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The LEDESTM (Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard) Oversight Committee ("LOC") is an international, voluntary, not-for-profit organization comprised of legal industry representatives and is charged with creating and maintaining open standard formats for the electronic exchange of billing and other information between corporations and law firms. The LOC is dedicated to using open standards which cater to no one organization or group of organizations to uniformly satisfy the complex needs of the legal industry based on 5 basic principles: keep it simple; make it unambiguous; diverge from existing formats as little as absolutely necessary; only ask for information the law firm is typically able to provide from their financial system; and meet the needs of corporations, law firms and legal industry software vendors to the maximum extent possible consistent with the first four criteria. The initial goal was to create a standard for the electronic exchange of billing information. In 1995 Price Waterhouse, LLP convened a consortium of leading legal industry time and billing system and case management system vendors in order to define a standard electronic billing format for use by the legal industry. Two ebilling formats were developed: The ASC X12 EDI standard (the national standard for EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), widely used in several industries). To our knowledge this format has never been used in the legal industry due largely to its enormous syntactic complexity. At least one custom format, however, was based on the ASC X12 format. A delimited ASCII standard. This standard was used, in slightly modified form, by several organizations. In 1998, using the framework established in 1995, PricewaterhouseCoopers updated the delimited ASCII standard and reconvened the legal industry consortium. With this the informal LEDES group was created and assumed control of the newly-named LEDES 1998 format. In 1999, the LEDES 1998B format modified and wholly replaced the ASCII, pipe delimited LEDES 1998 format. Ledes 1998B quickly became the accepted standard for ebilling. In 2000 another ebilling standard, this time in XML, was ratified by the LOC. The new LEDES 2000 format contained much more information than the original LEDES 1998B format, and more fully accommodated the complex nature of fee arrangements between corporations and law firms. The LEDES 2000 format had minor corrections made in 2004 and 2005, and the current document in place on this site contains those corrections. This format was revised substantially in 2006 with the ratification of the LEDES XML Ebilling Ver. ... (expand) (contract)