can be divided between purely legal work and support work for legal operations (legalOps or paralegal activities).
In the ALA’s UPBMS, this is represented by separating all codes into branches. The branches represent the highest organizational level within the UPBMS Codes. They organize substantive areas into two primary groupings representing the two sides of a typical legal services operation.
The “Support Branch” describes processes associated with assistance provided to lawyers, directly related to delivering legal services. The “Legal Branch” describes processes associated with professional legal work.
Support Branch
Classifications:
- Administrative Support (AS)
- Finance (FN)
- Human Resources (HR)
- Business Development (BD)
- Information Technology (IT)
- Leadership and Management (LM)
Legal Branch
Classifications:
- Litigation (LT)
- Transaction/M&A (TN)
- Patent (PT)
- Trademark (TM)
- Workers’ Compensation (WC)
- Bankruptcy (BK)
- Other (Counseling) (CN)
- Lobbying (LB)
Within each classification are “substantive areas” akin to UTBMS phases.
Litigation (LT) Classification
LT10 Case Assessment, Development, and Administration
Processes:
- LT10.10 Fact Investigation/Development
- LT10.15 Property and Exemplars
- LT10.20 Analysis/Strategy
- LT10.25 Experts/Consultants
- LT10.30 Document/File Management
- LT10.35 Budgeting
- LT10.40 Settlement/Non-Binding ADR
Below these “substantive areas” are the business processes associated with each area.
Automated document generation tasks in Looplex fit under the ALA UPBMS classification as Administrative Support (AS), substantive area “AS10 Document Services,” which identifies several business processes:
- AS10 Document Services
- AS10.10 Document Creation
- Activity: A103 Draft/Revise
- AS10.10 Document Creation
3. Activities: The “Verb” of the Task
Activities describe the actions effectively taken by the task executor in a specific case.
In LEDES’ UTBMS, below task codes, there are only activity codes. However, in ALA’s UPBMS, processes may also be classified without detriment to connection with an activity.
Original ABA activity codes include:
- A101 Plan and prepare for
- A102 Research
- A103 Draft/Revise
- A104 Review/Analyze
- A105 Communicate (in firm)
- A106 Communicate (with client)
- A107 Communicate (other external)
- A108 Appear for/attend
- A109 Manage data/files
- A110 Other
4. How Looplex Solves Task Classification
Based on UTBMS and UPBMS, supplemented by ABA activity codes (including 2013 updates), we created our task classification for the Common Data Model, compatible with North American market standards.
Our hierarchy includes two aggregation levels for task categorization (category and subcategory) and may or may not relate to business processes. Tasks can also connect decoupled (non-hierarchically) to an activity, which may come from a list or be entered as free text (process and business).
Task classification hierarchies, semantic definitions, conceptualization, and examples are available in our Common Data Model for consultation and use by legal engineers. These are reflected in logical groupings in the interface for ease of scheduling tasks in cases.
Each task has an ID, classification in our Looplex Uniform Task Classification Codes, and an optional user-provided text description (activity), replicable in time/effort tracking.
This enables generating Legal Analytics and BI views (dashboards and reports) to understand team task organization, establish productivity indices based on results (or costs) per task category, and recommend optimizations in your team’s work within Looplex People.
Footnotes
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When the Looplex Finance module is installed. ↩
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Fee notes in Looplex Finance are also compatible with the LEDES 1998B international e-billing standard. ↩