Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Why should you DiggiT?
As an organization Litigation Solutions prides itself on providing cost effective solutions to the financial risk associated with the claims industry. In 2009, we added a product that takes advantage of the explosion of social networking sites to do an on-line investigation we call DiggiT. When you consider that Facebook now has over 750 million users, and that 50% of those users log on daily, or that YouTube serves up more than one billion new videos per DAY, or that Twitter is on pace to process well more than 10 billion tweets this year, you can see why we focused on the social networking boom as an area to provide value!
DiggiT is an excellent tool in the claims arena for several reasons:
Cost-The cost of a DiggiT is under $400.00, and can be as inexpensive as $189.00;
Scope-A DiggiT can be performed on a subject anywhere, at any time;
Quick Turnaround Time-usually completed in under one week and can be done on a Rush basis;
High return on investment typically at least 10:1 on volume;
Unique Results;
Stealth-There is no risk of detection from our internet search.
Some people ask us when to use a DiggiT, and my answer is generally anytime you think that a low cost, low risk investigation may give you information that would be useful to your claim. More specifically, you can use it in conjunction with any surveillance or activity check for a more complete profile, on older surveillance cases that have netted minimal results, on a targetted demographic like all claims that have more than 2 weeks lost time with a claimant between the ages of 18-35, or on all high exposure cases in litigation based on the risk/reward associated with the service. For the price point, it is a service you can be aggressive with, and use almost as a tool for "fishing."
I am also asked what does a DiggiT typically find? Well, there are a number of things a DiggiT can find including pictures or video of your subject engaging in physical activity counter to their claims, or evidence of income that they allegedly do not have, or future plans so that you can set up a more focused and effective surveillance, or clues as to hobbies, interests, and residence set up. Remember a fully filled out profile usually contains about 40 pieces of recognizably personal information, including but not limited to name, birthdate, online and offline contact information, gender, relationship status, employment history, and often times their photograph!
Many adjusters and risk managers think that they already do what they may call a "Facebook" search, or internet search, and ask why they should spend the money to let us do this service. Their are many reasons. The first of which is the depth of the search. We include what we call a quick internet search on the bigger social networking sites as part of our pre-surveillance work up that is likely similar to what a typical claims person may have time to do. It takes 15-20 minutes, and hits the highlights of the top social networking sites for the subject, hoping for an obvious hit like an open account that is not marked private for Facebook or Myspace. A DiggiT, does much more than that. First, it takes the vital statistics given by the client and matches those through a database to any and all email addresses associated with the subject. It is not uncommon for a person to have multiple email addresses to open multiple accounts on-line, many of which are much more difficult to find. Then, those email addresses are matched to the existence of an account linked to the subject on any one of 200+ social networking sites. This is a MUCH more thorough search that uses the fingerprint of the cyber world, the email address, or ADDRESSES instead of the subject's name to locate internet activity that may exist under a fictitious name or on a more obscure site that the average person would never find. In addition, remember that more and more profiles are marked private or partially private making it tougher to get what you are looking for. But, our Diggers, will take the time to search the entire friend list looking for public or partially public profiles where the subject may have pictures, videos or text posted that is not private! If their friend or family member do not carry the same privacy level, their communications will be public on the friend's site. A DiggiT can take from 3 to 5 hours to conduct, but will combine a combination of national databases, custom algorithms, a criminal/civil search, and a trained investigator scouring not only the subjects information, but that of their social networking "friends." This is more time than a typical claims handler can afford to put into a search and given the potential savings in lost wages, future medical, claims costs, and litigation expenses for the price point, a DiggiT is a low cost, high value tool to use for your claims.
Despite the effectiveness of the service, don't be fooled by outrageous claims some vendors will make. We have done 6,000 of these over the past two years, and we will find something you did not tell us on many of these, if not most. However, it is about two of ten that return information that directly affects the value of your claim. However, the cost of ten Diggits, will usually be under $3,700 and the return on the ones with direct findings will typically be WAY more than that, with an average ROI for every ten claims placed at more than 10:1, and sometimes well more than that. We have had several DiggiTs that our clients have told us resulted in more than six figures in savings for a service with no risk, and at a cost under $400.00! Finally, our team is always evaluating different ways to increase our findings in this area, including the newer location based social networking sites. We can be flexible in pricing for larger volume projects or formal DiggiT programs. Please contact me if you have any additional questions about this exciting new avenue of claims mitigation.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Time Flies when you are having fun
It amazed me to realize that June 14th of this past year marked the 12th anniversary of Litigation Solutions! Twelve years ago I was sitting in the Gulf Tower with my partner and one other employee with little more than a quesy stomach, and the hope that quitting a very good job in order to chase my dream of opening my own business would not be the biggest mistake of my life. We initially opened up to be a one stop shop for litigation support services doing records retrieval, litigation copy work, trial exhibits, court reporting and subpoena service. Later in that year, the opportunity to get into the investigative field presented itself, and we dove in head first. The next two years taught us a few things. First, that there is a reason that most start up businesses fail in their first year, second that we were pretty good at getting those records for the litigation industry and doing surveillance, and finally, well we were not so good at all of those other things! As a result, we stopped doing our scanning and imaging work, our trial exhibits, and court reporting to devote our energies to building the best Investigations and Records Procurement business that we could. With the help of wonderful employees, most of which are still here, and now running regions or one of the divisions, and many great clients, many of whom I now count as great friends, we are now a company which employees 275 people, handling records procurement nationally, and investigations in 22 states with our own staff. We also handle the other states for investigations through a network of over 1,000 investigators that we developed at the request of our clients, and through our Vendor Management Program. I stepped back to realize that we have more than 165 of our own full time investigators working in 22 states, and a management team of 13 field managers, a Vice President and 2 Regional Vice Presidents to support those field operations for investigations. In addition, there is an administrative support staff for that department of about 20. There is now a sales team of nine Account Executives and 3 Regional Vice Presidents driving sales for the company. Our SIU department has 8 staff members and a manager, and the DiggiT team now consists of 12 people and a manager! Great job by all involved! In additon to that, our Records Procurement department has a staff of 24, a Vice President and an Operations Manager. Add six full time IT employees, and a Corporate staff, and it seems like a long time since I called my partner shortly before our first Christmas in business to ask if it meant that we were bankrupt when we could not pay ourselves and still meet payroll! Finally, the last I checked we had more than 6,000 individual clients signed up to work with us through LS Customer Link. Finally, priding ourselves on being ahead of the curve in terms of new services to offer our clients, I was excited to know that we now have done more than 6,000 DiggiTs for our clients, and some of the industry is just starting to counter with a service to compete in the Social Networking Investigations arena. Thank you again to all of our employees who hustle every day to deliver a quality service, and especially to our loyal client base who entrusts us to do just that each and every day!
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Introduction
Litigation Solutions was incorporated in Pittsburgh PA in June of 1999 with three employees. The company was initially focused on providing a one stop shop for all litigation support services. Over the first two years of our existence, we figured out that we were very good at two things, one was records procurement and the other was investigations. With our focus now defined, our company grew from those employees in Pittsburgh, to more than 275 employees in 22 states! In addition
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