I was recently a guest on the Be That Lawyer podcast with Steve Fretzin, talking about how we scaled GAIN from three people in an 8 x 10 room to a 150-person operation that has financed close to half a billion dollars in medical claims. Steve asked me a question I get asked in some form pretty regularly: if a lawyer wanted to scale a practice the way we scaled GAIN, what should they actually do?
I gave him four answers. I want to lay them out here in more detail, because they hold up whether you run a two-attorney shop or a large law practice with case managers cycling through a hundred files at a time.
The Pattern Behind All Four
Before the specifics, the pattern. Every one of these four areas involves an attorney, case manager, or paralegal talking to multiple outside parties about the same piece of information, over and over, on a rolling basis. The fix is not to work faster. The fix is to cut down the number of separate conversations required to get the same information to the same people.
That is the whole idea, applied four times over, across four different points in the case lifecycle.
1. Consolidate Case Updates
Every open case usually has a stack of lien holders who all want to know the same thing: where does this case stand. Left unmanaged, that means separate calls, emails, and portal logins with every lien holder on every file, repeated across a caseload of a hundred or more.
Route case status through one source and have that source distribute updates to every lien holder from there. It’s a small operational change that removes a surprising amount of weekly overhead once you multiply it across a full docket.
2. Fix the Medical Records Bottleneck
Demand letters cannot go out until the medical bills, notes, and records are in hand, and getting there is often the biggest time drain for paralegals and case managers, ahead of drafting the demand letter itself. Multi week delays waiting on records from individual providers are common, and they push the whole case timeline back with them.
Work with providers and platforms that make records available without the wait and without the per record fees. When records access moves at the speed of a lien portfolio instead of the speed of an individual provider’s back office, demand letters go out faster and cases move.
3. Build a Provider Map Before You Need One
Case managers lose real time hunting for an orthopedist, a pain management specialist, or an imaging center willing to see a patient on a lien, especially outside the handful of providers they already know. That search tends to happen case by case instead of once.
Build the map in advance. Know which providers in each specialty accept lien-based care in your market before a new file lands on someone’s desk, not after.
4. Consolidate Settlement Reconciliation
At settlement, a case with five or six lien holders can mean five or six separate calls to negotiate reductions, confirm amounts, and reconcile who gets paid what. It’s one of the more time consuming parts of closing a case, and it happens at the exact moment everyone wants the file closed.
Work with one revenue cycle partner who can consolidate that conversation. One call, one accounting of the settlement dollars, one distribution to every lien holder in place of a string of individual negotiations.
Where AI Actually Fits
None of the four steps above require AI. They work because they cut out redundant conversations. Once that redundancy is gone, AI is well suited to help with the manual work still sitting inside the process: automating record requests, drafting a first pass of a demand letter, or flagging which cases have stalled before anyone notices on their own.
I said something on the podcast worth repeating here. AI is not replacing case managers, paralegals, and attorneys. AI is replacing the people in those roles who refuse to use it. The people who show up for injured clients, negotiate settlements, and make the judgment calls are not going anywhere. But the hours that used to go into chasing records or reconciling lien holders one at a time do not have to be spent that way anymore.
When we started building predictive tools at GAIN back in 2016 and 2017, the average risk manager on our team handled 450 client files. Today that same role manages 4,500. Our people did not get faster. We removed the redundant work that used to stand between them and the files.
That is the opportunity in front of every law firm handling personal injury cases right now. Find where your team is having the same conversation five times when it should be having it once, and start there.
I go into more detail on this in my conversation with Steve Fretzin on the Be That Lawyer podcast, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw5oO0PXZtw.