Director of Recovery Operations and Human Resources, Praxis Consulting, Inc.

My name's Robert Runckle, I'm director of recovery operations in human resources at Praxis Consulting. Praxis is a subrogation vendor in the insurance industry so what that means is, in layman's terms we're a B to B collection service within the insurance industry. Our customer is an insurance company, so oftentimes they payout their policy holders for a loss that is not their fault, somebody else is at fault, another insured party, so we assist them in working behind the scenes to identify loss, investigate it and negotiate settlements to recover that money from the adverse party's insurance carrier. Maybe common occurrences like auto accidents or kitchen fires, all the way to much rarer circumstances like a multi-party accident that would take place on a, for example, a construction site. So what we do is we start out with loss runs from our clients. Now they may be a top 10 insurance carrier all over the United States to a regional or a state-wide carrier. Now, we run that through our process and audit their closed claim files or their open claim files, identify any situation where an adverse party was liable or potentially liable, we investigate the loss, investigate liability, damages, the statutes in the particular state where the loss occurred and then contact all the parties that are involved in attempt to negotiate some sort of settlement. We have a client who insures a landlord and landlord has tenants in the house and a fire occurred. It originated from the stove. Now in that situation we're going to need to collect all the physical evidence for not only the appliances in question but any surrounding appliances, take statements from anybody that was involved, look at the lease agreements, also if there is any expert testing that needs to be done, then we'll need to put all parties on notice for the manufacturers or possibly the installers of all of the equipment that is in question. There are two sides to every story, so oftentimes we may find out that the story that we have on our side according to our documentation may not be entirely accurate as, as told by the other party but we do our best to collect all of the factual information, compare that to whatever the negligent statutes of that particular state say can be settled and paid by the adverse party and come to a mutually agreeable decision and if that isn't possible, arbitration and sue are options.