Billy Nielsen, Product Manager, Guidewire, writes:

A bodily injury claim comes in on Monday morning. A routine rear-end collision involving soft-tissue neck and back pain, the kind of minor injury that typically resolves on its own in most files. Nothing about it trips a flag, so it lands in the general queue and waits its turn. Ninety days later, a lawyer has become involved and the estimated cost of the claim has more than tripled. A single runaway claim like this can quickly wipe out the margin of a hundred well-handled ones...

The easy interpretation is that attorneys are drawn to claims that were destined to be expensive anyway. That is partly true, and for years it was hard to separate selection from cause. The more recent work closes that gap. A 2026 study in the Journal of Risk and Insurance, led by Bogdan Savych at the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI), used an instrumental-variables design across more than 950,000 lost-time claims to isolate the effect of representation itself, and found that attorney involvement causally raises indemnity, independent of the underlying injury. The path a claim takes helps determine what it costs, which means some of that cost is still in play at the point an adjuster first touches the file.

Read the full article here.  He cites WCRI's Bogdan Savych's recent article on "Unresolved conflict in workers' compensation" in the Journal of Risk and Insurance (2026), as well as other WCRI research on the topic, including Impact of Attorney Representation on Workers’ Compensation Payments.  Visit its page on our website for more information.