When Every Dollar Is Yours: Measuring ROI In High-SIR Litigation
When your company carries a high self-insured retention (SIR), defense litigation doesn’t sit in some abstract insurance layer.
When your company carries a high self-insured retention (SIR), defense litigation doesn’t sit in some abstract insurance layer. Every extra week it takes to understand a record, every detour in discovery, every motion drafted on partial understanding, and every month you stay in a matter longer than you should because no one could see the full picture early enough, is paid for by the enterprise. Efficiency isn’t a “nice to have,” and accuracy isn’t negotiable; they’re both part of sound financial stewardship.
That’s why ROI in high-SIR litigation has to be measured differently. It’s not about whether “legal AI” is interesting in the abstract. It’s about whether a specific tool changes the cost and quality of defense in a way you can explain to your GC, your business partners, and your CFO. And because law departments typically buy platforms like ours for their outside counsel to use, not as a collaboration layer but to accelerate counsel’s work, your ROI needs to reflect what actually improves in their workflow.
What follows is a practical, defensible way to think about ROI in high-SIR litigation, based on what we see across real portfolios.
The Reality of ROI When SIR Is High
In lower-retention matters, efficiency is still valuable, but the payoff can feel diluted. In high-SIR defense work, whether product liability, medical malpractice, premises, transportation, or other exposures, the payoff is immediate and direct. Your team is setting reserves earlier with fewer buffers. The business is carrying more volatility. Every dollar that goes out the door is visibly your dollar.
That makes ROI a portfolio-level discipline, not a tech-evaluation box-check. The right tool helps you defend matters with less legal spend, better early decisions, and fewer avoidable detours. The wrong tool just adds one more surface area to manage.
Outside counsel hours are notoriously hard to manage through guidelines or billing controls alone, which is why the biggest opportunity is to shrink the lower-value time spent searching for, synthesizing, and reporting information, and shift more of counsel’s effort into strategy. That’s the core ROI story.
What You’re Buying for Outside Counsel
Let’s be clear about the use case our buyers are solving. Enterprises aren’t buying our platform so everyone can chat in a shared workspace. They’re buying it for their defense firms to use because it changes two things at once.
First, it compresses the time required to get to deep, accurate case understanding. The platform reads across pleadings, discovery, investigations, expert reports, depositions, and exhibits, then produces incisive, evidence-linked work product. That linkage matters. It preserves human oversight by giving lawyers the citations they need to validate conclusions before acting on them.
Second, that speed reduces the amount of billable time required to do the work that a defensible defense strategy still demands. Counsel isn’t outsourcing their judgment. They’re reducing the grind of assembling the factual record and stitching it into a coherent narrative.
In short: faster, accurate insights with fewer hours.
ROI Bucket A: Fewer Hours on Necessary Work
The first and most visible ROI bucket is what we’ll call Bucket A: counsel hours saved on work that still has to happen. These are not optional activities in high-retention defense litigation. They’re the fundamentals—just historically slow.
Think about where your firms spend their time:
• Digesting depositions to identify admissions, inconsistencies, and usable narrative
• Wading through sprawling discovery sets to find the few documents that actually move the needle
• Building timelines from investigations, expert files, and exhibits
• Drafting first-cut memos and motion sections from the raw record
None of that goes away. But the time required to do it can change dramatically when a platform surfaces relevant facts, patterns, and contradictions quickly and every insight comes with citations that let the lawyer verify it in minutes.
One case study we ran on deposition digests for case insights is a clean example of Bucket A in isolation. The platform accelerated transcript understanding so much that the client saw a 17x ROI on A alone, before counting any impact on timing. In a high-SIR environment, that kind of ROI isn’t theoretical; it lands directly in your P&L. Even if you take the most conservative stance possible and ignore everything else, A can be enough to justify the tool.
ROI Bucket B: Shorter Case Cycles
The second is Bucket B: shorter case cycles because you reach resolution earlier.
Even when a case is perfectly managed, it has a monthly burn rate—outside counsel activity, discovery operations, experts, motions, and the required internal oversight time all create organizational drag while a matter remains open. Faster insight doesn’t just reduce hours; it can reduce cycle time.
When counsel synthesizes the record quickly and confidently, key milestones move up:
• Early case assessment and reserve setting
• Mediation or settlement readiness
• Motion decisions and trial go/no-go calls
You might land at the same settlement value, but you land there with fewer months of burn attached. Over a portfolio, that timing difference becomes a meaningful cost reduction.
Bucket B is also where you start to see a second-order effect: decisions improve because they’re made with a truer picture of the record at an earlier point in the case. Settlement ranges are grounded in real leverage instead of partial reads. Discovery plans are narrower because the real issues are already clear. Sometimes entire phases of work are avoided because it’s obvious, early on, that they won’t change the outcome.
High-SIR ROI is usually the sum of sensible gains like this across many matters, not one heroic win.
Why Speed Matters Beyond Cost
There’s another dimension to ROI that’s easy to understate: client experience and counsel performance.
We’re watching the best defense firms in high-SIR portfolios use platforms like ours not only to reduce the hours they bill, but to deliver insights to their clients faster. That’s quietly transformative. Instead of waiting weeks for a coherent narrative and recommendations, enterprise teams get evidence-linked clarity early enough in the case life cycle to give guidance, not just react to it.
In other words, speed strengthens the relationship. Firms that can quickly produce defensible insight become strategic partners rather than reactive vendors. For high-retention clients, that is a form of value every bit as real as a reduced invoice—because it improves control in the windows where control still exists.
A Defensible Way to Model ROI
Put together, a credible high-SIR ROI model asks two simple questions:
1. How many hours did we save on work we still had to do? (Bucket A)
2. How much burn did we eliminate by moving milestones sooner? (Bucket B)
You can run this model at any level of conservatism. Some teams start by counting only A because it’s easiest to validate and already meaningful—as the 17x ROI case study shows. Others expand to B once they’ve run enough matters through the platform to see consistent timing improvements.
What makes the ROI model trustworthy isn’t complexity. It’s that the insights driving it are auditable. Citation-based outputs mean your firms can move faster without guessing, and your team can always trace the reasoning back to the underlying evidence. The story is never “AI replaced our lawyers.” The story is “AI accelerated evidence-based understanding.”
The Bottom Line
When every dollar is yours, efficiency is not a side quest. It’s part of defense strategy. High-SIR litigation rewards systems that collapse manual reading time, reduce unnecessary counsel effort, and surface leverage early, without asking you to trade away rigor or oversight.
The right way to measure ROI reflects how defense costs actually accrue: some comes from slow, unavoidable work done at human speed (Bucket A), and some from the sheer drag of time while matters stay open longer than they need to (Bucket B). If you separate those buckets clearly—and stay conservative in how you count them—you’ll end up with ROI that’s simple and credible.
Want to See What This Looks Like in Your Portfolio?
If you’re managing a high-SIR litigation portfolio and want to pressure-test ROI on your own matters, we’d love to help. We can walk through how other enterprise teams separate A from B in real billing and timing conversations, and show examples of how citation-linked insights translate into faster, more cost-effective defense.
Get in touch with us to see how your outside counsel can uncover deep, defensible case insight in a fraction of the time, and how that speed can reduce billables and improve early decisions across your portfolio.
Using esumry, privilege is protected with ZDR, and deposition analysis is fast, strategic, and secure. Tag testimony, assess credibility, and get ahead of how the other side will use the record—before they do.
