Your Claimant File Is Your Case File. Most Firms Build It Like an Afterthought.

A partner at a firm I work with pulled me aside last month and said something that stuck: "We spent $400,000 on claimant acquisition and $900 on intake infrastructure." He didn't mean $900,000. He meant nine hundred dollars. A Docusign account and a shared Google Drive.

That was before the Seventh Circuit's Wallrich v. Samsung ruling. Before the Supreme Court's Flower Foods v. Brock decision narrowed which workers can even be forced into arbitration. Before defendants started treating every individual claimant file as a deposition exhibit.

Now? That $900 decision is the one keeping him up at night.

What Changed and Why It Matters to Your Portfolio

Two developments in the last 60 days reshaped the evidentiary floor for mass arbitration campaigns.

First, the Seventh Circuit in Wallrich v. Samsung held that bulk data exports and aggregated sign-up spreadsheets are not sufficient proof that each individual claimant agreed to arbitrate. The court wants admissible, individualized evidence of assent. Not a CSV. Not a screenshot of a terms-of-service page. Individualized proof, per claimant, that this person saw this agreement and accepted it.

Second, the Supreme Court in Flower Foods v. Brock opened the door for "last-mile" delivery and gig workers to escape arbitration entirely under the FAA's transportation-worker exclusion. That means your claimant roster may include people who don't belong in arbitration at all, and if you can't document why each claimant qualifies, you're carrying dead weight that costs money every day it sits on your docket.

These aren't abstract doctrinal shifts. They change the operational requirements for every claimant you sign.

The Documentation Gap Most Firms Don't Know They Have

Here's what I see when I audit a firm's claimant files on a typical 5,000-claimant matter:

• 60 to 70 percent have a signed retainer. Good.
• 40 to 50 percent have a copy of the defendant's arbitration clause that was in effect when the claimant accepted it. Not great.
• Maybe 20 percent have a timestamped record tying the specific claimant to the specific version of the terms they agreed to. That's the number that matters after Wallrich.

The gap between "signed retainer" and "court-ready claimant file" is where matters die quietly. Not in a dramatic motion. In a slow bleed of challenged claimants, each one requiring individual briefing that your budget didn't account for.

A defendant's counsel post-Wallrich has a clear playbook: challenge assent on a claimant-by-claimant basis. If your intake didn't capture the right artifacts, you're not defending a motion. You're rebuilding a case file months after the claimant signed, when the evidence trail is cold and the claimant barely remembers your firm's name.

What a Court-Ready Claimant File Actually Looks Like

After Wallrich, the minimum viable claimant file for a mass arb campaign includes:

1. Signed retainer with timestamp, IP address, and device metadata. Not just a PDF. A record that proves this person, on this device, at this time, agreed to representation.
2. The defendant's arbitration clause, version-dated. The specific ToS version that was active when the claimant accepted it. Companies update terms constantly. Gemini rewrote its clause in June 2026. PayPal is switching from AAA to JAMS in September. If you can't match your claimant to the right version, you're guessing.
3. Evidence of the claimant's assent to the defendant's terms. This is the Wallrich requirement. A purchase receipt, an account creation record, an app download timestamp. Something individualized that connects this claimant to this contract.
4. Qualification documentation. After Flower Foods, if your matter involves gig workers or independent contractors, you need records showing each claimant's role doesn't fall under the transportation-worker exclusion. That's a per-claimant factual question now, not a blanket assumption.
5. Consent chain for outreach. Every text, email, and call your admin sends needs a defensible consent record. I've written about the TCPA layer before, but the point here is structural: consent documentation is part of the claimant file, not a separate compliance checkbox.

Five categories. None of them exotic. All of them absent from the majority of claimant files I review.

Why This Is an Infrastructure Problem, Not a Paralegal Problem

The instinct at most firms is to solve documentation gaps by hiring more paralegals or buying more hours from a contract review shop. That works at 50 claimants. It does not work at 5,000.

At scale, documentation quality is a function of your intake stack. If your signing tool captures device metadata and timestamps natively, every claimant file starts with that evidence baked in. If it doesn't, you're asking a paralegal to reconstruct it later, which is slower, more expensive, and less defensible.

Same logic applies to ToS version matching. If your system pulls and archives the defendant's current arbitration clause at the moment of claimant sign-up, you have a version-dated artifact. If someone on your team is manually downloading ToS pages every few weeks, you have gaps. Gaps that a defense attorney will find.

This is where owning the stack matters in a way that goes beyond cost savings. When your document signing, claimant communication, and data capture live in one system, the claimant file builds itself as the claimant moves through intake. Native document signing captures the signature, the timestamp, and the device. SMS and email delivery create a communication log with consent records attached. The AI handling claimant inquiries documents every interaction. Nothing falls through the cracks because there are no cracks between systems.

When you're licensing five different tools from five different vendors, every handoff between systems is a potential evidence gap. And after Wallrich, evidence gaps are not administrative inconveniences. They're case-killing vulnerabilities.

The Math That Should Change Your Next Campaign Budget

Let me put numbers on this. On a 5,000-claimant matter with a $1,500 CPA, you've spent $7.5 million acquiring your portfolio. If 30 percent of your claimant files can't survive a Wallrich-style assent challenge, that's 1,500 claimants at risk. At $1,500 each, you're looking at $2.25 million in acquisition spend sitting on files that may not hold up.

Now compare that to the cost of building documentation-ready intake infrastructure. Even if you spent $50,000 to $100,000 upgrading your intake stack (and most firms spend far less), the ROI is measured in millions of dollars of protected claimant value.

The firms that figured this out in 2025 aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They're the ones whose claimant files look like they were built for litigation, because they were.

What You Can Do Monday

Pull ten claimant files at random from your most active matter. For each one, ask: could I prove, with admissible evidence, that this specific person agreed to the defendant's arbitration clause? If the answer is "probably, with some work," multiply that uncertainty by your full claimant count and ask whether your budget accounts for the remediation.

The firms winning mass arb in 2026 are not the ones filing the most claims. They're the ones whose claims survive contact with defense counsel. That starts with the claimant file.