Strategic Claims Litigation Management Reporting and Metrics: Part 2
Making measurable improvements to your litigated claims process
In part one of this reporting series, we outlined critical litigation and analytics reports for claims leaders and covered the organization of big picture and current inventory data. Both are exceptionally important to having a high-level understanding of a claims litigation management program and providing insight for making program and strategy decisions for improvement. Understanding that gathering and structuring this data is difficult for many who may struggle with traditional methods of managing litigation, we’ll push on and discuss some additional reports that can help claims leaders make measurable improvements in their processes.
Our goal with this blog series is to call out the reports and data sets that are most used by CaseGlide customers and to share their best practices around data capture and analysis.
Understanding Closed Inventory
Much like having a better understanding of open inventory, having a detailed view of closed inventory can provide a number of opportunities for program improvement, process efficiency gains, and the ability to focus efforts on better claim outcomes.
Some suggestions for capturing data include:
- Percent of files resolved by verdict
- Percent of files resolved with $0 indemnity
- Closed files by specific venue
- Closed files by specific plaintiff firm/attorney
- Closed files in front of a specific judge
- Critical or dispositive motion success
- Number of statutory offers deployed on closed files
- Mediation success rate on closed files (files with mediation task completed, disposition)
- Percentage of file types closed, by number and paid indemnity totals
- States with the highest cost per file averages
- Closed files by severity segment, by loss paid, and as a percentage of all suits (example: “These 4 segments are 20% of all files closed and amounted to 80% of paid indemnity”)
The information above helps you understand how your program has been performing. Ultimately, that should help you look to your current open inventory and begin creating strategies for addressing open litigated claims that meet similar criteria.
If your team, or your defense counsel, has been conducting specific activities with little to no success in the past, you may decide to stop or change those activities. If your cases against a specific plaintiff firm or in front of a specific judge consistently result in a negative outcome, you can adjust your processes to favor better results. It’s all about capturing trends, understanding what might be driving those trends, and using that data to better affect your open and future litigated claims.
Identifying Opportunities for Early Resolution
One of the biggest impacts we at CaseGlide have on our customers’ litigation program is providing the data to identify litigated claims that can be resolved immediately. It sounds simple, but traditional methods for handling litigation tend to camouflage early resolution candidates. Workflows get followed, emails get sent back and forth, and important litigated claim data ends up buried in PDF documents and inboxes.
Claims handlers have their hands full with dozens, and at times, hundreds of ongoing claims with few opportunities to identify individual cases that are ripe for early closure. The reports outlined below expedite that process with just a few clicks of the mouse:
- Open files by cycle time
- Open files by total legal spend to date
- Open files by highest remaining legal budget
- Open files by highest exposure estimates
- Files with demands and offers within a fixed percentage or amount
- Files where remaining budget is less than demand
- Files with low defensibility ratings and demand below a certain $ amount
- Files with remaining expense budget exceeding 50% of exposure estimate
We’re all aware that the longer a litigated claim stays open, the higher the expense. Getting a grasp on files that are candidates for early resolution offers claims leaders a way to make an immediate and positive financial impact on their claims litigation management programs. It’s not rocket science, but you need to start gathering and organizing your data now—or you risk failing to ever get there. Start structuring your data in litigation management software and get it out of emails and attachments.
That’s it for this installment. Next, we’ll discuss identifying potential problem files and how we can start measuring our defense counsel and their efforts.