The Last 12% of Your Completion Rate Costs More Than the First 80%. Are You Modeling That?

Here's something most plaintiff firms already sense but rarely put a number on: the first 80% of your claimants are easy. They respond to the first email. They sign the document. They upload their ID. You barely have to chase them.

Then the work starts.

The next 12 to 15 percentage points, the ones that separate a failed threshold from a funded settlement, cost more per claimant than everything that came before them combined. Not a little more. Dramatically more. And if your admin stack wasn't built for that reality, you're funding a campaign whose margin evaporates in the final stretch.

The Completion Yield Curve Nobody Talks About

Think about your last 10,000-claimant matter. The first wave of outreach (email, SMS, maybe a single call) probably brought in 6,000 to 7,000 completed claimants within the first 30 days. Your per-claimant outreach cost for that group was pennies. A few dollars at most.

The next 1,500 needed a second and third touch. Maybe a reminder SMS, a follow-up email, a voicemail. Your per-claimant cost for that cohort jumped to $8 or $12.

Now you're at 85%. Your release threshold is 92%. You need 700 more completions from a pool of 1,500 remaining claimants who have already ignored three or four attempts to reach them. Each of those 700 completions will cost you $25 to $40 in outreach, and that's before you count the human labor of handling their questions, re-sending documents, and chasing down ID verification.

That's the yield curve. It's not linear. It's exponential. And it's the reason most firms that miss their threshold didn't underspend on outreach. They spent the same amount per claimant across the entire pool, which means they dramatically underspent on the cohort that actually determines whether they get paid.

Why Legacy Admins Can't Flatten the Curve

The structural problem is that most claims administrators charge per claimant, per touch, or per notice. Every additional outreach attempt is a line item. Every SMS is a cost. Every call is an invoice.

When your admin's business model makes each marginal touchpoint more expensive to you, the rational economic decision is to stop reaching out earlier than you should. You're not making that decision consciously. Your admin is making it for you, because their margin improves when they send fewer touches to the hard-to-reach cohort.

This is the incentive misalignment that kills completion rates. Your admin gets paid the same whether you hit 78% or 94%. You don't.

I'm biased here, because I built a stack specifically to fix this. But the math is the math regardless of who runs it. The question is whether your admin's pricing model punishes persistence or rewards it.

Three Ways to Flatten the Curve

The firms I work with that consistently hit thresholds ahead of schedule do three things differently:

1. They segment by response likelihood from day one. Not every claimant gets the same cadence. The 70% who will respond to a single SMS get a single SMS. The 15% who need six touches over 45 days get a different sequence. And the final 15% get a high-frequency, multi-channel campaign that would bankrupt you if you ran it for everyone. Segmentation is what makes the math work.
2. They own the touchpoint cost. When your document signing, SMS delivery, email, and AI voice agent all run on infrastructure you control (or your admin controls natively rather than licensing from five vendors), the marginal cost of touch number seven is nearly identical to touch number one. That changes the calculus on persistence entirely. You stop asking "can we afford another round of outreach?" and start asking "why would we stop?"
3. They model completion cost per percentage point, not per claimant. This is the real shift. Instead of budgeting $X per claimant for outreach, they budget $X per point of completion, with the budget weighted toward the top of the curve. A firm that allocates $15,000 to move from 80% to 85% and $35,000 to move from 85% to 92% will outperform a firm that spreads $50,000 evenly every time.

The Real Dollar Impact

Let's run a simplified example. You have 8,000 signed claimants on a matter with a 90% release threshold. The settlement value per completed claimant is $400. Your admin fee is $20 per claimant with a legacy provider.

At 88% completion (7,040 claimants), you don't hit threshold. You've spent $160,000 in admin fees. You get nothing.

At 91% completion (7,280 claimants), you hit threshold. Your admin cost is $145,600 (assuming lower per-claimant pricing on a threshold-aligned model). Your settlement value is $2.9 million. The difference between 88% and 91% is 240 claimants, roughly $96,000 in settlement value, and it's the difference between a zero-dollar outcome and a funded matter.

Those 240 claimants are the most expensive per-unit claimants in your entire portfolio. But they're also the most valuable per-unit claimants, because without them, none of the other 7,040 count.

What This Means for How You Pick an Admin

When you're evaluating a claims administrator for a mass arb matter, the question isn't "what's your per-claimant rate?" It's "what happens to your pricing and your effort level when we're at 86% and need to get to 92%?"

If the answer is "we'll send another round of notices," that's a countdown, not a completion strategy.

If the answer is "we'll deploy a multi-channel sequence with native document signing, SMS, email, branded caller ID, and an AI agent that handles 80% of inbound claimant questions without human intervention, and our pricing doesn't change because we built the stack instead of licensing it," that's a different conversation.

The yield curve is real. The firms that model it win. The firms that pretend completion is linear leave money on the table, or worse, leave it on the floor.

Harry Hedaya is the founder of Send It By Text, the native document signing, SMS, and email platform behind GroupSettle's mass arbitration completion stack. Their AI super agent handles over 80% of claimant inquiries on its own, which lifts engagement rates further. He works with plaintiff firms running live mass arb campaigns.