Milliman's Datalytics-Defense delivers advanced analytics on defense attorneys for insurers. The tool has become ever more important in the current era of ramped up litigation—so-called social inflation—a major point of concern for US insurers as courts open up post-Covid.

Litigation defense is one of the largest expenses for a carrier and auditing invoices alone has not made a significant impact lowering the expense. Insurers now need a macro approach to deliver better results and to analyse who their best and worst attorneys are—which can be a key source of cost saving.

Milliman Datalytics-Defense is a legal e-billing tool with advanced analytics for litigation defense. While most insurers have a legal e-billing platform to manage invoices with their outside counsel, many do not have advanced analytics on their outside counsel's performance.

Datalytics-Defense is the first platform to read line-item descriptions on invoices to capture data sets used for analytics.

Using proprietary data-mining techniques, Milliman Datalytics-Defense is able to analyse companies' defense cost invoices and produce actionable insights.

In one example, a large insurer used Datalytics to implement changes that led to a $14m per year decrease in legal defense costs. Attorneys billed roughly 15% less per claim per month.

The time spent on each active invoice per month went from 14 hours down to approximately 12 hours. Datalytics enabled the identification of vendors/partners that provide enhanced value. The client was then able to develop and manage a strategy to fuel collaboration, which reduced inefficiencies, and lead to a 300% growth rate.

Milliman's novel initiative is likely to grow in importance as the imperative to reduce litigation costs increases in the US.