We’ve all seen the headlines. The world is rapidly changing. Adoption of technology, millennials now amplified by the voice of Gen Z continue to disrupt consumption models.
Despite all of us knowing that change is coming, how much are you really doing at your company to get prepared and ahead of the change?
I’ll share an example of how we see this in our industry today.
We operate in the consumer litigation pre-settlement world. Providing much needed support for people – often accident victims – who don’t want to settle only a lawsuit but need to cover medical expenses and accident-related costs – we provide advances that allow the person to stay in the fight and get paid what they are owed. We recover our advance and what’s owed by the plaintiff only if they win their case.
As you can imagine, our industry moves at the pace of law firm transformation – and at times can be slower than the ambition we set in our personal lives. Documents and paper trails that embody the legal case are still for a large part held as hard copies. We still see evidence that plaintiffs continue to follow a manual process applying for advances/funds in writing and often receive a physical check – remember those? It’s a space ripe for disruption. But despite the signals of a technological transformation being heard since the 1990’s, not much has happened to change how this market operates in a holistic way.
Think of your own experiences… In the financial services industry, a lot has been done to help consumers apply for credit online, receive, manage payments, and predict default risk.
In our world (Consumer Litigation Funding) – hard copies and paper trails dominate a very manual process.
The resistance to change is dominant in industries that meet a few key criteria:
- Low profile industries that fly under the radar
- Industries where a few big fish dominate the market and are tough to disrupt
- Industries where consumers lack choice and dont always pursue options
We’ve decided to take a hard look at this and – despite being one of the leaders funding over $700 million in pre-settlement advances – we aim to bring a few new solutions to our customers – both law firms and plaintiffs.
The hard truth is that, like the financial services industry, data is king. We have access to types of data sets in personal injury space and continue to develop models and predictive indices around case settlement outcomes. With multivariate regression modeling, we can look at a number of factors that influence that outcome – geography, case & injury type, insurance and drive these dependencies to outcomes and results.
It’s our ambition to continue to develop the necessary tools that drive innovation for both Law Firms and Plaintiffs seeking connectivity to their experience. Please follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and learn more about our direction.