LEDES is the standard format for electronic legal billing between law firms and their clients, maintained by the LEDES Oversight Committee. Its formats — from the pipe-delimited 1998B through the XML variants — carry line-item detail, task and activity codes, and timekeeper information in a form corporate legal departments can process automatically.
LEDES
LEDES is what corporate legal departments use to process outside-counsel invoices without reading them one at a time. It is unglamorous, it is nearly thirty years old, and it is the closest thing the legal market has to a universally adopted data exchange.
- Line-item billing detail - Task, activity and expense codes, so spend can be analysed rather than only paid.
- Buyer-driven adoption - Corporate legal departments require it of their firms, which is why it stuck.
- Multiple formats - 1998B remains widely used; XML variants add structure for more complex arrangements.
- A committee, not a vendor - Governed by an oversight committee drawn from the market it serves.
LEDES is worth noting for what it proves about this market. Legal and compliance is capable of adopting a shared format — it did, thirty years ago, for invoices — and The State of Legal & Compliance APIs finds it has not repeated the trick for anything else. There is no LEDES for clauses, obligations, matters or controls, and the resource taxonomy shows the consequence: 928 distinct names across 81 companies, with clause published by none of them. The pattern that worked is available to be copied.
Industry: Legal
Also in the data model catalog
This standard shows up on both sides of the house — as a standard applied in API operations here, and as a data model defining what information exists. Same standard, two lenses.
See it as a data model →