For the last several months, this series has made a deliberate case: Negotiation is not a peripheral activity in insurance litigation—it is the mechanism through which nearly every outcome is determined.
Executive Summary
"The next chapter of claims handling will not be written by the most persuasive adjuster or the sharpest defense attorney. It will be written by organizations that treat negotiation as a system—measured, reinforced and embedded into how claims teams operate every day."
Offering this insight, Kate Dombrowski, Claims General Counsel for Selective Insurance, explains how organizations that implement data-informed negotiation systems and make cultural shifts can gain clarity, leverage and repeatable performance in this article that concludes a multipart educational series, "Negotiation Reclaimed."
The series was conceived by Guest Editor Taylor Smith. Smith introduced the idea in his 2025 CM article, Taking Back Negotiation: Why Claim Professionals Must Lead the Next Chapter
Read Part 1: Negotiation Is the Job: Reframing Defense Work in an AI-Enhanced Era
Read Part 2: The Power of the First Offer: Anchoring, Evidence and the Battle for Perception
Read Part 3: Rebuilding Negotiation Talent: Why This Skill Is Missing and How to Fix It
Read Part 4: Negotiation by Design: Why Writing Beats Talking
The first four articles in this series explored negotiation as a job function; examined the power of anchoring and first offers; addressed the industry’s negotiation talent gap; and highlighted the growing influence of written, evidence-based advocacy. Each article examined a different layer of the same reality: The defense industry is negotiating more often, with higher stakes and under growing pressure from increasingly sophisticated adversaries.
This final article turns the lens inward.
Reclaiming negotiation is no longer a matter of individual skill. It is now a matter of organizational design. It requires intention, prioritization and follow-through.
The next chapter of claims handling will not be written by the most persuasive adjuster or the sharpest defense attorney. It will be written by organizations that treat negotiation as a system—measured, reinforced and embedded into how claims teams operate every day.
The Limits of Talent Without Structure
Claim organizations across the industry are full of capable professionals. The issue is not intelligence or intent, it is the consistent execution of a clearly defined, data-informed strategy.
Negotiation outcomes vary widely across similar files, jurisdictions or teams. This is not due to lack of skill or effort. More often, it is the absence of shared standards, expectations and feedback loops. Without these, negotiation remains individual rather than institutional.
The defense industry historically allowed negotiation to live in the shadows— learned informally, executed idiosyncratically and evaluated retrospectively, if at all. That approach may have been tolerable when information was scarce and negotiation environments were simpler, but it is no longer sufficient. There is a wealth of data available to leverage in negotiation strategy that, to this point, has been largely overlooked.
Plaintiff firms now test, refine and scale their negotiation strategies using technology, data and structured messaging. They create and share “playbooks” to inform observed practices and calibrate strategy. Meanwhile, many defense organizations still rely on individual judgment without providing guardrails or benchmarks for what “good” negotiation looks like in practice.
Talent won’t close this gap. Systems will.
What Gets Measured Gets Taken Seriously
One of the most consistent findings across industry surveys is that negotiation performance is rarely tracked in a meaningful way. Files are measured by closure rate, cycle time and expense—but not by the quality or effectiveness of the negotiation itself.
