The LEDES™ (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. First formed in 1995 as an informal group tasked with creating a framework for the exchange of billing information, the LOC now offers several different formats for legal ebilling, as well as schemas for budgeting, timekeeper, rate management and IP matter management data exchange, all of which are available on this site. The LEDES ebilling standards are globally recognized and accepted as industry-specific EDI standards for the exchange of legal ebilling information. In addition, the LOC leads the industry in creating and updating UTBMS schemas used in legal data exchange, and is responsible for creating and maintaining UTBMS.com, the ultimate resource on UTBMS standards created worldwide.