William Marra & Asim Badaruzzaman: Litigation Funding, MSOs, and How PI Firms Scale

A quiet shift is reshaping how personal injury firms grow. For decades, trial lawyers ran their practices on a simple split. You won cases in the courtroom, you handled the business behind the scenes as best you can. Outside capital was scarce. Operations were an afterthought.

On a recent episode of the Trial Lawyer View by Synergy podcast, host I sat down with two people working at the center of this change. William Marra of Certum Group and Asim Badaruzzaman of Certum Legal Solutions. Their message was direct. The firms treating capital and operations as a strategy question, not a back-office chore, will pull ahead over the next five years.

Here is why, and what you should do next.

Capital was never built for plaintiff firms

A plaintiff-side case runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mass tort dockets cost far more. Law firms have historically lacked access to the capital markets every other business uses. Part of the reason is hardwired into legal ethics rules.

Litigation funding closes a real gap. But before you bring in outside capital, a few points are worth understanding. The capital is non-recourse, so if the case is lost, you owe nothing back. Funders do not control your litigation, your settlement decisions, or your ethical duties.

One detail stood out. Funders back fewer than 5 percent of the cases they review. The diligence is significant. A funded case has cleared a higher merit bar than almost any other filing, which means the underwriting works as a screen for the civil justice system.

Portfolio funding changes the growth math

Single-case funding supports one matter at a time. Portfolio funding works differently. The funder contracts directly with the firm and finances part of the fees and expenses across a broader selection of cases. The firm keeps their normal full contingency arrangement with each client.

What does this give you? Room to take strong cases from clients when there would ordinarily have been no way to fund the expense or absorb the risk. More clients served. Lower funder risk across the portfolio, which usually means a lower return demand. For a firm built to grow, portfolio funding is a serious lever.

MSOs bring operations into one platform

The same logic drives the rise of MSOs in plaintiff law. An MSO operationalizes the parts of a law firm that aren’t the practice of law. Asim described a vertically integrated platform running a case from inception to resolution, with law firm functions handled inside one system instead of bolted on through scattered vendors.

His argument mirrors the one Synergy makes about healthcare lien resolution. Your staff burns hours on administrative work they were never trained for and do not get paid to do. Pull those tasks into an outsourced structure, and your team focuses on the legal work moving cases forward.

Asim made a sharp point about why this matters on the plaintiff side. Contingency fees are capped by regulation. So, every efficiency gain flows somewhere useful. Faster, cheaper, higher-quality delivery puts more money in the client’s pocket and frees the firm to take on more work.

The structure question is real

MSOs sit in a space regulators are watching closely. Critics call them a workaround for outside capital without going full ABS. Asim did not dodge the point. Rule 5.4 still bars fee sharing with non-lawyers. The MSO model already runs in medicine, accounting, and finance, so the concept is proven outside law. Arizona has opened the door wider with alternative business structures.

His view is plain. Done right, the MSO model is likely how a large share of future firms will run. Done wrong, regulators will write the rules for everyone. Ethical guardrails are not optional.

AI is already reshaping mass tort

Both guests use AI today, mostly on the operational side rather than for predicting outcomes. The bigger story is mass tort.

Asim explained the old way. You take a random sample of a docket, hand it to a data scientist, and build a predictive model of the full population. AI removes the guesswork. You run the entire dataset through a model, pull the metadata, and see the good, the bad, and the ugly across every plaintiff with high confidence. Then you negotiate settlement from a clear view instead of a sample.

Will noted the same tools sit on the other side of the table. Defendants and judges have them too. Critics have long argued litigation finance helps firms pile up dockets of weak cases. The argument loses force when both sides review every case instead of sampling.

Key Takeaways

If you lead a PI or mass tort firm, the guests offered a clear set of decisions to start on:

•      Define your value proposition for restructuring operations. What do you gain, and does the move deliver better client outcomes or firm growth?

•      Decide whether capital, operations, or both are your constraint, then weigh funding and MSO partners against the answer

•      Educate your team on the tools now available, starting with younger lawyers, and treat fluency with AI and finance options as a baseline skill

The throughline from this episode is simple. Running your firm like a business is no longer optional. The lawyers who treat capital and operations as strategy will serve more clients, achieve better outcomes, and stay competitive as the market consolidates around the firms built early for this change.

🎧 Listen to the full podcast conversation on Trial Lawyer View here: https://partnerwithsynergy.com/podcast/william-marra-asim-m-badaruzzaman/

🔗 Want more insights like this?

If you’re a personal injury lawyer ready to scale, streamline, and step into your role as CEO, let’s talk. Join the Peak Practice Community, and learn how Synergy can help you eliminate settlement bottlenecks, resolve complex liens, and maximize recoveries.  Learn more here: https://partnerwithsynergy.com/peak-practice/

If you want to grow and scale your law firm more effectively, consider partnering with Synergy for lien resolution.  Learn more at: https://partnerwithsynergy.com/liens/

What Are the Critical Process Steps to Medicare Conditional Payment Resolution? 

If your personal injury practice involves Medicare beneficiaries, conditional payment resolution is not optional. It is a legal requirement and a high-risk area if mishandled. Understanding the process and taking the right steps can protect your client, your firm from malpractice risk, and your firm’s reputation. Here’s what you need to know. 

1. Notify Medicare Immediately 

Once a claim is opened, you must report the case to the Benefits Coordination and Recovery Center (BCRC). This alerts Medicare to a potential recovery situation and initiates their file. Failing to notify early risks delays and future complications. You also need to submit proof of representation and required authorizations. Without that, you won’t get access to key information. 

2. Review the Rights and Responsibilities Letter 

After notice, BCRC issues a Rights and Responsibilities (RAR) letter. This letter outlines what documentation is required and what you can expect. From this point forward, all communication must include Medicare’s correspondence cover sheet. Many firms overlook this and delay their own timelines. 

3. Audit the Conditional Payment Letter (CPL) 

About 65 days after issuing the RAR letter, BCRC will send a Conditional Payment Letter. This is not the final amount Medicare is owed. It’s a snapshot of what Medicare has paid so far for injury-related treatment. You must audit this document and dispute unrelated charges. If you skip this step, your client may pay more than necessary. 

4. Watch for a Conditional Payment Notice (CPN) 

If CMS learns about the settlement before you’ve submitted final details, it issues a CPN. This gives you 30 days to act. You must dispute unrelated items, send in procurement costs, and provide settlement documents. If you miss this window, CMS will issue a demand without accounting for your client’s legal costs. 

5. Submit the Settlement Details 

Once the case resolves, send final settlement information to BCRC immediately. Medicare needs this to calculate the correct demand, apply reductions, and set the final repayment amount by issuing a final demand. 

6. Receive and Pay the Final Demand 

Medicare issues a Final Demand letter after receiving the settlement notice. This is the only binding amount. Do not rely on earlier numbers. The Final Demand reflects all related charges up to the settlement date and includes reductions for procurement costs. You have 60 days to pay it. After that, interest accrues monthly. At 90 days, you receive an Intent to Refer notice. At 150 days, it goes to Treasury and that referral adds federal collection pressure to your file. 

Why You Cannot Rely on the CPL 

CMS makes this clear: the Conditional Payment Letter is not final. It is an interim figure. If you disburse based on the CPL, you risk underpaying Medicare. One law firm that did so faced enforcement and financial penalties from the Department of Justice. Always wait for the Final Demand before cutting checks. 

Process Summary: Pre- and Post-Settlement 

Pre-Settlement Steps: 

  • Report the case and submit documentation 
  • Receive and review the RAR letter 
  • Review the CPL and dispute unrelated charges 

Post-Settlement Steps: 

  • Submit final settlement details 
  • Receive Final Demand letter 
  • Pay the demand within 60 days to avoid interest and Treasury referral. 

Why This Matters to Your Practice 

The process is not just time-consuming. It creates liability. Conditional payment obligations are statutory. Errors can trigger malpractice claims, interest charges, and DOJ action. Outsourcing this process to experts like Synergy ensures compliance and protects your recoveries. Our specialists know the CMS logic, portal limitations, and dispute strategies that matter. 

The firms that treat Medicare compliance as core risk management, not an afterthought, avoid the pitfalls and deliver more value to their clients. 

Don’t let Medicare compliance put your case or your client’s recovery at risk. Bring your most complex Medicare conditional payment matters to Synergy. Our experts manage the process from start to finish so you can stay focused on your client. Contact us today to discuss your case.

The Capacity Trap: Why a PI firm’s best people are doing the least productive work, and how scaling personal injury firms can reclaim the time

Look at your most experienced paralegal’s week. Subtract the hours spent on hold with a Medicare contractor, chasing a lien letter, rekeying provider data, and requesting medical records one fax at a time. What is left is the work you hired the person to do, high level legal work.

For most personal injury firms, the number left over is small. The senior people who move cases are buried in work a machine or an outside partner should handle. The bottleneck in your firm is not a shortage of AI tools. The bottleneck is wasted capacity at the top of your team.

This is the problem to solve first. Solve for capacity, and the right technology decisions fall into place. Chase tools without solving for capacity, and you will automate the same misallocation of time you struggle with today.

The Real Cost of a Misused Hour

Run the math on one senior hour. A paralegal putting experience and judgment into a case is worth a multiple of a 75-dollar-an-hour administrative task. Every hour the person spends on records retrieval, or lien follow-up is an hour priced like skilled work and spent like clerical work. The gap is your margin leaking out one file at a time.

Now scale the leak. A growing caseload multiplies administrative volume faster than revenue, because the admin load rides on every file while the fees ride on outcomes. More cases mean more records, more liens, and more follow-up. The firms feeling the squeeze as they grow are rarely short on demand. They are short on the senior capacity to handle the demand they already won.

Why Hiring Your Way Out Stops Working

The first instinct is to add bodies. More paralegals, more case managers, more intake staff. Headcount helps for a while, then the math turns. Each hire adds salary, benefits, training time, and management load. Each hire also needs an experienced person to train and supervise, which pulls your best people further from case work, the opposite of the goal.

MIT’s 2025 study of 300 AI rollouts points at the same issues from a different side. The organizations getting return are not the ones adding the most tools or the most people. They tailor a few systems to a specific job and measure the workload removed. The firms spending the most on broad, generic capability see the least return. Growth does not come from more inputs. Growth comes from removing low-value work from high-value people.

Three Ways to Buy Back Capacity

Every task on a senior person’s desk belongs in one of three places. Sort them honestly and you have a capacity plan.

  1. Automate the rote. Document extraction, intake transcription, provider identification, and record summarization are repetitive, data-heavy, and low-judgment. AI handles these at a speed and consistency no tired human matches at the end of a long day. This is where AI earns a place in a personal injury firm, on narrow problems with clear inputs and clear outputs.
  2. Keep the judgment human. Client communication, legal strategy, negotiation, and quality review draw on experience a model does not have. No tool replaces a lawyer reading an adjuster or a room. Protect this work. Reclaiming capacity means giving your best people more of these hours, not fewer.
  3. Outsource the specialized drain. Some work is too important to automate and too specialized to keep on your team’s plate. The work needs expertise your firm does not staff full time, and the volume does not justify a dedicated hire. Lien resolution sits squarely here. So does medical record retrieval.

Lien Resolution, the Capacity Drain Hiding in Plain Sight

Lien work is the clearest example of senior capacity spent in the wrong place. Identifying every healthcare recovery obligation across a heavy caseload, verifying the claimed amounts, disputing inflated charges, and resolving the final number takes hours of skilled attention per file. The rules shift by payer and by state. A mistake here can be very costly, a missed or mishandled lien costs your client money and exposes the firm to a malpractice claim.

So, personal injury law firms assign the work to experienced staff, because the stakes are high. Then those same staff spend their weeks on hold with contractors instead of moving cases. High stakes, high effort, and low strategic value is the exact profile of work to move off your team.

This is the gap Synergy was built to close. Our technology surfaces lien and recovery obligations early, and our subrogation experts are the human in the loop at every decision. You get a resolved lien and a smaller number, not one more system to manage. Your senior people get their week back for the legal work only they can do.

Build, Buy, or Partner

Once you know what to automate and what to outsource, one decision remains. Build the capability inside the firm, buy a tool, or partner with a specialist who sells the outcome.

The data favors not building. In MIT’s study, AI bought from specialized vendors reached production around 67 percent of the time. Internal builds landed near 33 percent. The same research found the strongest return showing up in back-office and administrative work, the exact category most firms try to fix with headcount. Outside specialists and tools cut the load faster and cheaper than an internal project staffed by people who already have day jobs.

The test for a partner is simple. Are you buying software you still have to operate, or are you buying a result (like a verified lien)? A vendor who hands you a smart output and walks away has moved the work, not removed the burden. A partner who delivers the finished outcome gives your team back the hours.

Measure Reclaimed Hours, Not Features

A tool’s feature list does not tell you whether the tool works. Reclaimed capacity does. Before you deploy anything, write down the hours your team spends on the target task today. After sixty days, measure the hours again. The difference is your return.

Pick one drain and start there. For most firms, the fastest wins are intake transcription, medical record summarization, and lien identification and verification, because each pulls heavy administrative weight off senior people right away. Run a small pilot, measure the hours saved, then expand. When your team is not using the tool, the hours do not move, and the sophistication does not matter.

What to do now?

The firms scaling cleanly are not the ones with the most AI. They guard senior capacity as the scarce resource driving every outcome. They automate the rote, keep judgment human, outsource the specialized drain, and measure the hours they win back.

So, the question for a firm leader is not which AI tool to buy. The question is sharper. Where is your most valuable capacity going right now, and what would your firm look like with those hours back?

Why Synergy is the Answer to Help You Scale

Synergy exists to help firms confront the operational realities being driven by technology and scaling pressure. By removing administrative burdens related to lien identification, verification and resolution, from your staff, we help you strengthen your practice’s capacity for high-value legal work and sustainable growth.

🔗 Want more insights like this?

If you’re a personal injury lawyer ready to scale, streamline, and step into your role as CEO, let’s talk. Join the Peak Practice Community, and learn how Synergy can help you eliminate settlement bottlenecks, resolve complex liens, and maximize recoveries. Learn more here: https://partnerwithsynergy.com/peak-practice/

If you want to grow and scale your law firm more effectively, consider partnering with Synergy for lien resolution. Learn more at: https://partnerwithsynergy.com/liens/