Building Insurance Fraud Software with ASP.NET and SQL Server at a New Jersey 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. These are the technologies and experience behind the software I built to help them do it.

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.

Technologies I Used

I used ASP.NET and SQL Server extensively. The full list of technologies I worked with at the firm:

• ASP.NET
• SQL Server
• C#
• HTML
• JavaScript
• Classic ASP
• Microsoft Access

What I Built With Them

Those technologies sat behind the custom systems I built and maintained to identify and track insurance and healthcare fraud. Three of them get their own posts:

SIU: Special Investigation Unit

SIU tracked the people under investigation or on the firm's radar for insurance fraud and connected the players through their business entities, vehicles being followed by private investigators and the places they were spotted. People who claimed not to know each other kept showing up at each other's businesses.

AutoArb: Automating PIP Arbitration

AutoArb was an automated workflow system for PIP (Personal Injury Protection) arbitration litigation. It logged into each lawyer's case management system, pulled case information and court schedules, and put them into the firm's systems and onto the lawyers' calendars.

Tag: Following the Money

Tag turned boxes of subpoenaed paper checks, some dating back to the 1980s, into a searchable database stored by each part of the check, with OCR, manual review and a QA workflow. It helped attorneys follow the money and find ties nobody knew about.

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.

Projects from this period

• SIU: The Special Investigation Unit App I Built to Track Insurance Fraud
• AutoArb: Automating PIP Arbitration Litigation for a Law Firm
• Following the Money: Building Tag to Track Insurance Fraud

In My Words

I spent those years in ASP.NET and SQL Server building tools for lawyers and paralegals, and that is where I learned that good software for a legal team starts with clean, trustworthy data.

Brian Messenlehner

Project leadership by Brian Messenlehner.

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