Long Drafting Processes Lead to Workflow Bottlenecks and Writer Burnout

For much of the firm’s history, Easton & Easton had relied on a dedicated demand-writing department to produce its settlement demands. These staff members took on the time-consuming task of reviewing medical records, going through bills, and compiling a narrative of the patient’s medical story, which was then handed off to the attorneys for review and polishing. The attorneys would improve the narrative with the aim of making it persuasive and meeting the firm’s standards before sending it out to the insurance carrier.

This draft process was costing Easton & Easton dearly. Producing a draft could take anywhere from four to eight hours for smaller projects to more than a week for the higher-profile cases. Not only that, but the demand writer position saw high turnover, as the process of reading medical record after medical record and trying to summarize it was often boring, monotonous work.

Easton & Easton knew it needed a partner to improve its settlement demand process. However, the firm encountered two recurring issues when evaluating partners:

1. No real time savings: Most solution providers used the bare amount of automation, still relying on their own paralegal (often overseas) to draft the settlement demands. Easton & Easton was billed for the same amount of time that its own team would have spent drafting the demands while still having to review the completed draft for accuracy/quality.
2. Lackluster AI: What AI solutions Easton & Easton did find were severely lacking, and the settlement demand drafts they produced did not meet Easton & Easton’s standards of accuracy/quality. Moreover, none of the AI solutions could provide a narrative medical summary in the settlement demand, delivering instead a medical chronology structured by provider, which was significantly inferior to the format Easton & Easton had been producing in-house with its demand-writing department.

“We used to have a constant bottleneck of settlement demands waiting to be drafted for attorney review, despite a hard-working, dedicated demand writing department,” says Matthew D. Easton, managing partner. “Now, after using AI Demand Pro for more than a year, we are caught up, and every demand is drafted immediately within a matter of minutes after we have received the medical records. It has been an absolute game-changer and finally allows our firm to grow as fast as we want to grow without having to increase our workforce.”

AI-Written Settlement Demands Speed Up Turnaround and Improve Morale

Not only that, but Easton & Easton has seen a significant boost to employee morale. No longer saddled with the tedium of summarizing medical records, demand writers are now free to focus on the more interesting and nuanced parts of the case. Since partnering with AI Demand Pro, Easton & Easton has not had any turnover in its demand writing department, which is a first for this position. For their part, attorneys no longer have to reacquaint themselves with a case as the demand arrives the same day they requested it. Most importantly, clients are happier now that demands are coming a week or month earlier than it would have before.

One example sums up the difference AI Demand Pro has made. Prior to partnering with AI Demand Pro, Easton & Easton had prepared a settlement demand for a $30+ million case involving over 30 medical providers and thousands of records. However, additional medical treatment had taken place since that initial demand, and the managing litigation partner decided that a new settlement demand was needed before going to mediation—just a few weeks away.

Rather than task staff with reviewing the new records and inserting them into the old demand, Easton & Easton used AI Demand Pro to create a new demand from scratch. The team uploaded all of the medical records and documents to Demand Pro and had a new settlement demand in less than an hour after the partner requested it. With only a few edits, the medical portion of the demand was added to the mediation brief, and a few weeks later, the case was settled for $22 million at mediation.

Looking to the Future

“It truly is revolutionary,” says Easton. “I can’t put into words how much it has impacted and changed our law firm and opened up future avenues and abilities that never would have been open otherwise.”