Choosing a team: five perspectives, one approach

So when choosing a company, to help a building owner with a claim, I think there's a couple different things to do. One, it's very important to shop around. You definitely want to understand your options, and do your due diligence and really understand different approaches to solving the problem, and understand what approach might best serve your interests. And, because not every approach is equally good.

I think that if I had a building, and it had a major problem, what I would look for is, one, I would ask the, whoever I was interviewing, what their approach is, and then I would try to see what actual on the ground experience they have in executing that approach. Because there's a difference between just reading about something in a book, and really having lived it, because you really understand it at a much deeper level. And so, our approach is really understanding the underlying decision making behind these disputes. That's really where we spend the vast majority of our time, is developing evidence and creating arguments for the internal players, at what we call the payers, So the internal players at the payers, helping understand and implementing strategies that enable them to increase payments to our clients.

And it's pretty sophisticated how we do it. But, and really how we're able to do that is because we have people in our team who have worked in these fields for decades. For example, we have a former senior claims adjuster on our team that worked at large insurance companies. And so that helps us understand the institution behind the claim making process, the politics, the different incentives, the bonuses, the concerns about potential layoffs, how to, you know, document a file, all of those sorts of things.

Because really at the end of the day, people at the insurance company, or people who work at an insurance company, they're interested primarily in what's good for them and what's good for their own families. They're not really interested in the insurance company itself. And so really having that fundamental understanding of how things really work really helps us create arguments for the insurance company. And then, likewise, what we do is, for the construction company, we do something kind of similar, and that we've got a former senior superintendent on our team, who really knows a lot about, you know, the construction issues and how construction works.

We also have a community manager, for HOAs on our team, and this really helps us communicate, with the board of HOA to understand that they're volunteers, how to reduce the load on that and make things very easy and make communication with the homeowners very easy, when we represent HOAs. And likewise, we have a commercial real estate expert on our team as well that really helps us communicate, the claim resolution process to especially limited partners in these real estate development process, so that they understand in a way that's, very easy to go down and very, and very kind of simple, but accurate. And so I think that this kind of multidisciplinary approach, and our kind of our understanding of the entire lifecycle, and understanding of everyone's incentives and the claim, is really pretty, fundamentally different, and I think that's why, people tend to hire us as well. And I think that might be something to look for in whoever you hire.

But I don't necessarily think, even though that's the expertise and what we bring to the table, it's definitely not the right strategy for everyone. And so I would definitely look around, you know, interview other lawyers, interview other public adjusters, interviewing, you know, other other participants in this industry and see really what approach is the right one for you. And then, once you determine what the right approach is, what I would advise you to do, is to really contemplate, who has the team, that can best implement that approach. Not just who's read about it in books, but really who has lived it and who has a deep understanding of, you know, the actual politics and the actual inner workings of these structures.