KCIC
Harmonizing Technology and Deep Consulting Expertise

Back in 2002, when KCIC was founded, its primary purpose was to help companies maximize the value of their insurance assets. Over the years, the company expanded its focus to include being a leader in administering asbestos-related personal injury claims, which led them to develop the cutting-edge Ligado Platform. KCIC assists corporations and their legal counsel to efficiently capture, organize, interpret, and access mass tort claim data as well as insurance data for proper research and analysis. As such, data analysis and analytics are at the heart of KCIC.

Following is the conversation that CIO Applications had with Carrie Scott, VP at KCIC, to understand how the company’s offerings help clients tackle their product liability problems by implementing solutions in truly transformational ways.

What are the market pain points that have manifested as opportunities for KCIC?

In mass tort litigation, lawsuits are coming in from all over the country, and our clients’ cases are defended by a nationwide network of defense counsels. Data concerning these lawsuits, insurance assets, accounting records, and more are maintained in various disparate and non-standardized ways—from excel spreadsheets to emails and accounting systems. As a result, it becomes a burdensome time-consuming effort to perform any kind of simple or comprehensive reporting on the data.

To solve this issue, Ligado centralizes all users, data, and documentation in one place and in a standardized way to facilitate the process of real-time reporting. This enables our clients to make more strategic decisions, mitigate the chances of errors, and save their valuable time and resources.

Please elaborate on how KCIC has established itself in the litigation analytics solution space?

KCIC is involved in litigation analytic solutions in a couple of ways. One of the biggest issues that mass tort defendants face today is getting good data to help them make strategic decisions. The Ligado platform helps streamline and standardize data for our clients, allowing them to manage their litigation and analyze their results. By collaborating with their counsel network through Ligado, clients can also receive real-time, dynamic reporting at their fingertips.

Additionally, from years of discussions related to valuations of mass tort cases, KCIC developed a tool that allows clients to algorithmically identify their potentially dangerous cases. The model considers a client’s past experience, future decision points, and multiple variables and combines those with the existing real-time data. The result is a tool tailored to a client’s specific situation that allows predicted outcomes and dynamic reporting at their fingertips.

Over the years, we have been able to provide insight into asbestos national filing trends, an area previously void of aggregate reporting. In our annual Asbestos Litigation Report and blog posts, we report on a variety of filing trends related to things such as alleged disease, plaintiff firm, and jurisdiction.

We also identify and monitor industry developments like which plaintiff firms changed their filing patterns. All of this analysis is prepared to help our readers better understand their position in the litigation.

Finally, with KCIC’s unique experiences in the industry as well as access to national trends, we can forecast outcomes for a defendant. This custom approach is accomplished by considering an individual client’s trends, national statistics, insights from defense counsel, and other industry analyses. This helps a defendant to reserve properly, account for their liabilities accurately in financial filings, make intentional decisions on defense strategy, and evaluate corporate options such as restructuring.

Please shed light on how BEV solves the mysterious phenomenon of evidence disappearing from the record after asbestos product liability defendants file for bankruptcy?

Both the tort and bankruptcy trust systems often receive claims from the same plaintiff with little transparency within the tort system of the plaintiff’s exposure to now bankrupt company’s products. This can lead to an extremely time-consuming and manual effort for the defendant to identify whether a claimant has or could file a trust claim and subsequently receive an offsetting settlement distribution. KCIC’s BEV tool streamlines the process allowing defendants to analyze bankruptcy trust information within seconds. The feature allows users to run reports of potential trust claims that the plaintiff could file based on their work history and provides pictures to use in depositions to help identify products manufactured by now-bankrupt companies. A process that could have taken days in the past can now be completed in minutes.

Please elaborate on a case study where KCIC utilized data analytics to help a specific client solve a problem.

Recently, a client decided to analyze their litigation strategy in detail to identify areas and processes that could be made more efficient and effective and ultimately lower overall defense costs. In addition to the normal lawsuit data KCIC tracked for them in Ligado, the client wanted to analyze metrics regarding case motion filings and outcomes, deposition attendance strategies, BEV report usage, and defense cost spend by legal activity. This information was then compared against past performance.

We assisted the client with this analysis by using Ligado to track and manage all the needed data points. We developed dynamic, real-time analyses through interactive platforms like MS Power BI. These analytic solutions allowed the client to measure the efficacy of strategy changes in real-time and allowed them to customize their results based on different variables (such as time frame, jurisdiction, and plaintiff’s counsel).

We were also able to help the client assess their defense efforts and trends compared to other defendants based on data seen in national statistics. For instance, with our analysis, the client was able to see if a particular plaintiff firm named them on a higher proportion of its overall lawsuits which allowed them to determine if a defense strategy was working to reduce filings. With these analytics, the client better understood the impact of their defense decisions on their litigation outcomes and costs, which allowed them to make timely decisions as to how to proceed into the future.

How does KCIC separate itself from competitors in the data analytics industry?

At KCIC, we have always been able to deliver our transformative solutions by bridging corporate needs and leading-edge technology for our clients. We do this by having a best in class technology team that works collaboratively with our consultants to partner with clients. This strategy allows KCIC to identify and provide advanced solutions to solve the problem and improve a client’s work experience. Our company is committed to learning and investing in new programs and technologies to continually provide the highest quality of work to our clients and allow our team to work smartly and efficiently.

KCIC looks forward to continuing the trend of being ahead of the technological curve. Some of our future projects include establishing Ligado as a go-to litigation platform for all types of mass torts, emerging and mature, expanding our leading-edge industry analysis and reporting, and identifying new areas of litigation where we can provide meaningful analytics.