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⚖️ LIENS vs SUBROGATION vs REIMBURSEMENT: WHY CLASSIFICATION MATTERS

Not all recovery claims are created equal, and treating them the same can cost your client money and expose our firm to risk.

In our latest blog, Teresa Kenyon, Vice President of Lien Resolution at Synergy, breaks down how trial lawyers and paralegals can correctly classify, defend, and resolve each type of claim before settlement funds are distributed.

From statutory liens to contractual reimbursement rights, the legal foundation behind each claim determines what gets paid, what gets reduced, and what can be challenged.

💡 KEY TAKEAWAYS:
✓ Liens attach directly to settlement funds and carry the highest enforcement risk
✓ Subrogation rights are often limited by state law doctrines like made-whole and common fund
✓ ERISA self-funded plans can override many state protections based on plan language
✓ Reimbursement claims are contract-driven and hinge entirely on the plan document
✓ Misclassification can lead to overpayment, disputes, or firm liability exposure

🚨 BOTTOM LINE:
If you don’t correctly identify the legal mechanism behind each claim, you cannot properly defend the recovery. Classification is not optional, it is protection for both client recovery and firm compliance.

👉 Read the full blog here: https://ow.ly/r4T050ZhClh

🚨 Alert: New Peak Practice Newsletter Drop

Winning cases is the hard part, right? Then you try to scale a PI firm and learn the truth. The work that makes you a great litigator is often the same work keeping your operation fragile.

n the latest Peak Practice Newsletter, Jason D. Lazarus, J.D., LL.M., MSCC breaks down his recent Trial Lawyer View podcast conversation with Ralph Pillinger, litigation paralegal and production lead at Feller & Wendt, a multi-state catastrophic injury firm that grew from under 50 people to over 105 in a single year. Ralph has spent two decades in litigation and still coaches endurance athletes, and he runs case teams the same way he trains runners.

Here is what stands out:
· Coach your team the way they want to be coached! Make sure you know what motivates and how your team wants to be led.
· Stop paying your team to work outside their wheelhouse. Ralph is good at lien reductions. He also says a specialist does it five times faster, so he hands it off and spends that time on five other clients.
· AI does 92 percent. The art is the last 8. Human review of a 2,000-page file runs about 65 percent accuracy. AI lands between 85 and 95. Ralph's rule, borrowed from Mark Lanier: AI will not replace attorneys and paralegals, but the ones who use it will replace the ones who do not. Pick one tool, learn it deeply, get team buy-in before you buy.

For personal injury firms scaling to compete with a real operational foundation, this edition lays out how the best teams set up cases, where they leak time and money, the AI moves worth making now, and the duplication that lets a firm survive losing a key person without falling apart.

📥 Read the Full Newsletter Here: https://ow.ly/Vn9b50Zhgqr