What are Budget Phases?

The American Bar Association (ABA) has published Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBM reference), which includes activity- and task-based billing codes organized into phases. These codes make it possible for your firm to submit standardized billing and for corporate law departments to efficiently track work.

CounselGO uses the standard codes provided by the ABA.

Your client chooses which type of budget to request for a given matter. They can choose monthly budget, quarterly, life of matter, or phased.  If phased, they also choose the Phase Set. Options include litigation, counseling, patent, trademark, and M&A. Here is an example of the SimpleLegal budget request form.

The Uniform Task-Based Management System uses phases, tasks and activities for tracking work against a matter.

• Phase is the highest level category in the billing code hierarchy. Phases represent collections of tasks that occur largely in a sequence during the course of a matter.
• Tasks reside within phases to capture tangible work product produced or business results achieved. 
• Activity codes describe how work is accomplished (e.g., communicating, drafting). 

When you submit coded invoices through CounselGO, the system buckets the line items to phases, tasks, and activities based on those codes. The codes are visible in SimpleLegal on the invoice record in the Line Item Details area.

The first two characters of the task code represent the phase of the task code and the latter two represent the activity. Therefore, the following work was invoiced in the screenshot above.

• Phase L1 Case Assessment, Development and Administration
  • Task L140 Document/File Management
    • Activity A101 Plan and prepare for
    • Activity A104 Review/analyze
• Phase L1 Case Assessment, Development and Administration
  • Task L120 Analysis/Strategy
    • Activity A104 Review/analyze

Does SimpleLegal track spend against the task codes?

Yes. For instance, an L310 will go in the discovery bucket. 

Contact Us: For more information please contact us at [e-mail]. We are happy to help.