Inter-company arbitration is where a subrogation file is either recovered or written off. The contention an adjuster files has to set the scene, tell the facts of loss in order, and tie the adverse driver's conduct to the specific state statute it violated. Writing that well takes time and experience, and quality varies from one adjuster to the next on the same set of facts.
This guide walks through how Claims Agent Suite's arbitration agents prepare those contentions, what the adjuster supplies, what the agent retrieves on its own, and where the adjuster stays in control.
Two agents, one for each side of the file
Claims Agent Suite has separate arbitration specialists for each role in a dispute:
- Applicant contentions, for the recovering carrier. The goal is to establish the adverse party's liability through reasoned argument grounded in the evidence.
- Respondent contentions, for the defending carrier. The goal is to contest the applicant's version of events and rebut their contentions point by point.
Both follow the same workflow, so outbound and inbound arbitration files get the same standard of work.
Step 1: Collect the facts of loss
The agent gathers the facts conversationally, one question at a time, and asks follow-up questions when an answer is too thin to argue from:
- Loss date.
- Loss location, in any format: a city, an address, or an intersection. The agent derives the state itself and confirms which state's statutes it will use.
- The applicant and respondent carriers.
- A scene description: road type, intersection layout, weather, time of day, and traffic conditions.
- The facts of loss, in chronological order.
- Optional supporting evidence, such as police report notes or witness statements, plus any uploaded PDFs like the police report itself.
On the respondent side, the agent always asks for the applicant's own written contentions, pasted or uploaded as a PDF, so it can answer them directly instead of arguing in a vacuum.
Uploaded documents are scanned with Cloud DLP before their contents reach the model. Social Security, driver's license, and phone numbers are replaced before anything is stored or shown.
Step 2: Confirm before generating
Before it writes anything, the agent reads the collected facts back to the adjuster as a short summary and asks for confirmation. If something is wrong, the adjuster corrects it and the contentions are generated from the corrected facts. The output is only as strong as the facts that go in, so this check comes first.
Step 3: Retrieve the governing state statutes
The agent searches a statute evidence vault covering all 50 states for the traffic law that applies to the loss state and the facts described. It uses retrieval-augmented generation: the contention cites statute text that was actually retrieved, by name and section number, rather than relying on what a general-purpose model remembers about traffic law. If the retrieved documents include case law, the contention can cite that too.
Step 4: Write the contentions
The output is written the way an arbitration panel expects to read it:
- Flowing paragraphs, not bullet points, and no more than five of them.
- An opening paragraph that sets the scene: the loss date, the time of day when it's known, and the physical location.
- A chronological narrative of the facts of loss.
- Each statute violation explained in terms of accident dynamics, traffic engineering principles, and safe-driving standards, so the citation is connected to what actually happened.
- Carriers referred to by company name, never by the insured's proper name.
Carriers with house rules for how contentions should read can set company-specific prompt overrides, so every adjuster's output follows the same standard.
Step 5: Log, then present to the adjuster
Every contention is logged with the statute citations it relied on, the loss state, and the facts it was built from before the adjuster sees it. That gives the file an auditable record of what was argued and on what legal basis. The adjuster then reviews the contentions and decides what gets filed. Claims Agent Suite prepares the argument; the adjuster keeps final control of the filing.
Supporting evidence from the same workspace
The same workspace also prepares the evidence that usually travels with a contention:
- Scene imagery. The loss location becomes aerial and Street View imagery from Google Maps, plus an adjuster-tunable scene diagram.
- Recorded statements. Audio statements are transcribed into AFICS-formatted transcripts the adjuster can draw on for the facts of loss.
- Damage audits. On the respondent side, the inbound demand audit supplies line-item reductions the filing can stand on.
What it means for capacity
Claims Agent Suite's modeled results put the time saved at about 30 minutes per arbitration file, roughly a 50% cut in cycle time. Across about 38,880 filings a year, that's around 19,440 hours, or about 13 FTE of capacity, without adding headcount.
These are the product's own modeled figures, not measured carrier results. Recompute them against your own volume with the subrogation capacity calculator before quoting them.
To see where arbitration sits in the full inbound and outbound flow, read the automated subrogation arbitration workflow on the Claims Agent Suite page. For bringing new reps up to this standard before they file, see training subrogation and arbitration reps.