UTMBS Patent Billing Code Update

The third draft of the UTMBS Update Initiative Patent Committee's proposed patent billing codes are now available. Please feel free to contact me, at BillHeinze@tkhr.com, for a copy which with the following minor revisions:

• Typo corrected on M540
• M500 and M600 titles have been revised from foreign to "Other than Domestic"
• Revised E125 and added E126 to reflect separate line for post-issuance maintenance fees.

If you haven't heard already, the UTBMS is a budgeting and billing system designed to provide clients and law firms with meaningful cost information on legal services. It currently includes a Litigation Code Set that was released in 1995 and has since been widely adopted for contested matters, including judicial litigation, binding arbitration and regulatory/administrative proceedings. More-recently, the ABA has also released Counseling, Project, and Bankruptcy Code Sets. However, the ABA's Steering Committee concluded that "it would not be practicable to develop practice-specific task codes."

This has led various consumers of intellectual property services to adopt inconsistent and/or proprietary code sets that have frustrated consumers and service providers alike. The UTBMS Intellectual Property Workgroup has therefore been charged with building upon those legacy code sets in order to develop a baseline model code set for patent and trademark services.

More information about t he patent billing codes is available here. More information about the UTBMS Update Initiative is available at at http://www.utbms.com.