Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard

The Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard is a set of two file format specifications intended to standardize bill/invoice data transmitted electronically ("e-billed") from a law firm to a corporate client. It is abbreviated LEDES, and usually pronounced as "leeds".

LEDES was developed by the LEDES Oversight Committee, which was led by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Members of the commitee include law firms, corporate legal departments, electronic billing vendors and time and billing software vendors.

The two currently used LEDES standards are:

• LEDES 1998B, a pipe-delimited plain text file. It is by far the more commonly used format. It lacks some flexibilty, having a rigid structure. Another disadvantage of LEDES 1998B is that invoice-level data is repeated on every line item even though it is only needed once, as it does not vary per line. Many clients attempt to impose nonstandard customizations, thus defeating the purpose of having a standard.
• LEDES 2000, an XML format. Adoption of this newer standard has been slow. One advantage of LEDES 2000 is that although the structure is very well defined, the specification defines "extend" segments, allowing the insertion of client-specfic fields without breaking the format or violating the standard.

Many clients using LEDES also request the use of the Uniform Task-Based Management System.

External link

• LEDES.org (http://www.ledes.org/) "The Standard in Legal E-billing"