The Challenge
Over the past several decades, the client has had thousands of employees experience hearing loss and asbestos-related illnesses.  When the insurance cases were considered individually, the loss associated with each case was much less than the deductible on the railroad's catastrophic loss insurance policy, allowing the reinsurance carriers to avoid paying the claim.  On the other hand, if all cases were considered together for any one year, the claims substantially exceeded the catastrophic loss limits on the railroad's reinsurance policies.  The railroad contended that all cases should be considered together and decided to sue their reinsurance companies for payment of old claims.

The railroad secured the services of a large law firm to handle the case.  One of the major requirements in the case was to provide concise information to each of over 1,000 insurance carriers regarding their "portion" of the losses. To accomplish this objective, data would need to be merged and matched from many sources including other law firms and several railroads that had merged with the conglomerate over the years.  The employment history for victims needed to be extracted from many disparate data sources, and then consolidated and analyzed. Additional data consisted of payments which had been made, a history of all suits settled, won and lost, and history of all of the various factors including the complex reinsurance "layering" that was active each year (and in some cases for part of a year).  Additional information needed to be assimilated such as mergers of insurance carriers as well as handling the situation where insurance carriers were out-of-business. The data went back to the 1930's and, as one may imagine, was filled with missing, invalid, and inconsistent information.  The process of consolidating all of the data into a coherent and useful database would be difficult, tedious and complex.