LEDES is a standardized text format for law firm invoices that reduces errors across multiple clients. The video covers service codes, how to tag matters as LEDES-type, and which practice management platforms support it. Avoid semicolons in descriptions, which trigger rejection errors.
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This week we're going to talk about unlocking the efficiency of LEEDS billing. LEEDS billing, L-E-D-E-S, and yes, that's an acronym. And it's really to help legal bookkeepers understand what exactly LEEDS billing is. And if your attorney-client asks you, do you process LEEDS billing, to know exactly how to do that. And as best I can explain it to you, because it's definitely nuanced. And it really depends on what legal platform you're uploading the bill. So LEEDS billing, which is Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard. What a mouthful, right? LEEDS billing is something that was created back many years ago, and it was just to standardize the process of invoicing. So if you work with several attorneys, you'll see that everybody kind of invoices in their own way. And this was kind of a way to standardize, especially for big corporations like Microsoft or Google. If you have to do legal work for them, They want a way to standardize it 'cause they might be working with multiple attorneys all over the country. So it's really, that's a format that's standardized. It's one way, it's the only way. It's very weird looking when you print them out. It looks almost like computer code when you print them out. It's got a text format to it and it's really a format to ensure consistency and clarity in billing and reduce any potential errors. It also is something that you really want a good legal billing software that will be able to create these. This look of the invoice, you're able to easily upload them into the billing platforms like LegalX or some of the other ones that we see that we use. And it's got codes. So Clio has it, LeanLaw has it. You create these codes that you have to book in for each thing that's happening on the bill. So if there's legal services happening, it'd be one code. If it's recording services, you're recording a transcript for a case, It's a different code. So there's different codes for different things. It could be a pretrial pleading or a motion. And I've got all this really in detail below in the article. So you can see there's different codes for different sections of different types of law. That's practice. There's expense codes. There's codes for copying. There's codes for court fees, witness fees. There's different codes. And as these transactions, as these bills come in from these outside services that you're paying on behalf of the attorney, you need to put those codes in so so that the system will see the codes. And then when it spits out the invoice in that LEEDS format, those codes are there and you're not having to go backtrack and kind of reattach them and put them into the billing, the bill itself. So it uploads easily and you don't get any error codes where they're actually, you know, getting an error saying that you can't, it won't, it won't be accepted. And then you have another whole world of hurt as you try to put them together. So, Leads billing can be done without software, but you have to pick up a program. And I think I put in the article a, an actual link to a free service where you can actually take an upload, a PDF, and it will convert it into leads. I don't know how well that works. I've always used leads billing with the software. So know that that's something that you might run into when you're doing this kind of work. Adopting leads. Billing is important that you tag the matter as a leads billing matter. If you have, if you have some matters that the attorney works for that are non-leads, and then some of their leads, you have to make sure you tag it as such. So you have the ability to add those codes in so that when you do print the invoice out to leads format, it comes out in the way you need, where the expense and the code is all there. It's definitely a skill. So you want to make sure that you understand how to do this. You get that out, and you just have to understand the platform you're uploading it to. So you'll get a login for the platform. You actually upload it to the platform and it will read it and then it will fail if it's not correct. I can tell you that at a firm, and I can still think it's amazing that Nicole, our account manager, figured this out. The bill kept getting, the bills kept going for this one firm. She did leads billing for multiple and this one firm, it kept, they kept getting rejected, rejected. And we couldn't figure out why. It didn't tell us. So we found out that the reason it got rejected was because they, the attorneys were using semicolons in their typing up what happened in the meeting. So-and-so went to the meeting, we had a discussion on something, semicolon. Then it kept going on and on. And the semicolons in this particular firm that she was working with, this particular billing platform that she was uploading to, they just kept getting rejected. And she figured out it was the semicolons that were causing the rejections. So it can be something as simple as that. And we— Yeah. Implemented some specific verbiage, which a lot of these programs have where you can start to have almost like a code to the language. You can kind of uniformly do it. If the attorneys are typing the same thing all the time, meeting with so-and-so in regard to X, you can have that all kind of preset and then the attorney can go in and just add the words. So it saves them time too, but also help in your leads billing format. You wanna stay away from semicolons on some of those because that was what was making them rejected. Mm-hmm. Some of the platforms, even if you spit it out from the program itself, you'll look at the rejection and see that there could be some little thing inside the words that the system doesn't like, and you have to figure it out. And sometimes you have to go in and edit the leads building itself. It's not a hard thing to do. Just open it up and just find where you need to change it, and then backspace and put the right codes or dot or dots or numbers in. But at least this way you'll be able to upload them. If you have any more comments or interest in this topic, I know it's one that you can do work with attorneys all the time and never have to do a leads bill, but it's a good thing to know about that this exists. And you might have an attorney that comes along and just has leads billing. You just need to know what this is about. It's a great topic even at the Law Lab. So if you have questions, you can always join our Law Lab as well. Please like or comment this. If you have any questions, we'd love to help you out. And until next week, we'll see you all then. Bye now. Bye.
