Practice Notes ·
The Late Call: What Waiting Costs an Insurance Defense File
The most expensive decision in many insurance defense files isn’t a settlement figure. It’s a date: the day someone finally called an investigator.
We see the pattern weekly. A claim arrives, suspicion registers early: the demand doesn’t fit the mechanism of injury, the treatment pattern looks templated, the claimant’s story is a little too polished. The file moves through review, reserves get set, written discovery goes out. Somewhere around mediation, months in, the defense team decides it’s time for surveillance.
By then, three things have usually happened.
Evidence has decayed
Commercial CCTV systems typically overwrite on 30- to 90-day cycles. The loading dock camera that captured the “accident,” the gym’s front-desk footage, the neighbor’s doorbell video: all of it has a shelf life, and none of it waits for the litigation calendar. Witnesses move, phone numbers die, and memories soften into uselessness.
Recollections harden
A claimant three months into treatment presents differently from a claimant ten days after filing. By deposition prep, accounts have settled into final form and daily patterns have adjusted around the claim. Early observation documents routine behavior while it is still routine.
The economics have hardened
Reserves anchor negotiations. Once a claim has been valued and both sides have priced it, new facts have to fight uphill against everyone’s sunk expectations. The same surveillance video is worth more at sixty days than at three hundred.
When to make the call
The answer is simpler than most engagement decisions: at first documented suspicion. An early consultation costs a conversation. We’ll tell you honestly what can be established, what it takes, and, just as often, what isn’t worth spending on yet. That triage costs nothing, and it only exists early.
Request a case consultation. We respond within one business day, in confidence.