The First 48 Hours: Responding to Construction Claims

Welcome (00:02):
Welcome to the Astrus Advantage Podcast, where we share timely insights on risk, underwriting, and insurance trends shaping the construction industry and beyond. Each episode brings practical perspectives from industry leaders to help you navigate complexity with greater clarity and confidence.

Danette Beck (00:19):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Astrus Advantage Podcast. I'm Danette Beck, and I'm here on behalf of Astrus Insurance Solutions, where we've spent the last 10 years focused solely on the construction industry. We've launched this podcast to shine a light on the real issues facing contractors, brokers, and risk professionals today. From rising insurance costs and workforce challenges, to evolving job site exposures and litigation trends. There's no shortage of complexity in construction, and we believe the more visibility we can provide, the better decisions the industry can make. So that's our goal, is to share insights, elevate conversations, and help our partners navigate risk with clarity and confidence. So welcome to the Astrus Advantage Podcast. Before we dive in, I'm thrilled to be joined by Kent Drescher, who is on our general liability and auto liability claims team. So Kent, introduce yourself.

Kent Drescher (01:13):
Well, thanks for having me, Danette, and I'm glad to talk about this topic with you today. I'm a vice president, casualty claims director at Astrus. I've been with our company since we started in 2015. And again, thanks for having me.

Danette Beck (01:28):
Yeah, absolutely. So let's dive into it. So I know, I think you though you were going to have a whole podcast on your illustrious tennis career during college, but unfortunately, I think there's something more important that we'd like to talk about today. Not to say that your collegiate record's not important, but what I would love to talk to you about today is the whole topic of field investigation. So for our contractors and our risk professionals listening today who may really only see claims once something goes wrong, what exactly does field investigations in a construction setting, like, what does it actually mean?

Kent Drescher (02:08):
Well, I think our industry, field investigations is a low start, unfortunately. But at Astrus, we really focus on trying to get a good investigation on all of our claims. And when there's serious exposures, complexity, we really like to have a field investigation with the independent adjuster who goes out to the scene and helps us with the investigation. And when I say independent adjuster, that means different things to different people, but we've partnered with some independent adjusters who really have strong construction experience. They tend to hire folks who might be retired and maybe semi-retired where they kind of want to still use their claims experience and do field investigations. And it's really helpful in the construction field to have someone with 30 plus years experience out there investigating. But I think when we talk about robust field investigations, some of the things we'd like to see are certainly photos and videos that the independent adjuster takes.

Kent Drescher (03:15):
And a lot of clients might say, "Well, I'll send you some photos and videos." But many times that can be scrutinized by the other side. The client is the one documenting the loss because the other side can say, "Well, wait a minute, you took these five pictures, but what didn't you take a picture of?" It's funny, you'll open up something from our IA and you'll think there's got to be a few pictures and there's 89 pictures. So that's helpful. We really like to see in-person statements from the participants and the witnesses. A written statement from someone that may be written by a supervisor who, again, might have a little bias, like you mentioned earlier. It's really better to talk to the person that's there, that was there when it happened. And also, the quicker, the better. They always say what you say at the scene tends to be more reliable.

Danette Beck (04:12):
Right, 100%.

Kent Drescher (04:13):
If you have a week or two to think about it, you're coached, you change your story. So the quicker...

Danette Beck (04:20):
Or you'll remember things differently.

Kent Drescher (04:22):
Right. Right. And also, we have contractors and subcontractors on these sites, and some of these employees might not be there in a month or two. And so it's just better to get them quicker. And also, evidence preservation on the scene is helpful. We've had incidents where a bad water loss happens or something bad happens with equipment and somebody just tosses it. And that might be a claim against a manufacturer or just a flat out spoliation of evidence claim that your client threw away the evidence and didn't get that the other side see a field investigator can help with that. They can actually take the evidence, put it in a storage locker and create a chain of custody. And the other thing I like about field investigations is it's easier to identify fraud. Fraud is in a certain percentage of our claims, but many times a field investigator on the scene looking at the claimant, well, they're not going to always be there with a claimant, but they're going to be there with evidence and many times reach out to the claimant to talk to them in person away from the site.

Kent Drescher (05:33):
And I think the face-to-face with a claimant gives you a more honest impression. Fraudulent claimants tend not to want to meet you in person. So the fact that our investigator's tracking them down to do so, I think helps flush those out.

Danette Beck (05:48):
It shocks me a little bit that you say that it's a little bit of a lost art because everything that you just mentioned sounds like it just brings clarity, transparency, and fairness to the entire process. So that's wild to me that we're moving into kind of a phase of our industry that we're moving away from that when you get a better result when we do that and do it right.

Kent Drescher (06:12):
Definitely agree with you. In construction field, it's very important.

Danette Beck (06:16):
So with that, you talked about a lot about the controls in here. So how do you site conditions, the subcontractor controls and safety protocols influence liability allocation? You talked a lot about looking the claimant in the eye and looking at the equipment. So how does all of that influence the liability allocation for a large claim?

Kent Drescher (06:43):
Well, the independent adjuster is able to document through statements and photos who controlled what portion of the site at the time of the loss. We have a variety of types of claims and on site, many times you never get the same kind of loss. But we have job site losses where a work zone, auto claim happens, and we have a work zone in the area that changes every day. Clients that work on the freeway don't stay in one place too long. And so the investigator who gets out there quickly is able to isolate what did this work zone look like at the time of the loss. Where was our client? Where were the subcontractors or other contractors on the site? And I think that's really important in multi-party involvement claims is who controls what. When you talk about subcontractor controls, that depending on our role on the site, if we're the general, we have a certain set, and if we're a subcontractor, we have another set.

Kent Drescher (07:47):
So the investigation, if it's on behalf of the general contractor, is going to look at the subs, who's responsible. And if we're on behalf of a subcontractor, what did we do that tries to protect us from our liability allocation if there's multi parties involved.

Danette Beck (08:05):
Which makes sense.

Kent Drescher (08:06):
Sure. And then I know you mentioned safety. We have a really vibrant safety department at Astrus and we call it risk engineering here, but I talk to our risk engineers all the time and without them, our company would be a lot different, than they are...

Danette Beck (08:22):
I would agree with that. They are definitely the heartbeat of the place.

Kent Drescher (08:25):
Right. And so I talk to them quite a bit and our clients as well about safety. But when our clients have a strong safety program, it really always shows well in discovery and depositions on litigated cases. I see the reports from our attorneys and I see weaknesses if there's a safety issue and I see strengths if there's not a safety issue or less safety issues. So strong safety programs really help us.

Danette Beck (08:56):
And with that, that's actually a question I was going to ask you. What I've been hearing in some of the comments that you've been saying is around there's like a consistency that goes along with it. And so do you have any habits around everything like documentation or these, you just mentioned the strong safety influence. So there's got to be from a process standpoint in this documentation, in the investigation that consistently will help contractors defend themselves later on. Wouldn't you agree?

Kent Drescher (09:27):
Yes. No, I definitely do, Danette. And documenting the job site through daily reports that are maintained, those aren't something you just maintain for a year and somebody destroys them. We really need to have clients maintaining our documents really as long as the statute of limitations or statute of repose can be in the venue, which is on property damage claims up to 10 years in many venues and bodily injury claims several years depending on the venue. And so it's maintaining good records and maintaining them throughout the statute of limitations because it's not surprising to many folks is claims aren't always made the day the loss happens. There might be a bad work comp claim on a site. Our client may be aware of it involving another contractor or sub, but there's no indication of claims being made of that day.

Danette Beck (10:26):
I think it would be a dream if claims were made the day that they actually happened. That makes things so much easier.

Kent Drescher (10:32):
Right. So our clients need to prepare when those incidents happen is if a claim could be made. It doesn't mean we go solicit the claim, but that we really line up and protect our client's interests with the investigations process we discussed and through the client's, like I say, diligent records, daily reports. Many of our clients now are photoing the site when they leave it. Some of them use drone footage that gets an aerial view depending on what kind of work they're doing. And the video and photo documentation of the site on a daily basis has been quite helpful to our clients as well.

Danette Beck (11:12):
So do you think that separates contractors who handle serious claims well from those who struggle?

Kent Drescher (11:18):
Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

Danette Beck (11:20):
What do you think they do else that helps them in this situation and how do they compare to those that struggle with this?

Kent Drescher (11:29):
Well, I think one of the most important things is turning claims in rapidly and anticipating what we were talking about earlier is an incident happens. We may or may not be involved. I think to the best on this process. We'll turn those incidents in as record only, insured only investigation where we're not contacting the claimant. We're not making a big deal with the parties on the site, but we're trying to go preserve information in case a claim's made. And if claim's made immediately our better contractors, I think that, like you say, handle the serious claims well, that they turn those claims in immediately. They don't turn them in in writing through the normal process and wait a day or two to hear back. They get on the phone and call the broker and call Astrus and we will assist them in immediate response.

Kent Drescher (12:30):
So I call it a rapid response protocol. And some of our clients who I've seen develop this, you can certainly do it on a phone and have all the numbers. Or I've seen clients that make up an index card with the phone tree for their serious escalated claims. And I think those are the clients that get a better response because they can immediately trigger something from that phone tree. Many times they include our risk engineer on that. And that allows us to immediately dispatch someone to a site to get out there and help start the investigation immediately.

Danette Beck (13:08):
I'm hearing a lot of words immediate. We talked a little bit before about, you know, getting to the site right away. In these complex construction auto and geo claims, we talk a lot about it in workers' compensation, that three point touch within the first 24 hours of a work comp injury. But it seems to me that you have to have the same sort of tenacity and quickness to the site for auto and geo claims. So how much does the first 24 to 48 hours matter?

Kent Drescher (13:35):
Well, there's a lot of things that do change on our sites, as I mentioned earlier, like if you're doing road work, highway work, where the site literally moves every day. So if you go a week later, it's hard to make...

Danette Beck (13:48):
Yeah, construction project sites don't look the same.

Kent Drescher (13:52):
Right. And as we discussed a little bit earlier, witness recollection of the event does tend to deteriorate over time. So you get right out there, the memory's fresh, just happened you know, the day before, let's say. Conditions on the site though, for an auto claim, skid marks are very important in claims. I know when you drive down the freeway and you see fresh skid marks, you go, you think in your mind, "What just happened here?" But when you have a bad auto accident, many times skid marks are involved. And we had one not too long ago where we referred it to defense counsel to assist us, very serious injuries. And defense counsel commented, they said, "I'm glad you gave this claim, got us involved this quickly because it's supposed to rain tomorrow and we can get out there today before the skid marks are washed away." So it, it really is a literally a matter of sometimes one day where your skid marks are gone.

Kent Drescher (14:54):
And so that's helpful. Another thing getting out there quick is an advantage is videos from neighboring businesses in many locations, whether it's a geo claim or an auto claim, but video of the site many times is available through one of those businesses. But if you wait, if the business doesn't know that, that they've videoed a claim, they may tape over it after 30 days, depending on what they have. And I've had one where we got out there very quickly. It was a donut shop. And the employee was very open with our attorney and said, "Yeah, sure. Let's go watch it." And it was because it happened. It was the day after it happened. If that's a week later, maybe the manager of the restaurant gets involved or the donut shop and says, "No, we can't release that. You need to talk to our attorney." So you almost, the quicker, the better, and you don't really give them time to not give it to you if you get there quickly.

Danette Beck (15:59):
I love that you pivoted to auto because I do want to spend a hot minute on auto. What I want to ask you is what are the common patterns you're seeing in high severity auto claims involving contractors?

Kent Drescher (16:13):
Well, it's usually a larger vehicle, not always, but usually it's a larger vehicle. We have a lot of specialty vehicles. We have trucks, you know, in the construction field, and they're sometimes loaded with equipment or rocks, depending on what we do, or concrete trucks. And so usually it's larger vehicles versus smaller vehicles. A lot of times our clients will have an accident like that and they'll say, "Well, our vehicle wasn't damaged very much." But if you have a very large vehicle versus a small vehicle, you know, that's to be expected. Sometimes the force of the impact won't look very bad when you see the client's vehicle. We think it's important in those to have pictures taken of our client's vehicle because just because the client doesn't see the damage, there might be a little hidden damage. Also, we're very big now into the EDR downloads, especially on the low impact claims.

Danette Beck (17:11):
What Is an EDR download?

Kent Drescher (17:13):
That's where we send an expert out and they're able to take electronic data from the vehicle. It's something that's in, you know, the manufacturer puts in the vehicle and you need an expert to pull it out. So it's not something that the client buys and has it on the vehicle or claimant has it. There are some specialty trucks where it's more difficult to get out and you have to use the manufacturer to get it out. But we have a lot of clients who have accidents and pickup trucks that do have EDR download capability. And so we really like that, Danette, because so many of our impacts really seem to qualify as low impact incidents where there's not a traumatic violent collision, but yet many times injury claims are made. And we think one of the defenses for our clients is, let's go document the force of the impact.

Kent Drescher (18:09):
To have an expert say how fast our vehicle is going. If we can look at the claimant vehicle, let's find out how fast they were going. And if we hit them while they were stopped, then we really don't need their speed, but we get ours and those things can help us in a defense of our client claims.

Danette Beck (18:26):
Right. So in addition to the EDR, thank you. I feel much more knowledgeable now today than I was yesterday, knowing what that is. But what about telematics and driver history? That has to play into investigations as well. So how do you see it from your standpoint?

Kent Drescher (18:41):
Yes, Danette. I think it's a highly important and really keeping your auto incidents day on it and having better driver behavior. Yeah, the dash cams will capture a video from our client's vehicle. We really like the dash cam that show as much of the view of our client's vehicle as you can...

Danette Beck (19:02):
Inside and out, right? Internal, external?

Kent Drescher (19:04):
Internal, external, and front, back, because if you just have a front-facing dash cam only, you're just going to get that view. But many times we need the view from other views. So the better dash cam technology that can have as many views outside the vehicle is great. And inside the vehicle, it's helpful to see what our driver's doing...

Danette Beck (19:28):
Well Dan told me about a claim that we had that we were able to get out of the claim in a couple of days because we were able to present the dash cam footage that it was the other vehicle's fault. And the counsel from the other side immediately were like, "Yep, we're out." So I think, isn't there a speed to resolution also with having the access, I would think, to the EDR and to the telematics?

Kent Drescher (19:55):
Yes, Danette. And, thanks for bringing that up because I remember that claim. And our client had great dash cam footage inside and outside the vehicle. And it was early in the morning. There was no witnesses. It was up in the hills and north of LA. Our client, the dash cam really showed that our client was on his, our side of the lane. It was a two-lane road, and our client was on his side and nothing unusual was going on. He wasn't distracted. And it showed the exterior and the other party, for I don't know why, did cross the center line right into our driver, and the other party passed away. And we did get a notice of a representation letter within a few days. We had the video. We sent the video to the other attorney and he said, "Oh, I didn't realize this is the case." And he dropped the claim against us.

Kent Drescher (20:50):
I believe if that video wouldn't have been there, Danette, that we would have had a fatality claim in litigation if it didn't settle and there would have been an argument about who crossed the center line and what our driver was doing. And that video probably saved our clients many years of insurance premium on avoiding a fatality accident added to their record. So...it only takes one...

Danette Beck (21:17):
I want to talk about that for a minute because we talk about that, that one, like, the claim that does go to court or there's a fatality that is of significance. On this last podcast with the guys, we talked about nuclear verdicts and social inflation, but I want to hear about it from your perspective because I think you have an insider's view of what social inflation, actually looks like inside a courtroom.

Kent Drescher (21:44):
Yeah, Danette, it is concerning, not just in our industry, but it really impacts everybody who's a defendant in an auto or geo case, is it really means that inflation on settlements and verdicts are arising much more quickly than the general economic inflation. We used to be able to look at claims and we'd have a very good feel based on recent jury verdicts of a fatality with no dependents, maybe just a spouse and no children, that's going to settle in this range or a leg off leg amputation case might settle in that range. But the nuclear verdicts are indicating that juries are really throwing numbers at these that we really have been difficult to predict in the past. So I think it really gets to how do you avoid getting here into this verdict problem of social inflation is doing a much better job of investigating our claims...

Danette Beck (22:53):
And staying out of the courtroom. Staying out. So they can't even get it there. Because if it does, then the potential is that there's going to be sympathetic jury that's going to the injured party, the victim, and they want to give them large sums of money. But why, I mean Kev why do you think commercial autos become such a target for large verdicts?

Kent Drescher (23:12):
You know, I think there's a volume of it, the accidents. You talk about unusual GL losses where you get plaintiff's attorneys involved in litigation, but it's hard to predict how many there are, and they're more complicated. When you drive to work every day or when you're on the road, you see them, you hear them on the radio, "Hey, this freeway's closed because of this accident." So there's a lot of accidents just in the public.

Danette Beck (23:42):
I just saw one coming back from the airport yesterday.

Kent Drescher (23:45):
Right. And I think they're easy for attorneys to get these cases. I mean, you drive down stretches of the freeway, you might see 15 plaintiff attorney billboards in a stretch of three or four miles and you see if they have ads on the TV and radio and on the internet every few seconds about an attorney. So it's almost an assumption sometimes when you have an accident that the other side's going to get an attorney. There's a lot of volume. The auto cases are easier for plaintiffs to take because they do not have to hire a lot of experts. If you have a complex GL case, you might have to do a lot of work. There's less parties in an auto case, you know, versus a GL case might be multi-party case. Usually an auto case is one person versus another person or company.

Kent Drescher (24:37):
AI is making it really easier for lawyers to really do simple things like draft a lawsuit. We don't have our law degrees, but if we were to go on the internet and say, "draft a lawsuit", I think in about 30 seconds, AI could probably draft us a nice lawsuit. They think that gets back to our discussion of, you know, why we are on the, on our podcast right now. If we have someone go see the vehicle, you know, not just depend on photos from other people or the claim...

Danette Beck (25:07):
It's almost like we're, the more we make it efficient, the more that it opens it up for additional fraud. Right. And you said that earlier, which is, it's just the easiest way to have a fraud prevention.

Kent Drescher (25:18):
Right, right. It really helps us reduce the fraud exposure to our client claims as if we see more things in person and do more things in person. And one of my jobs early in my career was being a full-time field investigator. You know, I had the company car and I didn't work on the inside adjusting. I was out in the field every day investigating claims. And one of our clients was a school district, and we had a couple of different claims there that really stick in my mind as interesting claims. And one of them was a young student who fell off the jungle gym. And it wasn't tragic injuries, but he had some pretty significant injuries. And I remember investigating that claim and taking photos. And the principal handed me a diagram. He had gone out and done a diagram of the loss and where the student was when he fell...

Kent Drescher (26:17):
And I thought, I always told him, well, I told him when I met him, I said, "Well, you should have been a field investigator because he really did my job for me." It really looked good in the file to have all that stuff, but it came from the client. And I thought, "Isn't this helpful?" And I had another claim at the same school district, a different loss where at a baseball field where there was folks watching a foul ball struck somebody in the eye. So I flew over the fence and the people were sitting in the stand behind and they had eye problems from a baseball. And when I was investigating that claim, a math teacher in the school got involved and I think the principal brought me in to talk to him. And he sat down and drew up some average speeds of the ball and the height of the fence and with all these things that we could do by a computer now.

Kent Drescher (27:15):
In those days, you couldn't, but he showed that this was really a very rare instance. And he kind of just did sample projections on this document for me, but it was very well done. And it helped me in my negotiations to say that, look, the height of the fence was safe, that this was really literally a one in a million height of the ball and the way it came through. And I always just felt like, you know what? If you'd have just picked up the phone and called one person at the school, how would you have gotten that information? But by being there, investigating, hands-on, it really showed me people on the site want to help you. They want to give you resources and material. Many of our clients, you know, are very sharp. They know what they do on that site. They know what should've been done.

Kent Drescher (28:11):
And so trying to talk to them over the phone about a complex accident is not going to get much information.

Danette Beck (28:17):
Yeah, you probably would never have learned that. I mean, who would have met the math teacher would've been able to help, right?

Kent Drescher (28:22):
So there's just institute for being there in person on these complex claims.

Danette Beck (28:26):
Right. What I love is that you were talking about the collaboration between and the different parties that you need to talk to kind of build out the full picture. We talk a lot about this internally about how we organize our teams that include underwriting, risk control and claims. And you already mentioned earlier that you talk to the risk control team, like constantly about this, but we really do try to work as a team on these high exposure accounts. So how do you think that from a claims perspective, all of these three disciplines should work together in order to help our clients?

Kent Drescher (28:57):
Well, it's really one of the reasons I really love working at Astrus and we have a very, very collaborative environment amongst those three disciplines. You know, many companies kind of separate their departments and the departments don't talk to each other much. In our company, we have such a team environment and when we have a large claim or a complex claim comes through our claim directors, myself being one of them, we see those claims as soon as the TPA sees the claim. And if it's complex and we want our risk engineers and underwriters to know about it, which is, happens every day, I forward claims to risk engineering and underwriting on our accounts, is we'll send it through with, "Hey, we got a new claim. Here's an unusual circumstance about the claim we wanted to share with you." And many times we'll get on the phone as well and talk to them.

Kent Drescher (29:54):
If we have a fatality incident, we'll pick up the phone and talk to our underwriter and Risk engineer and, you know it's really through that process, you really learn sometimes where the risk engineer will say, "You know, I was just at that site a week ago. Here's what was out there." And sometimes it may relate to the loss.

Danette Beck (30:17):
Okay, we've got just a couple minutes left before we have to sign off, but I want to look forward and what you're seeing from a claims perspective on trends that are happening in construction or what those same construction leaders that you gave a practical recommendation to, something that they need to be paying attention to now? Do you have any trends that you're seeing?

Kent Drescher (30:39):
Well, on the auto side, Danette, we were discussing earlier the dash cam technology's highly important and we really can't stress enough having that. And I think as much technology as we can get a client to use is not just the dash cam footage, but the telematics. You know, where's the vehicle going? Where's it been? That will really help us as we go down in the future. And because, you know, the best way to avoid the social inflation, as we said earlier, is avoid the incident. And I think those things can all help us avoid the incident. I think they can help our drivers with the telematics, understanding that their routes are being watched. As you know, we're just going to have better behavior. Understanding that you've got internal dash cam, I'm not going to pick up that cell phone and look at it every 10 seconds, you know?

Kent Drescher (31:31):
And I think we all think those things when we're driving and I think those are better. But I don't know how long-term this is Danette, but, you know, a lot of personal vehicles, private passenger type vehicles, have a lot of technology the bigger trucks don't have. So I see when that technology hits all of the trucks and specialty vehicles that our clients have, I really think it's going to greatly reduce our auto exposures and our auto settlements and verdicts because we won't have the claims. And it's not goin to stop every claim, maybe someday, but in the shorter term, if we can stop those rear-end auto accidents, that would just be a huge in our auto exposure because I don't have the percentage in front of me. I've heard our risk engineers discuss it. It is a very high percentage of our losses are just the rear end auto accident.

Kent Drescher (32:26):
So if we can get the technology in our vehicles that allows them to stop and think it's there not too far in the future, I really think that's what our clients should be paying attention to. When can I get that in my vehicles? Because I really think that will reduce the auto experience a great deal. On the GL side, Danette, it's a little more complicated because GL doesn't have the predictable four or five types of auto accidents aren't really in the GL world. GL world has hundreds of scenarios that happen every day. And it's really outside of having a great safety program and a great safety culture to try to prevent them. The only thing I thought of in the future though, that I can see paying attention to would be one of the things our clients struggle with is in the risk transfer area. If we're a general contractor and we write all kinds of contractors that are subs and generals, but even our subs sometimes sub out work.

Kent Drescher (33:29):
So a lot of times an important thing in our world is how can we successfully risk transfer? And one of the downsides to that is we'll see a client set up a department to help them with their risk transfer, risk management department. And they'll say, "Yeah, we have a group. We like to see all the certificates of insurance come in. We like to see all the policies come in, but we really don't have time to review them all. We don't have time to ask for them and get them." they say, "That's too many man hours. If we have several hundred contracts, we have policies we have to review a year." But I tell you the downside of not doing that, Danette, is we had a client, a very large client who was very successful at risk transfer and they got a certificate that said subcontractor had proper insurance, had a bad claim involving the subcontractor's employee, and there were exclusions on the policy that prohibited risk transfer. The client was living...

Danette Beck (34:33):
Oh my gosh. We have a whole lot of podcast on that.

Kent Drescher (34:38):
Right. But they said if I'd have seen the policy, I would have not let them work the job. And I think AI could be developed to where you could have, let me get all the policies and then I'll have AI review, you know, because that saves you thousands of man-hours reviewing policies if you could have AI scan policies to tell you whether or not it met your subcontract requirements. So I think that's probably in the future and it can probably do more for us.

Danette Beck (35:08):
Yeah, we've been talking a lot about AI and how it's going to transform the industry so that you can spend more time making smarter decisions instead of doing some of the manual tasks that you just talked about. And this has been a fascinating conversation. I'm so glad that you were willing to come on and talk about field investigations, what may sound like table stakes or something that is a throwaway process part of the risk management strategy, but it really is where the rubber hits the road. And for the first 24 to 48 hours after a claim happens is the critical time speed or the rapid response to get to a claim so that it can be resolved as best we can for our clients. And so I really thank you very much for being on this podcast.

Kent Drescher (35:51):
Thanks for having me.

Closing (35:53):
Thank you for tuning in to the Astrus Advantage Podcast. To learn more about Astrus and access additional insights, visit Astrusins.com. Be sure to subscribe and join us next time as we continue the conversation.