The Information Asymmetry in Plaintiff-Side Insurance Litigation

You are sitting in a mediation, and across the table defense counsel is working from a document you will never see in discovery. It is not a brief. It is a portfolio readout — reserves, resolution rates, average paid, time-to-close — showing how this carrier has handled claims like yours, in this jurisdiction, for the past five years. You have the claim file, the policy, and your expert's report. The gap in that room has nothing to do with how well you prepared this case.

A structural imbalance, not a preparation gap

No amount of deposition prep or aggressive discovery closes this gap, because it is built into the structure of the litigation. Carriers and their counsel have had aggregate, portfolio-level claims data for decades. They use it to set reserves, price coverage, weigh litigation exposure, and fix settlement authority long before anyone walks into a mediation. The data that would hand the plaintiff side the same second dimension has always sat in the public and regulatory record. Nobody organized it for us — until now.

What carriers have

A large carrier's claims operation runs on portfolio systems that sort every claim it has ever handled by claim type, jurisdiction, adjuster, coverage line, and resolution method. Actuaries build loss-development models on that data. Litigation managers use it to set settlement authority by case category and venue. And the defense firms that represent a carrier across a state build their own version of the same picture from years inside that carrier's book.

None of this is secret in any improper sense. It is what operating at portfolio scale produces. A carrier writing thousands of policies and closing thousands of claims a year cannot run that book without aggregate intelligence about how those claims behave. The asymmetry is not bad faith — it is scale. The carrier always argues from the portfolio. The plaintiff attorney, by default, argues from the file.

What plaintiff attorneys have had

The individual claim file is our primary document. The policy. The coverage correspondence. The adjuster's notes, when we can pry them loose. The expert report. The depositions. And the pattern-recognition that builds over years of practice — a working sense of how this carrier behaves in this kind of case, assembled from every matter you have personally tried or heard about from the people you trust.

That experience is real intelligence, and it wins cases. It is also slow to build, impossible to transfer, and bounded by one lawyer's caseload. It cannot tell you how the carrier resolved the 200 claims like yours that other attorneys handled in other venues before you ever filed. It cannot tell you whether your claim's profile — coverage line, claim type, venue, demand timing — sits inside a pattern of early resolution or one of prolonged resistance. The file gives you the facts of the case. It does not give you the market context defense already holds.

Why the gap has persisted

The data that closes this gap has been sitting in plain view the whole time. Regulatory filings, complaint records, docket data, licensing records, financial disclosures — the public record carries a substantial picture of how carriers behave across their books. It never reached the plaintiff bar as usable intelligence not because anyone hid it, but because nobody had aggregated it, normalized it across jurisdictions and source types, and turned it into an analytical layer built for our side of the case.

Defense firms never built it because they never had to. Their clients already carried it internally. So the plaintiff bar worked on the assumption that aggregate market intelligence simply lived inside the carrier's own systems and nowhere else. That assumption no longer holds.

What aggregate market intelligence changes

Aggregate market intelligence does not predict how your case comes out. It hands you the second dimension defense has always carried into the room: a clear read on where your case sits against how this carrier has handled this type of claim across its portfolio, in this jurisdiction, over time.

That read changes how you evaluate the case, calibrate the demand, and run the mediation. When you know that claims against this carrier in this coverage line and this venue have moved through the market on a particular resolution pattern, you are not guessing when you set a demand or weigh a settlement offer against the carrier's own behavior. You are working from the frame defense counsel has always had — not because you got hold of the carrier's internal documents, but because the aggregate pattern is visible in the public record once someone assembles it properly.

DAIS Analytics assembles that record — aggregate, anonymized, drawn from public and regulatory sources across sixteen states — into carrier intelligence profiles that give plaintiff attorneys the portfolio view they have never had. It does not predict outcomes. It shows what the aggregate record reveals about how carriers of this type have resolved claims like this one. That is the intelligence layer the plaintiff side has been working without, and it is what I built DAIS to deliver. See Litigation Intelligence.

DAIS Analytics, LLC is a data-analytics company and is not a law firm. David M. Greene, its principal, is a member of The Florida Bar. His Florida Bar membership does not create an attorney-client relationship between DAIS and any user or subscriber. Nothing on this website constitutes legal advice. DAIS services are nonlegal services as defined under Rule 4-5.7 of the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar. Data is delivered in aggregate, anonymized form and does not predict, guarantee, or valuate any individual claim or case.