A file is not filed the day it is opened. It is filed the day its weakest piece of evidence has been replaced with a stronger one, which is most of what this method does.
An engagement covers a decision made about a client on the basis of a score, a report, or a private tribunal ruling: a credit-file entry, a tenant risk score, an employment background check, an insurance renewal score, or a finding already issued by a private adjudication panel. In practice this means:
A matter where the vendor has already corrected the record voluntarily, inside its own published window, is not opened as an engagement, because there is nothing left to move through the method below. A matter is closed at intake, without further contact, in that case.
The method runs in six stages. Each stage narrows what the next stage has to do, and the fourth stage, filing, does not begin until the third is complete, however much a client wants to file sooner.
The file a decision was based on is requested first, under whatever statutory or contractual right applies in the jurisdiction. The response window most vendors operate under is thirty days. The average response actually received across this firm’s open matters is forty-six days, a delay of sixteen days past the vendor’s own window. Where the applicable procedure attaches a per-day penalty for a late response, a common figure is twenty-five dollars a day; sixteen days at twenty-five dollars is four hundred dollars, a damages figure that exists before the underlying dispute has been assessed at all. It is logged and carried forward, not raised separately.
Every piece of evidence the client already holds is graded against the five-tier scale set out under Rubric on the overview page: the respondent’s own record at Tier I, third-party documents at Tier II, contemporaneous personal logs at Tier III, uncorroborated testimony at Tier IV, and contradicting testimony with nothing behind it at Tier V. Most clients arrive holding Tier IV and Tier V material only, which is not a comment on the underlying facts. It is a comment on what a private rubric was built to accept, and stage two exists to identify exactly which document would close the gap.
The gap identified in stage two is filled. A bank statement, a servicer letter, a timestamped message log notarized through a contemporaneous-log service: whichever moves the strongest available account from Tier III or IV up to Tier II. The notarization service runs forty-five dollars a document, and a typical file needs two to three, ninety to a hundred and thirty-five dollars. This cost is carried by the firm and is not billed at intake; it is recovered, like everything else, only out of a successful settlement.
| Stage | Produces | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Record request | The file the decision was based on | 30 to 46 days |
| 2. Tier mapping | A graded inventory of existing evidence | 2 to 4 days |
| 3. Corroboration engineering | Tier II documentation closing the gap | 5 to 12 days |
| 4. Filing and routing | Individual claim or aggregation referral | 1 day |
| 5. Contested adjudication | A ruling, where the matter is contested | 6 to 14 weeks |
| 6. Recovery and collections | A payment | 2 to 9 weeks after ruling |
A claim is filed individually or referred to the class aggregation desk, on a fixed threshold. This firm’s average internal cost of a single contested hearing is nine hundred dollars. At the standard thirty-three per cent contingency, a claim needs to clear roughly two thousand seven hundred and thirty dollars in projected recovery before an individual filing pays for the hearing that produces it: nought point three three multiplied by 2,730 is 900.9. Claims projected below that figure are routed to aggregation rather than filed alone, not because they are weaker, but because a single hearing does not clear its own cost against them.
Where a matter reaches a private tribunal, the format is fixed by the respondent’s own procedure: no cross-examination in the ordinary sense, no right of appeal in most jurisdictions of admission, and a complainant whose consent to arbitrate was given at signup against a respondent whose consent was never required. Representation at this stage does not argue that the format should be different. It ensures the panel is shown Tier I and Tier II material rather than the Tier IV account the client would otherwise have brought alone.
A ruling in a client’s favor is not a payment. Private tribunals carry no enforcement office of their own, and an award that sits unpaid for lack of a collections step is a documented outcome in this line of work, not a rare one. This stage converts the ruling into money, typically within two to nine weeks of the finding, and the file closes on the date funds clear, not the date the ruling issued.
An individual claim, from record request to closed file, runs eleven to twenty weeks depending on whether it reaches contested adjudication or resolves earlier through a corrected record and settlement. An aggregated class runs four to nine months from the point the aggregation desk accepts referrals, scoped at intake to the number of individual files being combined. Full terms, thresholds, and the current fee schedule are set out under Engagement.