Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) not up to the task

Why might those letters now mean Under-used Thereafter by Managers and Supervisors? Let’s catalog why.

The task structure fit best with litigation, which accounts for something around 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 and – here’s the real inhibitor – law departments do not take the time to analyze what data they could develop from the UTBMS codes.

My view is also that any form of bill review is too late to affect consequential cost management. The hard work needs to be at the beginning, not the end, of legal services.