AutoArb: Automating PIP Arbitration Litigation for a Law Firm

Summary

After I left the Marines, I went to work at Pringle, Quinn, Anzano in Belmar, New Jersey, from 2004 to 2010 as a software developer. The firm was best known for representing the Special Investigation Units of insurance carriers, including Allstate New Jersey Insurance Company, Encompass Insurance, Mercury Insurance Group and Selective Insurance Company of America, in challenging complex healthcare insurance fraud schemes. AutoArb was one of the systems I built for the firm.

The Firm and the Fight Against Insurance Fraud

Pringle, Quinn, Anzano had offices in Belmar, Morristown, Mount Laurel and Trenton. Its practice covered commercial litigation, governmental relations and regulatory law, municipal law, commercial transactions, real estate and land use, and wills and estates. The part of the practice I worked in was insurance fraud. Those cases involved automobile accident fraud rings, healthcare provider fraud, No Fault PIP, UM and UIM claims, and automobile theft claims.

Cases like that live and die on information. Who is connected to whom, which claims keep showing up, which names come back again and again. That information had to be captured, organized and easy to find for the people building the cases.

AutoArb: Automating PIP Arbitration

AutoArb is a system I built at the firm as an automated workflow system for PIP arbitration litigation. PIP stands for Personal Injury Protection, the no fault coverage behind many of the claims the firm handled.

AutoArb logged into each lawyer's case management system on their behalf and pulled all of their case information and court schedules. It then put that information into the firm's systems and onto the lawyers' calendars automatically.

That saved the lawyers real time. Nobody had to gather and manage that information by hand anymore. It just showed up for them, ready to work with.

AutoArb worked alongside the fraud work the firm was known for. PIP claims were part of the No Fault PIP, UM and UIM matters in the firm's insurance fraud practice, and the same lawyers, paralegals and client staff who used SIU and Tag were the people AutoArb served.

What the Job Covered

I owned three things: web application development, database administration and data analysis. I wrote the applications, ran the databases behind them and dug into the data to find what mattered. That mix carried straight over from my time in the Marines, where I built web applications and relational databases for the Marine Corps Logistics Command.

What It Taught Me

Building software for a legal team taught me that the users are the experts. Lawyers and investigators know their cases. My job was to give them tools that fit how they already worked and to keep the data accurate, because in litigation a wrong record is worse than no record. I still build that way: start with the people who will use the system every day and make the data trustworthy.

The Other Systems I Built There

• SIU, the app that tracked people on the firm's radar for insurance fraud
• Tag, the system that turned boxes of subpoenaed checks into a searchable database
• The technologies and experience behind all three systems

In My Words

The best part of building AutoArb was that the lawyers stopped chasing their case information and court schedules, because it just showed up on their calendars.

Brian Messenlehner

Project leadership by Brian Messenlehner.

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