Lighting is an advancing phenomenon both on the technology and on the market level due to the rapid development of the solid state lighting technology. The efforts in improving the efficacy of high brightness LED's (HB-LED) have concentrated on the packaging architecture. Packaging plays a significant role in reliability; not only on mechanical protection but also on thermal management. An efficient numerical model using the finite element technique to evaluate thermal and mechanical performance of LED packaging is presented in this article. A commercial HB-LED package is used as a benchmark example and a strategy relying on the obtained thermo-mechanical response to reduce the mesh size and density is proposed. Next, two new HB-LED concepts are simulated based on the proposed finite element modeling strategy.