Case Selection: Deciding Which Bad-Faith Matters to Take

For a contingency-fee firm, intake is the most consequential decision it makes — and the one made with the least information. Every matter a firm takes commits years of attorney time and real capital against an uncertain recovery. Yet the screen at the front door is usually built on instinct and the handful of carriers a firm happens to have litigated before. Case selection is a portfolio decision. It deserves portfolio-level data.

Intake is capital allocation

A plaintiff firm has a finite number of attorney-hours and a finite tolerance for cost advances. Each bad-faith matter it accepts is an allocation of both against a probability-weighted return. The economics are unforgiving: a strong claim against a carrier that pays reasonably is a good use of the firm's capital; an equally sympathetic claim against a carrier that litigates everything to the courthouse steps may not be — not because the client is wrong, but because the expected cost of recovery is different.

The problem is that, at the moment of intake, a firm typically knows the facts of the one claim in front of it and very little about the institution on the other side. It knows how this carrier treated this insured. It does not know how that carrier behaves across thousands of comparable matters, how it compares to its peers in the same line and region, or whether its financial posture is strengthening or deteriorating. Those are exactly the variables that separate a good intake decision from a costly one.

What a portfolio view changes

Aggregate carrier intelligence reframes the intake question. Instead of asking only "is this claim meritorious?" a firm can also ask "what is the institution on the other side, statistically, likely to do?" That second question is answerable — not from any single claim, but from the pattern across the whole market.

Three aggregate signals do most of the work in an intake screen. None of them is determinative on its own. Together they convert a coin-flip into a graded decision.

1. Carrier propensity, indexed to the market

A carrier's conduct profile — how often it generates the kind of regulated disputes that precede bad-faith litigation, in the relevant line and region — is a measurable thing when read across the market. A carrier indexed well above its peers in the same coverage line is a structurally different counterparty than one sitting at or below the market average. That distinction belongs in the intake decision, because it shapes the entire arc of the matter: demand posture, expected resistance, time to resolution.

2. Settlement benchmarks, in aggregate

Knowing the aggregate range of outcomes for comparable matters — by line, by region, by carrier posture — gives a firm a defensible expected value before it commits. It is the difference between accepting a matter because it feels like a six-figure case and accepting it because comparable matters in that line and region resolve in a known band. Benchmarks do not predict any single outcome. They calibrate expectations across a book of matters, which is precisely what portfolio-level intake requires.

3. Financial-health and solvency posture

A meritorious claim against a financially deteriorating carrier carries a different risk profile than the same claim against a well-capitalized one. Collectability, willingness to reserve, and appetite for protracted litigation all track, in part, with financial condition. Layering a carrier's financial-health posture onto its conduct profile turns two thin signals into one composite read on the counterparty.

From signals to a go / no-go

In practice, these signals combine into a posture read rather than a verdict. A claim with strong facts, against a carrier indexed high for conduct in the relevant line, with settlement benchmarks in an attractive band and a stable-to-deteriorating financial profile, is a different intake proposition than a claim with the same facts against a clean, well-capitalized carrier. Neither is automatically a "take" or a "pass." But a firm that can see both is allocating its capital with information the firm next door is guessing at.

Used across a book of matters, this is where the compounding happens. Any one intake call still turns on judgment. But a firm that screens every prospective matter against the same aggregate baseline raises the quality of the portfolio — fewer capital-heavy matters against the worst counterparties, more concentration where the expected return justifies the commitment.

Delivered responsibly

This intelligence lives at the market level — carrier conduct patterns, benchmark ranges, and financial-health posture — not at the level of individual claimants or claims. All DAIS intelligence is delivered in aggregate, anonymized form, and describes institutional conduct across the market. It is market intelligence to inform a firm's own business and strategy decisions; it is not legal advice, and it does not tell any firm whether to accept or decline a specific matter. For more on the approach, see the Methodology page.

The premium layer

The composite that makes an intake screen useful — carrier propensity indexed to the market, settlement benchmarks, and financial-health posture, read together across multiple lines and jurisdictions — is the intelligence delivered to Founding Members. DAIS's Carrier Intelligence product assembles these layers into decision-ready briefs built for exactly this question: where a plaintiff firm should point its capital.