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Insurers That Mine Testimony Data Will Outperform Peers

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Insurers That Mine Testimony Data Will Outperform Peers

2026-07-30 23:31 UTCBy AlphaScala Research DeskSource reporting: insurancethoughtleadership.comEditorial standards

Insurers That Mine Testimony Data Will Outperform Peers

Property and casualty insurers that mine deposition testimony at scale can price risk more accurately, but the plaintiff bar is already investing hundreds of millions in AI, analysts said.

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Property and casualty insurers that analyze testimony at scale will price risk more accurately than competitors relying on instinct alone, according to a recent analysis by two insurance industry experts.

Every claim hinges on testimony. Not documents, and not data fields in a claims system. What moves a claim from first notice of loss to final resolution is what people say under oath and on the record. The analysis argued that the oral record is the currency used to analyze risk and construct narratives. Reserves rest on it. Settlements are priced against it. Juries decide on it.

Most claims organizations, the analysis said, manage that currency as if they were using an abacus. A deposition is taken, read once by assigned defense counsel, and summarized in a report that lands in a claim file, then effectively disappears. The knowledge inside it – how a particular plaintiff's expert testifies about future medical care, which questions unsettle a professional expert, how a repeat-player plaintiff firm builds its damages case – is gathered once and thrown away. The organization paid for the transcript and the hidden data it contains, yet almost none of that value is used beyond the single matter that produced it.

Efficiencies at the Single Claim Level

The first level of opportunity is the individual case. Obtaining, reviewing, and analyzing testimony consumes an extraordinary amount of billable attorney time. Much of that work still relies on tools and methods that have changed little in decades, the analysis said. AI and testimony analytics can help counsel search and summarize transcripts, identify admissions, and compare testimony with medical records. Tasks that once required hours of billable time can now be completed in minutes, producing faster turnaround and lower attorney fees.

Strategic Advantage from Aggregate Data

The larger opportunity lies at the portfolio level: leveraging aggregate data. By treating all of an organization's testimony as a single, queryable body of knowledge, transcripts become institutional memory. Across matters, they record the statements, strategies, and behaviors of insureds, company witnesses, retained experts, opposing experts, defense counsel, and adverse attorneys.

Extracting and leveraging that aggregate history lets a claims organization identify patterns that no single case reveals. It can better prepare witnesses, evaluate repeat experts, profile recurring firms and attorneys, detect anomalies and contradictions across claims, and improve outcomes across its portfolio. The analysis noted that in testimony, the past is often prologue.

It is now possible to turn testimony into a searchable body of institutional knowledge and generate a wide range of analytics. As data is added, the value compounds: every new transcript strengthens the system, transforming testimony the organization has already paid for into a reusable data asset. For a large insurer responding to a disaster, that could mean identifying recurring participants, uncovering potential fraud, avoiding improper payments, and recovering millions, the analysis said.

Claims organizations that build a portfolio-level testimony capability will out-execute those that do not, and the gap will widen rather than close. An organization that grounds its decisions in accumulated testimony data can make a better-informed judgment. An organization relying on the assigned adjuster's memory and the handling attorney's instinct is guessing. On one claim, the guess might beat the model. Across 5,000 claims, it will not, the analysis argued. Better information yields more wins on average, and claims is a business of averages.

A second reason to act, according to the analysis, is the risk that the plaintiff bar will deploy these capabilities at scale sooner. Plaintiff firms understand the power of technology and are using it to widen the intake funnel and increase case volume. Far more investment is flowing into plaintiff-side technologies than into defense-side technologies. The hundreds of millions of dollars invested across a growing group of plaintiff-side AI platforms illustrate the scale of that effort.

The analysis concluded that organizations that learn to manage and analyze testimony at scale will handle claims more efficiently, price risk more accurately, deploy better strategies, and improve outcomes across their portfolios. The plaintiff bar has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in AI platforms, widening the gap between defense and plaintiff capabilities, the authors noted.