Your Completion Rate Looks Fine. Your Completion Cost Per Dollar Recovered Doesn't.

Every plaintiff firm I talk to knows its completion rate. They can tell you they're at 84%, or 79%, or "trending toward threshold." That number matters. But it's the wrong number to manage by.

The number that actually drives your case P&L is completion cost per dollar recovered. And almost nobody calculates it.

Here's why the distinction matters: a completion rate tells you where you stand relative to the release threshold. Completion cost per dollar recovered tells you what each point of completion is actually costing you, and whether the next point is worth pursuing at the current burn rate. Those are fundamentally different questions, and they lead to fundamentally different operational decisions.

The Math That Hides Inside a Percentage

Say you have a 10,000-claimant matter with a $15 million settlement fund. Your release threshold is 85%. Your current completion rate is 78%, and your admin is billing you $20 per claimant for outreach and processing.

At 78%, you've completed 7,800 claimants. Your admin spend so far: $156,000. Your completion cost per dollar recovered is roughly $0.0104 per settlement dollar. That sounds cheap.

Now you need to move from 78% to 85%. That's 700 more claimants. But these are the hard ones. The people who didn't respond to the first four outreach attempts. The ones who started the signing process and dropped off. The ones whose contact information is stale.

If your admin charges the same $20 per claimant but needs three times the outreach touches to convert each of those remaining 700, your effective per-claimant cost for that final tranche is closer to $60. That's $42,000 in incremental spend to unlock the remaining settlement dollars. Your blended completion cost per dollar recovered just jumped, but the per-tranche cost for those last 700 claimants is nearly six times what the first 7,800 cost you on a per-head basis.

Most firms never see this because they're watching a percentage tick upward and assuming the cost curve is flat. It isn't.

Why the Cost Curve Bends

Claimant completion follows a decay curve, not a straight line. The first wave (typically weeks one through three) captures 40 to 55% of your eventual completions. These are the people who open the first email, click the first text, or answer the first call. They're cheap to convert because they're already motivated.

The second wave (weeks four through ten) adds another 20 to 30%. These people needed a reminder, a second channel, or a slightly different framing. Cost per conversion goes up, but not dramatically.

The third wave (weeks ten through twenty-six) is where it gets expensive. These claimants need persistent, multi-channel outreach. They need calls at different times of day. They need document re-sends. Some need identity verification support. Each conversion in this window costs three to five times what a wave-one conversion costs.

Here's the thing: that third wave is often where the release threshold lives. If your threshold is 85% and your first two waves delivered 75%, everything rides on the most expensive tranche of claimants you'll ever convert.

The Admin Pricing Model Makes This Worse

Legacy claims administrators charge a flat per-claimant fee. That sounds simple. But it creates a perverse incentive: every additional outreach touch to a non-responsive claimant is a cost to the admin with no additional revenue. The admin's margin gets thinner the harder they work on your hardest-to-reach claimants.

So what happens? The outreach cadence flattens. The admin sends the contractually required notices, maybe a reminder or two, and then waits. The claimants who were going to respond easily already did. The rest sit in a queue getting occasional emails that look like every other email they ignore.

This is why most legacy administrators were built for class actions, not mass arb. In a class action, notice is the obligation. You send it, you document it, you're done. In mass arbitration, completion is the obligation. You need that 85% or 90% or 95% threshold, and the difference between hitting it and missing it is the difference between getting paid and not getting paid.

When your admin's incentive is to minimize touches per claimant and your incentive is to maximize completions, you have a structural misalignment that shows up directly in your completion cost per dollar recovered.

How to Actually Calculate This Number

Run this on your next matter, or retroactively on your last one:

1. Total admin and outreach spend through final completion (not just the per-claimant fee, but any overage charges, additional mailing costs, call center fees, technology licensing).
2. Total settlement dollars unlocked (the fund amount that becomes distributable once you hit threshold).
3. Divide spend by dollars unlocked. That's your completion cost per dollar recovered.

Now break it into tranches:

1. What did the first 50% of completions cost you per claimant?
2. What did completions 50 to 75% cost per claimant?
3. What did completions 75% to threshold cost per claimant?

If your tranche-three cost per claimant is more than four times your tranche-one cost, your outreach system is working against you. The decay curve is natural. A 4x or 5x cost multiplier on late-stage completions is not. That's an infrastructure problem.

What Flattens the Curve

The firms that keep late-stage completion costs closer to 2x (instead of 5x) their early-stage costs share a few traits:

• They own their outreach stack. When your document signing, SMS, email, and voice outreach run on a single platform, adding a twelfth touchpoint costs almost nothing incrementally. When you're licensing five tools from five vendors, every additional touch carries a marginal licensing cost that compounds.
• They automate the persistence layer. An AI agent that handles 80% of inbound claimant inquiries (questions about the process, document re-sends, status checks) means your human team focuses on the 20% of cases that actually need a person. That's the difference between a flat cost curve and an exponential one.
• They treat outreach like a sales funnel, not a notification system. Different channels at different times. Escalation sequences. Re-engagement campaigns for claimants who started but didn't finish. Branded caller ID so the phone call doesn't look like spam. This is direct-response marketing applied to settlement administration, and it works for the same reasons it works everywhere else.

I'm biased here. I built GroupSettle's stack (native document signing, SMS and email delivery through Send It By Text, AI super agent) specifically because I watched firms bleed money on that third-wave tranche. When your admin charges $11.99 per signed claimant instead of $20 to $25, and bills on a threshold-aligned model where the firm owes nothing until the release threshold is hit, the incentive structure flips. The admin makes money by getting you to threshold, not by minimizing effort.

The Decision This Changes

Once you start tracking completion cost per dollar recovered by tranche, two things happen.

First, you can model whether a matter is worth taking before you take it. If your projected settlement fund is $8 million and your historical completion cost per dollar recovered runs $0.015 on matters with similar claimant profiles, you know your admin line item is roughly $120,000. If the fund is only $3 million, that same rate means $45,000 in admin, but the smaller fund is more sensitive to the cost curve bending in wave three.

Second, you can benchmark your administrator. Not on their headline per-claimant rate. Not on their technology brochure. On the number that actually matters: what does it cost you, per settlement dollar, to get from 75% to threshold? If your admin can't answer that question with historical data from comparable matters, they've never had to care about the answer. And that tells you everything.

The completion rate is the scoreboard. The completion cost per dollar recovered is the game film. Watch both.