Every year at Guidewire Connections, the industry gathers to take massive leaps forward and to address hard truths learned on the front lines of insurance. This year’s truth? Everyone knows litigation is getting harder and more volatile, but almost no one knows exactly why.
There’s Still a Blindspot
Legal spend keeps climbing. Year after year. Every insurer we met confirmed it. But, ask them what’s driving it and you’ll get mostly silence, some shrugs, maybe vague theories at best.
And that’s certainly not incompetence. It’s visibility, or lack thereof. We’ve said it for years, and it shows in the data, that Claims Systems were built for claims, not litigation intelligence, and there’s a clear need to bring front line adjusters and defense counsel closure together in partnership instead of working in silos, spreadsheets, and email chains.
For claims leaders, adjusters, and defense counsel, it’s the same story: you can’t fix what you can’t see.
The Promise of AI Before Quality Data Exists
AI is seemingly everywhere, at least in promise. I’d bet that 90% of all marketing copy featured AI prominently, and to be fair, most everyone wanted to talk about how deploying AI will reshape their operations. But we’re seeing an alarming trend, which is to skip the low-hanging fruit in favor of huge moonshot features like predicting outcomes. The future!
So far, even the most well-known large consulting firms haven’t built reliable, industry-wide litigation models, and it won’t happen without clean data. You need the foundation first. Structured data and lots of it, consistently.
We need to get the basics right, then add the magic down the road!
The Disconnect with Defense Counsel
The adjuster-attorney relationship continues to strain (with notable, but small and inconsistent exceptions) under pressure of misaligned objectives and, at times, unclear authority.
Many adjusters describe the constant chase of updates from defense counsel as feeling like they’re herding cats, while defense firms describe the same interactions as feeling micromanaged.
Both sides speak aspirationally about wanting a better partnership with the other, but remain entrenched in the operational status quo, neither side consistently taking the steps toward true collaboration, both citing their own expertise or knowledge of “the facts” and their own experience.
It’s our belief, having seen it firsthand, that the breakthrough here isn’t as much about control or authority (as is often cited) as it is about transparency of data and communication. The best teams share a single source of truth, real-time updates, and clear expectations to minimize surprises.
Litigation Management Holds Many Meanings
Guidewire Connections revealed an industry talking about evolution, leveraging new tools and technology, while also acknowledging the deliberate pace at which decisions are made and adoption occurs. What felt difficult to pin down were issues related to insurance defense, not because they don’t exist, but because carriers have such different views on how to handle insurance defense and litigation operations overall.
Many, for example, view legal bill management as their one and only lever for working with defense counsel, and therefore, they use bill review as a proxy for litigation management. Others claim never to review legal bills with the intention of rejecting line items, trusting their panel counsel wholesale to do what they’re best at doing, to win cases and/or reach otherwise favorable outcomes. Interestingly, both of those camps want lower spend and more visibility into the process, which is why we’ve pressed ahead with Litigation Intelligence, a single platform that combines case management, performance data, and billing data in one comprehensive solution that finally helps tell the ROI story on defense spend and strategy.
Start Small, But Start
The carriers succeeding with litigation transformation don’t boil the ocean, but they start the process. They pick one line of business and connect the data. They prove the value, then expand. The cycle looks like: visibility impacts engagement and behavior, which impacts results. Taken together, better long-term decisions get made with better outcomes, which is the promise of litigation intelligence.
Suddenly, adjusters aren’t chasing, they’re collaborating. Neither carrier nor defense counsel are guessing, they’re evaluating the same facts and updates in alignment. And executives have full, transparent visibility across the entire portfolio. Who’s doing what, when they’re doing it, what happened, and what’s next are all on full display. No more waiting and wondering, just full transparency and insights at a glance.