• • SALI (Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry)
    Learn about the efforts that are underway to help develop standards for the legal management industry. The initial efforts are focused on developing matter management categories.
  • UTBMS Codes and Development of Other Industry Standards

The Association of Legal Administrators is a partner in a newly formed entity that is working to develop a full and complete set of Matter Management Codes. When the ABA consortium developed the UTBMS code sets back in the 1990’s, the primary focus was on developing codes for tracking in the litigation practice. Although the ABA consortium has recently created a code set for M&A transactions, there is still a number of practice areas that do not have codes sets to help collect more data about the nature of matters and the work performed on them. Our industry is crippled by our inability to parse and fully use the data generated every day in law firms (i.e., daily time records) due to the lack of standards utilized across the industry in capturing this data. It is anticipated that firms which intend to maximize their competitiveness and efficiency will eagerly adopt these standards. The capture of this data is a key next step toward the ability of law firms to develop pricing of services that is truly data driven, allowing much greater accuracy in pricing and also providing a better data set from which to improve efficiencies in our processes.

As a recent member of the ALA Executive Committee, Walker has led and been involved in the decisions made by the ALA to invest in and affiliate with this group and has helped to drive the Association’s involvement in this initiative. We have first-hand knowledge of some of the players involved in putting this together and access to information about what is being done and the plans of the new entity.

• • UPBMS Codes

In this same vein, the ALA has developed a set of codes to be used by the legal industry. The UPBMS codes (Uniform Process-Based Management System) was rolled out in early 2017. Through the ALA Board, Walker has been involved in the development of this code set. The purpose of the UPBMS codes is to allow the capture of data from administrative systems at all levels. This will allow a better understanding where efficiencies can be driven in the utilization of personnel and resources.