Panel rates, litigation guidelines and carrier audits. Realization is set by someone else's billing rules, and the write-downs happen after the work.
You are not really setting your own rates, your own staffing or your own billing increments — the carrier's guidelines are, and they were written to reduce spend. The economics of a defense practice are therefore decided somewhere between the panel agreement and the e-billing rules, and almost nobody reads those two documents against each other.
panel rates
LEDES
task codes
litigation guidelines
e-billing rejection
carrier audit
block billing
These are the terms the review uses with you. A page written for
law firms generally would not contain any of them.
Where it concentrates here
Specific to insurance defense, not to law firms generally. Each is
concentrated — a single agreement, a single code, a single account nobody reviews
— which is why a sample of the operation tends to miss it and a full pass tends to
find it. They are not findings from a named engagement.
E-billing line items reduced or rejected on task and activity codes, absorbed as a write-down rather than appealed inside the carrier's own appeal window.
Panel rate agreements with volume commitments, agreed discounts or annual increases that nobody tracks against what was actually billed.
Litigation guidelines that cap staffing, block block-billing or require pre-approval for research, applied unevenly across timekeepers.
Carrier audits recovering fees already collected, with no reserve against the exposure and no analysis of which practices triggered them.
Realization reported firm-wide when defense work and other practice groups have structurally different realization, so the average conceals both.
Where this data actually lives
LEDES 1998B or 2000 exports into the carrier's e-billing platform
Legal Tracker (formerly Serengeti), CounselLink or Passport on the carrier side
Task-code and activity-code compliance checked by the platform, not by you
Named because it changes what the intake asks
for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them
rather than surprised by them.
The proposal is written for law firms as a
whole — the sequence, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your
number of operating units. What is on this page is what we would additionally expect to
find in insurance defense.