The Board of Directors has authorized the formation of a new IP Improvement Subcommittee whose charter explains their mandate as follows:
Intellectual Property invoices are different than many other types of legal invoices in the sense that they are typically high in volume and low in dollar amount. Those who review Intellectual Property invoices often note that is time-intensive and costly to review these invoices.
Of interest to IP invoice reviewers and a focus of this sub-committee is the tracking of individual tasks assigned to vendors (e.g. drafting an office action response). Invoice review for tasks is difficult because sometimes companies are billed twice for the same task and invoice reviewers must spend significant amounts of time to check whether this is the case. The sub-committee will investigate whether updating the LEDES formats with a place for a unique task id generated by an ELM or IP system may be used to validate that a task has only been billed once.
In addition, the sub-committee will review the UTBMS codes for IP. There are existing UTBMS codes for various types of IP (e.g. Patents and Trademarks). These codes haven’t been reviewed lately and should be examined now that they have been in use for some time. The sub-committee may make recommendations on updating these codes.
The subcommittee will also be open to other suggestions and recommendations as it investigates potential improvements to recommend to the LEDES Operating Committee.
The Subcommittee will be led by Adam Jaffe.