Insurance defense firms face an increasingly competitive global marketplace. As the 2024 Deloitte insurance industry outlook report suggests, change is accelerating around us, “possibly at a faster pace than any period in history.” Innovation is necessary, but bringing on tools like generative artificial intelligence (AI) must go beyond tech bells and whistles: AI can’t be a footnote for insurance defense firms. To truly stay competitive in the insurance defense landscape, firms must incorporate AI into new areas of law. This means automating and digitizing the information required for tasks that in the past, have only been done by hand.

Generative AI tools can act as an extension of the knowledge professionals themselves. For example, when searching through piles of documents or summarizing relevant precedents, generative AI can work at a speed far faster than a human brain – sifting through hundreds or even thousands of documents in 45 minutes, for what might have taken a human 6 hours to finish. 

Speed is nice for workload management, but law firms are billing by the hour. So why is it important to use technology to get the job done? 

The answer is data. Insurance cases aren’t immune to ‘big data’. LexTrado referenced a study by the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists, which found that the average case contained 6.5 million pages, 10 to 15 custodians, and had 130 GB of data in a recent insight. The authors found that in their own case, the amount of data was quadrupled – and only a fraction of it could be removed by eliminating duplicates or other redundancies. 

As big data takes over the big insurance firm, defense lawyers need to keep up: either miss out on potentially important facts buried in case documents, or rely on massive amounts of manual custodians to process the pages. Or, a third option: rely on generative AI and its capabilities. 

Generative AI is Reliable for Insurance Defense Firms

Automation of the insurance industry was one of the first ‘blooms’ of technological innovation. A fillable client intake form, for instance, helped insurance discovery professionals to automatically check off or request documents necessary for the discovery process, meaning no more tedious forms. However, not all information is as simple as a checklist, as insurance defense lawyers well know. Medical documents and patient files, the backbone of insurance law, are often unstructured and unique to the physician or facility involved. The same is true for medical chronologies, which bring together the unstructured aspects of the patient’s health via forms and documents, and turn them into a cohesive, chronological whole. 

Although technology was not capable of handling these tasks a decade ago, it’s not uncommon today. For insurance law professionals, this is a very good thing. 

Billable hours

Law firm associates can only handle so many files at one time. Law firm managers need to be efficient when handing out workload if they want to optimize billable hours, get the best return, and find ways to cut back on overall time. How can generative AI help maximize billable time? Scope, scale, and bottlenecks. By assessing when, where, and how files can get ‘bottlenecked’ and delayed, law firms can decide how they’d like to implement generative AI. Firms that have an extensive client onboarding, discovery, or review process might find that additional ‘brainpower’ can help cut back on the time to review and resolve a claim. 

Schedule optimization, client onboarding, and time tracking can all be aspects of your practice that are much improved by the help of AI. Similarly, online document libraries, portals, and summarization platforms can all make information available quickly and easily – in a fraction of the time. These non-billable admin tasks can save defense firms a lot of time, and improve profits. 

AI Helps Defense Firms Compete in the Insurance Industry Today 

Insurance defense firms will need to innovate, organize, and reinvent how they do business in order to thrive.
Machines can do many of the tasks that used to take up human time – without compromising the value of having human staff. By bringing on tools like generative AI, firms can not only maximize their profits and stay competitive in a changing industry, they can also make the most out of knowledge worker time.