Close Up Radio Spotlights Litigation Support Expert Katherine Hoffmann of SMART Reviews LLC

Welcome to CloseUp Radio, where our hosts Doug Luellen and Jim Masters engage today's top figures from around the world to bring you information, inspiration, and thought-provoking ideas. You can put to use in your personal and professional life right now, covering a broad range of topics. CloseUp Radio digs deep to discover what makes today's top figures tick. CloseUp Radio, where ideas matter. And now here's today's host, Jim Masters. Welcome to CloseUp Radio. This is your host, Jim Masters. It's a pleasure to have you here on the program tuned in from all around the world, where we have fascinating guests who are doing what they can to make our world a better place. One of our next guests that is doing just that comes to us from Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, Catherine Hoffman, the founder of Smart Reviews LLC. It's exciting to have her here. She's actually known as Kate, so during the conversation, we refer to her as Kate. But here is sort of the scenario to think about. Software can flag a document in seconds, as it's exciting, right? But it can't call a hospital records department. It can't sit with a claimant on the phone. It can't catch the small inconsistency that turns a viable case into a liability. But Catherine Hoffman built Smart Reviews LLC around that gap using technology to move fast without letting a machine make the final call. Technology gets us through the volume. Kate says it does not get us to the truth. That still takes a person on the phone with a records custodian or sitting with a claimant to confirm what actually happened. The built the company, she says, so neither side of that equation gets skipped. The company founded by Kate. More than a decade ago, has grown into a national litigation management partner for law firms handling mass tort dockets. Some of the litigations, too, they have worked on include products such as Roundup, Hernia Mesh, CPAP Devices, AFFF, and Camp Le Jurent Water Contamination. You've heard probably about all of those. Those are some pretty big cases. In just over a decade, Smart Reviews has reviewed and validated more than 500 and counting. 500,000 claims and reports a 98 percent client retention rate, that is incredible. That success the company attributes to a model that treats automation as a starting point rather than a conclusion. Smart Reviews LLC really is the gold standard. It meets the demands of today's legal landscape with a 72 hour initial quality control turnaround and has an impressive 98 percent client retention rate, as I mentioned, which I repeat because it's so incredibly impressive. And it's huge. A lot of companies don't get that. They wish they did. Their comprehensive suite of services converts the entire litigation life cycle from secondary quality control and doctor review to full scale litigation support and by carefully completing plain to fact sheets, medical reviews, damages metrics, so much involved. The company ensures that every case file is clean and likely a principal and ready for strategy sessions. It's extraordinary, very detailed work that Kate and her team does. It's my pleasure to welcome her to dive into some of the extraordinary work. Kate, welcome to Close Up Radio. It's a real pleasure to have you with us today. Thanks, Jim. I'm really happy to be here. Oh, it is our pleasure. You know, your background involves clinical health care to and work on both the plaintiff and defense sides as a medical paralegal. Now, how do these dual perspectives inspire you as you still do what you do so well? But how did it inspire you to initially create and found smart reviews LLC? So, as you said, I do have a background in clinical health care. So I really enjoyed working with patients, getting to medicine is never evolving field. I was very interested in that. And I started seeing the crossover between medicine and law and got a job working initially for a plan or a defense law firm. So I worked for a large mass toward defense law firm first and getting to review medical records and help, you know, sort through these cases confirm, you know, and then I realized that the quality of cases claimants were truly injured and also evaluate, you know, put value on these cases. But from the defense side, it was very impersonal from where I'd come from in a health care background. And so I, after about five years, went to the plaintiff side. And I realized very quickly that, you know, even the best plaintiff firms in this country, when you're doing mass towards and you're getting hundreds of claimants at the same time, it's truly impossible for any law firm to really give individual client attention. And for the claimant, they're one of one, right? They, you know, took the strike uses device, they were injured. That is what they care about. And so I saw this sort of gap in the ability for a law firm to really give that attention to their clients. So started my own company 14 years ago. And that was initially sort of the focus was that we wanted to take that burden off the law firm so they could focus on the litigation piece of it. And we could be the client facing to work with them to collect their medical records to fill out their fact sheets to help, you know, prove up their cases and take that burden off the firm. So, you know, doing discovery and all of the, you know, filings and hearings and everything that they have to do takes up all of their time anyway. And so this way, you know, the claimant, I had to feel like they were the most important thing in their lawsuit, which is what the firms want. They just don't have the resources to do that. So that's where we started this company. And we worked, we've worked in pretty much every mass toward that occurred over the last decade. And we've been there. We were very fortunate pretty quickly to pair with some really wonderful firms and grew pretty fast from, you know, one person to 10 people to 50 to 100 to now over 200 people. And doing things like a claimant fact sheet when we get hired by a firm, they may have 5,000 of these that they need done. So we're calling the clients confirming their information, getting their medical records, reviewing them, helping them complete their fact sheets, getting them signed, submitting them. What we started seeing a change in the last five years, and particularly the last two to three was that a firm would hire us to do 5,000 fact sheets. And as we started going through them, we'd realize there were only a couple hundred legitimate cases in there. And so as we saw this fraud issue increase, we sort of pivoted here and put a lot of focus into now are sort of the, I mean, we still do all of the keys work up, but the main thing we're focusing on right now is we call it a secondary QC. And so I don't know how familiar are with mass church, you know, the whole process of them. But, you know, for the lay person, you know, you hear that if you took this medicine and you have this injury call this number, right? And so someone calls in, they're asked a series of questions. So long as they hit on answers that qualify them that lead is then essentially sold to a law firm. And those leads cost a lot of money. Now technically the firm, you know, it's paying for marketing, but that's what it is, right? They're marketing and it's turning into so many viable potentially viable leads. And so pretty quickly people who are doing fraud realized, you know, J. Mike could give you a hundred bucks and tell you how to answer the questions, right? Turn around and make $5,000 if you said the right answers. And so that was sort of realized in the fraud space, unfortunately. And when COVID happened and everything, you know, became very remote. I think it allowed the opportunity for more of these fraud centered organizations to get in. Camp Le Jun was also a really big problem. Too much money winning in the space at one time, because it was like a race to the pot of money. And so all of these investors, all of these firms threw too much money into the mass short space that they are buying cases from anybody. Some guy that used to sell car insurance a week before it was now selling Camp Le Jun cases. And so it just really, really opened up the space for fraud to get in. And so when we saw that. I felt like, OK, this is what we're supposed to be doing. We someone, you know, the marketers aren't going to trust each other with their information law firms aren't going to trust each other with their information. There needs to be some third party. some neutral third party policing this, right? So in order to get from that initial lead into the hands of the law firm, somebody else who doesn't have a dog in the fight, right? It's not our money, it's not our marketing. We're just in the middle saying, in order to cross this bridge, you've got to prove, you've got to meet the minimum burden of proof. And so we started doing this secondary QC. And when we started during it two years ago, we had multiple torts where over 90% of the leads that we were running through, that were running through us, were fragile. - You know, that's unbelievable. The AI successfully sort of, I guess, faking its way through job interviews, how do you validate that a client is actually authentic? - Right, so, and we've also seen, obviously the increase of the usage of AI, like any other tool, right? It's gonna be used by the good guys, it's gonna be used by the bad guys. So in our process, so once someone signs an intake, the first thing, now they've signed up to be with a law firm. And we've been retained as a third party on behalf of that firm, to make sure that they appear to be legitimate, right? So the first thing we do is a background check, just to make sure they are who they say they are, that they don't have any egregious felonies against them. You'd be surprised how many people managed to sign up for a mass tort from prison for murder, truly, like not kidding. We see hundreds of them are you. So make sure they don't have serious felonies. They've given accurate information as to who they are. And then we also run them through what we've now created as a massive database to see, okay, here's a person who already got frauded out for claiming they were at AstroWorld and already got frauded out for claiming their child had a formula case, right? Now they're trying to get in with a depot case. So we already know this is someone that's attempted previous times, or it may be that they already signed up with one law firm and didn't realize, and now they're trying to sign up with another one. And we have to explain to them, now you're already represented by a firm. And so we do that piece of it just to make sure we've got someone that's even potentially viable to move forward, then say it's a depot-prevera case. We just reconfer, we don't go through everything they already did on the intake, 'cause we don't wanna frustrate people, right? We just need, we let them know, hey, unfortunately there are people out there trying to get in on this lawsuit and it hurts all the good claimants like you, right? So we have to do these additional steps. So we make sure they do qualify and then in like a depot-prevera case, where the injury is this benign type of brain tumor, we work with them to either get into their my chart or we have their HIPAA and we will send it to their treating brain doctor just to get their last visit that shows they do in fact have this diagnosis. So we make sure that they are telling the truth about the diagnosis they have. There's a lot of the fraud we've seen, the people are who they say they are, they just don't have the injury. And they may have even taken the depot-prevera, but they're lying about the injury, so they don't qualify. And since we've been doing this, we've seen about 50 marketers leave the space, which is, I'm never trying to, I'm sure they went somewhere else, right? There are people that don't belong in this space because it's so important what is happening in these mass torts, it's so important that we keep the fraud out because I am a firm believer that our justice system is in place for a reason that there are towards the curve, there are people who get injured and that everyone in this country should have a right to stand up to 3M, to stand up to Johnson and Johnson, to stand up to whoever if they have been injured, right? And if the system finds that 3M or Johnson Johnson won't end the wrong, I support that outcome too, but we have to protect that system and we have seen tort reform really, really pushing down on it and pushing down on being able to put money into this space and it's understandable when we've seen what's occurred with fraud, so it's so important right now that we're driving the fraud out so that we can protect this, otherwise it's going to become and it's horrible to say, but if people can't make money off of representing these claimants, they're not going to get represented. The system won't work, right? Attorneys aren't out here just working for fun and so I think that the work that we're doing in that space is extremely, extremely important right now and we've seen so many marketers and law firms really understand the value of it of having that second check to make sure and the great thing for the law firms is that they typically, they say they get like a two week window, right? To return a case, so in a law firm, if you get 500 new clients in a day, there's no world where at two weeks you've managed to do a touch point with all of them. That's just not possible. And so that return window, it's always been there but rarely utilized and by the time the firms find out the cases aren't good, it's outside that window and they're really mad but they didn't return within the time frame so the marketer doesn't feel like it's fair for them to try to return them and it sort of just turns into this big war. So for us, we do our process within that time frame so that if it's bad, the marketer knows immediately and they have to replace it. So it's protecting the firm's budget. We have one law firm that runs a lot of cases through us that has a large ongoing budget and they save millions of dollars every month because the cases are running through us and they get to return the bad ones for good ones, right? And so, yeah, so we were seeing these dockets where a firm was getting cases and I think pretty much every law firm right now in this country, the Desmaps, mass torts, unfortunately has one of these stories where they bought 100 cases and two were good, right? And so they're able now to return them to know that the majority coming in are going to be good leads and that they're not gonna have these fraudulent claimants because, let's be honest, you're on defense this side and you find out that nine out of 10 of the plaintiff's claimants are fraudulent, that's all you're gonna talk about. You're never gonna talk about the facts in the case you're only gonna talk about that fraud and so we've seen this, it's almost like a trial within a trial, it's all about this fraud. And so for the law firms, it's not just protecting their money, it's also protecting their reputation, protecting their bar cards, right? You can't put fraudulent documents on file, we've seen it happen several times already this year, we've seen attorneys get sanctioned, they don't realize it, right? They think they're representing their clients appropriately and don't realize but defense does and that's what defense is looking for. And so for the law firm, it's kind of a no-brainer. And for the marketer, where it's really valuable is if you're a marketer and say a firm gives you a million dollars to get these say, we'll use again, double-provere elites. And you put an ad on Facebook, you put an ad on Instagram and you put an ad on YouTube. We're giving feedback immediately. So in real time, not months later, after all the money's been spent, but in real time, maybe a hundred thousand of the budget's been spent and they can see that the cases that are not good are all coming from the YouTube. Okay, we'll shut that one down, right? And the best cases are coming on Facebook, Creece, throw a second ad on Facebook, right? So they're also able to pivot in real time to maximize what they're doing and they're not running depot with one firm, right? So they can use our data, our feedback to see what works best and then they can do that for all of their clients and improve their numbers. So in the good marketers want to sell good leads, they do not want to sell fraud. And so it really has, I think it's shown who is wanting to do this the right way. - Right, exactly, absolutely. All right, our time is moving fast and this is a great conversation. Smart reviews looks at over a thousand legal leads a day. How does your company manage the immense mental stamina required to oversee the volumes of complex cases and are you using AI as well? - Yes, so we do use some. I think I understand I always have made jokes that I'm way behind on technology. Like I'd still have a flip phone if it would work. I collect controllers like I'm just, you know, - You still have a pencil sharpener. - Exactly, yes. - Exactly, and that's a good thing. - And I, you know, I like, I can't, I'll read a book, you know, off the pages kind of gal. So I, but I do also appreciate where technology's going. I appreciate the value of AI. And I think that we're not there yet for something like what we're doing that I think still requires that. human touch. However, there is a value to being able to get claimants on the phone faster, right, to, you know, dialing out and getting ahold of people. And also with the data that we're putting in to help us at least get things into the right, like Fox. But we have seen that these torts are so subjective, right, especially right now. Unfortunately, I'm sure you've heard there's so many sexual assault lawsuits going on. Institutional assault, rideshare, people being assaulted, numerous enlifts. And where we found it tricky is that the AI will try to pick up patterns. And there aren't patterns with people's experiences, right? So we for a little bit of time, we're trying to see if we could utilize it within our intakes to help our intake agents get the data in faster. But we realized in some cases, it was sort of manipulating it, thinking it was keeping with the pattern. So we, right now it's wonderful for maximizing the outreach to claimants. But still in these cases, you know, we are just, I'm a little bit old school too, like if it's me and it's my lawsuit and I've been injured or assaulted, I would like to talk to a person. So, and the other thing I'll say about AI, wait, at these intake centers, they started utilizing AI to be able to tell if someone was being dishonest, which was amazing. This was about a year ago. And I thought, what a really great tool because at the end of the day, the more they catch at that initial intake, right, before it comes to us, that's great, right? We want them to also be catching people. And so I was really excited about that. It seemed to be working well and then like anything else, right? Gets into the hands of the band guys. And so the people that are coaching people are using the AI, having them do a mock one and then seeing if the AI says, well, you didn't inflect your voice enough. It sounded like you were reading. This was too monotone. This was whatever. And then using that information to coach these claimants that are lying on how to get past the AI. I'm really amazing that it certainly is. So when you think about it, how is the rise of AI in automated lead generation changing the nature of fraud? So I think it's on both sides, right? I think we're seeing the benefit. But it's like the fraud's always just one step behind. I feel like, you know, as soon as they find a benefit to use any tool, including AI, the fraud is saying, oh, well, we could use that too, right? So I do think right now there's absolutely a benefit of being able to get a hold of people quicker of being able to do, you know, even if it's an initial very short intake to make sure the person qualifies huge value there in using AI. But in the, you know, step past that, where we're really making sure before the law firm starts putting their time and resources that this person is is real and potentially a viable claimant. Not there yet. Not there yet. And so what does this mean for everyday citizens who are seeking justice? Yeah, so I think that in the last, you know, two, three years ago, I think it was going down a pretty scary path that tort reform was really pushing down on it. We're still sort of dealing with the fall out of all of the fraud that came into the space. But I think collectively all of the good players in the space, the plaintiff's terms, the marketers, even defense, I feel like everyone finally saw the problem and is working together because let's be honest at the end of the day, defense firms don't want it to go away either. That's what they're defending, right? They're not the, they're not Johnson and Johnson. They're a law firm hired, right? When there is an issue, so no one wants this industry to collapse. And so I feel like it's on the right path back where we're getting back to being able to focus on the actual litigations and not the just the fraudulent claimants trying to be a part of them. So I think we're in a much better place than we were a couple years ago. And I think it's just going to continue to get better. Now smart reviews as review and validated over 500,000 claims since 2015, what would you say are the most common warning signs or red flags that help your team separate legitimate injured claimants from fraudulent cases? Yeah, so I would say the biggest warning sign that we've seen is if they've already attempted to have a fraudulent claim in another a previous tort, that's sort of our biggest marker now that we've collected so much data, a lot of these are frequent flyers. And then we look at each sort individually and what the claimant is going to look like. In a round of case, an older white gentleman is typically the claimant in it just based on that injury itself, the type of blood cancer, as well as the fact that it's a, you know, agricultural workers injury typically. And so we can look at what the claimant looks like and sort of know how we're going in, doing our secondary intake. And then, you know, if the person is willing to participate with us to help, you know, get their medical records, we know that's a great sign, but honestly our biggest flag has been if they've already tried it, tried to fraud in another tort, there's a really good chance they're going to be a fraud. Exactly. So smart reviews has created an environment that supports working mothers and providing flexible opportunities to over 100 women. As a mother of three, what structural changes do you think other businesses must make to support parent professionals without forcing them to choose between career and family? Yeah, I think that, you know, I'm a woman, so I can only speak as a woman, but when I've had opportunities where it's, you know, acknowledged that yes, you're also a mom and these are important, there are important things that are going on in your life outside of your job that may coincide with the same time frame in a nine to five, and it seems like it's gotten worse and worse, you know, my kids would have a baseball practice at 3 p.m. and I would think who in the world can get their kid there, right? And so essentially, I think COVID has helped us in a lot of professions is if someone comes to work at my company and they are committed to working 40 hours a week, and as long as they're working their 40 hours, then it's okay if they start late on Wednesday because their kid has a class Valentine's party or they leave early, as long as they're putting in their time and they're holding up their end of the bargain, I want them to know that we understand that there are things that are going to go on that are more important than work during the same hours. So as long as, you know, they can work their schedule and let us know when they're going to be working, we want to respect that. That's right, exactly. You and your staff work 100% remotely too. Are there any downsides? I, you know, so we do still technically have an office that has about a dozen people that work in it just for like paper records that come in, and there's a handful of people that I think just want to get out of the house, but we have found that for what we do, it works really well. We do try to, everyone works within like a team's group, so they're on a call together, so they can, you know, sort of socialize. We try to still create that environment, and we've had a lot, we have people that are on opposite side of the country that have gone on trips together, that have gone to meet each other, that are, you know, have developed really strong relationships from working together every day. So we still try to give that, you know, some, some, lots of, you know, working in an office environment, but being remote. That makes great sense, and it's terrific to know that too, and you recently opened a secondary QC division. Tell us about that. So that is the fraud prevention that we were discussing. Yeah. Where we're doing that second step, and it has really sort of blown up within our space that people, I think, saw very quickly the value of it, and it's been really wonderful and also given us opportunity to bring on even more team members. That's fantastic. That's great growth is an important thing. Smart reviews maintains, which I said in the introduction, an exceptional 98% client retention rate, and a highly competitive legal vendor landscape, and congratulations on that to you and to the team. What is your foundational philosophy for building trust and alignment with law firms? So I want a law firm to think of us as an extension of their team. I want them to know that we want to represent their values. We want to show their clients that they are with the right firm and that they matter. And so we try, and we also want to work closely with their internal team. The paralegals and legal assistance in law firms are some of the hardest working people I have ever met in my entire life truly and so we want that the support staff at the law firms primarily to know that we are here to help them we are here to take a burden off of them and we also want them to know we're not trying to step on your toes you tell us what works for you and let us be an extension of your team remotely essentially why should a large law firm or the large staff choose to work with you from your perspective so I think that large firms have I think they've started to realize you know that it's very difficult to give the claim attention that they want to I think they've probably always known that but now with this new fraud issue it's difficult to put the time and energy in to figure out which claimants are being honest right it's hard enough to do all the discovery and respond everything with defense and do all the production and get all of the documents necessary and go to all the hearings without also having to investigate right and play detective with your own clients to make sure that they're actually legitimate so I think that I hope that you know the I feel confident that firms we work with CS as a great value in that sense and I I think any firm you know there's definitely a value there when you're not helping attorneys when their case is what are you doing so as you mentioned I have three children who are now now 22 20 and 18 I have two boys and then a girl my daughter is about to leave for college she's actually leaving today to go to a cheer camp she's going to cheerleading college and they are they're grown they're adults now technically all of them they are truly my favorite people on earth and I you know I started my own company I'm at the soul you know I'm founder and CEO and obviously that wasn't the easiest thing in the world is a single mom on a low income at the time and so they've been with me from the beginning they've supported me all the way through but they also had to sacrifice too you know it's hard to run a company and get to be present at these things right and so I missed out on a lot of things make it through growing up luckily my my ex-husband's a wonderful father he's remarried they have a wonderful step mom so you know they had a lot of support but I missed out on so many things when they were younger that I'm really trying to take advantage of spending as much time with them as I can now speaking with Kate Hoffman founder of smart reviews LLC if you'd like to learn more you can go to smart reviews llc.com that's smart reviews llc.com doubling down on humans in the age of AI Kate thanks so much for joining us here on close-up radio time goes by in a New York minute but extraordinary work comprehensive dedicated and impactful work you and your team are doing and congratulations and all the incredible success and I'm sure more to come and hopefully we'll get a chance to expand some more down the line that would also be a pleasure and hope you enjoyed the time with me as much as I have with you on close-up radio today and you were wonderful I really appreciate it I appreciate that you've been chatting with my mother again huh it's uh Kate thank you very much you have a wonderful rest of your day and thanks for sharing just a bit of the incredible work that you do at smart reviews llc this is Jim Masters thanking our listeners for their time this time till next time here on close-up radio appreciate you being with us here and stay tuned for another great episode coming up in just a moment till then for all of us have a terrific day thanks for listening and bye for now you have been listening to a broadcast from close-up radio a division of close-up television incorporated for more information about our show and to be considered for future broadcasts please visit closeup television.com you may also learn about our sun social media and listen to us on podcast and internet radio thank you for joining us and we hope that you have an empowered and productive day