The Record Retrieval Cost Most Firms Don't Realize They're Absorbing

Every personal injury firm retrieves medical records. But how a firm retrieves them determines whether those costs disappear into overhead or get recovered from every settlement. Firms handling retrieval in-house with dedicated paralegal teams are absorbing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in non-recoverable overhead—costs that could instead be classified as recoverable case expenses by outsourcing to a vendor.

The distinction is not a loophole. It is how case costs have always worked in personal injury litigation. Filing fees, expert witnesses, and vendor invoices for records are deducted from the settlement before the contingency fee is calculated. Paralegal salaries are not.

Case Expense vs. Firm Overhead: The Distinction That Matters

In personal injury practice, costs fall into two buckets: case expenses and firm overhead. The difference determines who ultimately pays.

Case expenses are costs tied to a specific matter. Filing fees, deposition transcripts, expert witness fees, and vendor invoices for medical record retrieval all qualify. These are advanced by the firm and recovered from the client's settlement before the contingency fee is calculated. The client bears these costs—not the firm.

Firm overhead is everything it costs to keep the lights on: salaries, benefits, rent, software licenses, equipment. These costs exist whether the firm signs one case or one thousand. Overhead cannot be charged to clients as case expenses. The firm absorbs them entirely.

Same Work, Different Classification

Here is where it gets interesting: the same work—retrieving medical records—is classified differently depending on who does it. When an in-house paralegal requests records, the cost of that work is the paralegal's salary. That is overhead. When an outside vendor retrieves those same records and invoices the firm per case, that invoice is a case expense—recoverable from the settlement.

The Math: 10 Paralegals to 1 + Platform

Consider a mid-size personal injury firm handling 25 new cases per month, with each client averaging 8 healthcare providers. That is over 200 record requests monthly. To manage that volume in-house, the firm employs 10 paralegals dedicated to retrieval—calling providers, sending authorizations, tracking requests, and organizing records when they arrive.

By outsourcing to a white-glove retrieval service, the firm replaces 9 paralegal positions with vendor invoices charged to individual cases. The one remaining paralegal coordinates requests and reviews incoming records. The vendor costs—averaging $40 to $75 per request—flow through as recoverable case expenses on every settlement statement.

The firm's overhead drops by over $700,000 annually. But the impact goes beyond the balance sheet. Those 9 paralegals were spending their days on hold with medical records departments, re-faxing authorizations, and chasing down missing pages. That is not what you hired them to do. Freed from retrieval, your team goes back to the work that actually moves cases forward—client intake, case strategy, demand preparation, and litigation support. Record retrieval becomes someone else's core competency, not your team's side burden.

The Speed Dividend

Cost recovery is the headline, but speed is the compounding benefit. In-house retrieval teams manage requests manually—phone calls, faxes, follow-up calls when providers don't respond, more follow-up calls when faxes fail. Average turnaround is 30 to 60 days per provider, and each paralegal juggles dozens of open requests simultaneously.

Faster records mean faster case evaluations, earlier demand letters, and quicker settlements. For a firm running hundreds of active cases, even a two-week acceleration across the portfolio compresses the revenue cycle significantly. And your attorneys and paralegals never touch the retrieval process—no phone trees, no fax confirmations, no tracking spreadsheets. They get records delivered, organized, and ready for review.

The Providers Your Clients Forgot

Speed is only part of the equation. In-house teams retrieve from the providers the client remembers. But clients routinely forget specialists, urgent care visits, and prior treatment—sometimes 20-30% of their full provider history. A dedicated retrieval platform with automated provider discovery surfaces these missing records, turning incomplete files into complete medical histories. Cases that looked weak suddenly qualify. Cases already qualified move to a higher settlement tier. One missed provider can be the difference between a $50K settlement and a $200K one.

Records That Arrive Ready to Use

When records arrive from a manual in-house process, someone still has to organize, deduplicate, and review them—often 8 or more hours per case. A platform with AI-powered analysis delivers structured, searchable records with instant chronologies and clinical summaries on arrival. That is 8 hours of paralegal time per case that goes back to demand preparation and litigation support instead of sorting through hundreds of pages of disorganized PDFs.

Making the Shift

The transition from in-house to outsourced retrieval does not require a disruptive overhaul. Most firms start by routing new case requests through a vendor while existing staff work down their open queues. If you are not sure where your firm stands, LlamaLab offers a free consulting evaluation—no commitments, no sales pitch. We come in, map out your current retrieval workflow, calculate your fully loaded costs, and show you exactly what is recoverable and what is not. The numbers speak for themselves.

For firms concerned about data security when moving records outside the firm: any HIPAA-compliant retrieval vendor operates under a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with your firm, held to the same data protection standards as a healthcare provider. Client records never pass through unsecured channels, and certified documentation accompanies every download for opposing counsel acceptance.

The Bottom Line

The same work, classified differently, has a dramatically different impact on firm profitability. In-house retrieval paralegals are overhead the firm absorbs permanently. Outsourced retrieval invoices are case expenses that settlements pay back.

This is what a dedicated retrieval service exists to do. Attorneys should be building cases. Paralegals should be preparing demands and supporting litigation. Neither should be spending hours on the phone with medical records departments. When you hand retrieval to a team that does nothing but retrieve and organize medical records—thousands of requests a month, across every provider type and every state—you get better results, faster turnaround, and a cost structure that pays for itself from every settlement.

Sources: Nolo – Case Costs in Personal Injury, Attorney at Work – True Cost of an Employee, PayScale – Paralegal Salary Data 2025, ChartRequest – Retrieval Challenges, On Call Legal – Retrieval Pricing, AllLaw – Managing PI Case Expenses.