Through support for this new code set, users can exercise greater control over legal spend by gathering and reporting on claims litigation costs with greater specificity and granularity.

Bottomline's legal spend management solution, Legal eXchange, helps leading corporations efficiently manage legal spend through electronic invoice management. By accessing and analyzing data electronically, users can work collaboratively with outside counsel to align and manage budgets and case handling strategies, while simultaneously establishing benchmarks against which future performance can be measured.

First introduced in 1995, the Uniform Task-based Management System (UTBMS) code set is widely used among insurance carriers to capture meaningful litigation expense information. Limitations within the original code set, however, have led to inaccurate coding and overuse of default codes, preventing carriers from accurately analyzing important components of litigation costs. The effort to revise the UTBMS code set, which was co-facilitated by Bottomline, attracted the participation of other solution providers, law firms and leading insurance carriers, including Liberty Mutual, AIG, Zurich, The Hartford and Farmers Insurance.

"The UTBMS code set is an invaluable tool for insurance carriers, since it offers a standardized framework for attaining a better understanding of all their legal expenses," said Robert Mullen, Director of Legal Solutions for Bottomline Technologies. "The initiative to revise the code set is the result of a collaborative effort among individuals who believe that by enhancing the existing UTBMS code set and promoting its use to law firms, we can create a system better prepared to respond to the litigation management needs of the insurance industry."