Strategic Claims Litigation Management Reporting and Metrics: Part 1
Seeing the Big Picture and Nailing the Foundation
Successful claims organizations know that relying on hunches and gut feelings around their litigation management efforts is a recipe for bad decision-making. Understanding circumstances like litigation trends, current case inventory, early resolution candidates, problem files, and attorney performance provides claims leaders with the ammunition needed to make strategic claims litigation management decisions. Ultimately, those insights also allow claims organizations to realize better case outcomes.
There are a couple of obstacles standing in the way, of course. First, you must capture the right data in a structured manner to measure it, visualize it, and act on it. Second, you must organize your data and analyze it, making decisions that move the needle in the right direction.
CaseGlide clients process tens of thousands of cases annually, capturing critical data along the way and reporting on that data to find where to focus their energies and resources to make measurable process improvements. In addition to sharing best practices around data capture and analysis, we wanted to shed light on a few ways CaseGlide clients are using reporting as a conduit for change. Without further ado, here’s part one of our series.
Strategic Claims Litigation Management: The Big Picture
It may sound like a no-brainer, but establishing a baseline around big picture program data is the place to start. We regularly speak with claims leaders, and it’s clear that many struggle with pulling together the bare essential data points for their litigation management program. We can tell you unequivocally – your foundation is not sound without this data, and your program decisions and strategies will suffer.
To start, you’ll want to capture the following data:
- Total Legal Spend
- Total Indemnity Spend
- Projected Legal Spend Based on Recent Prior Spending
- Average Legal Spend Per File
- Average Indemnity Per File
- Average Total Case Cost Per File
- Expense to Indemnity Ratio (all fees + expenses divided by indemnity paid)
- Spending to Budget
- Invoice Adjustment Rate
- Total New Received Files / Total Closed Files / Total Pending Files
- Closure ratio (number of files received vs. number of files closed within a time frame)
The information above sets your foundation. Once you’ve captured and memorialized all of those data points, you can start to understand where your litigation management program stands and how to focus your efforts toward raising or lowering them to improve outcomes. These create your baseline for the current state and allow you to build strategies around getting where you aspire to be later. Not to mention, being able to share this data with your organization’s senior leadership team helps your case when investments in new technologies and headcount are needed.
Strategic Claims Litigation Management: Analyzing Current Inventory
Once you’ve set your baseline and established the big picture for strategic claims litigation management, it’s time to review your current litigation management situation. This is what you’re facing today and where everything stands. This process helps you understand your existing cases, who’s working on them, which attorneys represent them, etc.
Here’s what we suggest you focus on with your current litigated claims inventory:
- Open Litigated Files
- Assignments to Counsel
- Litigated Files Per Claims Handler
- Litigated Files by Case Type
- Litigated Files by Venue
- Outside Counsel Assignments: Outside vs. Staff
- Represented claimant with no assigned defense counsel
- Open files by Plaintiff Firm / Attorney
- Files Comprising Top 20% of File Exposures
- Files Comprising Top 20% of File Legal Budgets
Many of our clients create weekly snapshots of this data, with the report delivered to their inbox first thing every Monday morning. Imagine starting your workweek knowing the information above and formulating your team’s plan of attack before calendars become crowded with other interferences.
With the information above, you’re dialed in with your current claims litigation landscape and can start to drive decisions that deliver the outcomes you desire. It’s not overly complicated, but it does require you to capture the data and structure it properly. Once you’re up and running, we think you’ll appreciate this approach’s difference in improving efficiency.
That’s it for this installment. For our follow-up blogs in this series, we’ll tackle viewing your closed inventory of cases, identifying opportunities for early resolution, and more. There is a lot of data available to claims leaders to help drive strategy and streamline processes—it just needs to be captured. And there’s no better time to start than now.