The Architect of Transcendent Settlements
The revolution started with the 16-year-old boy who was afraid to open his mouth.​​
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If you ask her, Isabella Acevedo will tell you about a time when she could barely get her son Isiah to shut up. A precocious, outgoing kid who was full of joy and energy, Isabella had numerous meetings with Isiah's teachers about his constant energy levels. He loved to play around, constantly cracked jokes, and craved the opportunity to make people laugh.
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Then, one afternoon Isiah was hit by a car while ridging his bike home from school. He flew over his handlebars, hit his face on the ground, and chipped three of his front teeth.
It was pre-Obamacare, and health insurance was still a luxury in America. Isabella couldn't afford dental insurance. And Isiah was forced to simply adapt to his new smile.
In the social pressure cooker of junior high that meant shrinking into the background. First he stopped talking nearly as much, hoping to keep his embarrassing chipped teeth a secret. Then he started to avoid eye contact, realizing that if he didn't he risked people engaging with him and starting a conversation that would force him to open his mouth. And within a few months he was actively inventing excuses to avoid parties, school dances, and just about anything else where he might have to open his mouth.
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When Steve's law partner inherited Isiah's case from a volume law firm, and Steve saw that there were $100,000 policy limits and no settlement offer on the table, he had a simple question:
What had been done to tell Isiah's story?
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He searched the file. He found a single-page copy-and-paste demand and a form liability denial from the carrier. Steve resolved to do something different. He drove to Isiah's house and interviewed him on video. Then he recorded a conversation with Isiah's mom, his best friend, and his sister. He watched a YouTube video on digital video editing, and pieced together a simple video using iMovie on his white plastic iMac. Two months later the insurance carrier tenders the $100k limits of the driver's policy--and the "Transcendent Settlement" was born.
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Insurance companies employ oppressive, dehumanizing systems. In the name of maximizing their profits, they have created a system where insurance adjusters have become exhausted, depleted, and overwhelmed.
The typical adjuster is assigned an absurd amount of claims, responsible for
seeking to mitigate the risk of bad faith exposure with form letters to claimants and repeat solicitations for status updates.
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And few adjusters are
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A Transcendent Settlement is one that breaks through an insurance adjuster's preconceived beliefs about what a case must be and evokes the most powerful capital in any case: the adjuster's empathy.
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Attorneys were willing to bank potential settlement (the client's, and firm's most valuable asset) on a Demand Letter--one that was frequently long, boring, and laborious to read. And they were willing to trust an overworked, underresourced, and frequently uninformed insurance adjuster to read it.
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Steve suspected the adjusters weren't actually reading these letters. And as he talked to them he realized that his few adjusters could do so, even if they wanted to: They simply did not have the time to read the volume of written materials they received every day. ​
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Insurance companies
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teve Benedetto is a challenger of convention, an avid investigator of leverage, and an obsessive student of persuasive storytelling.
After beginning his career as a Big Law litigation associate, Steve has spent the last 15 years running his own firms-- representing actual human beings in complex matters against far more resourced, powerful opponents. During this time he has dedicated his career to studying and deconstructing systems of power – including those designed and used by insurance companies and corporations. Focusing on how these systems harm human beings, Steve has sought new, increasingly creative ways to circumvent and overcome these conventions.
A student of decision science, systems thinking, and story, Steve has spent 15 years engineering “Transcendent Settlements”: early case resolutions that exceed the adjustor’s initial authority, the defense attorney’s expectations, and reasonable trial outcomes by transcending the insurance company's paradigm.
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After five years of zigging (studying the art of settlement) while the rest of the practice zagged (studying the art of trial advocacy), Steve unwittingly found himself at the vanguard of an emerging specialty: settlement advocacy and consulting.
Steve pursues this practice through Policy Limit Demands, the collaboration he created with an Oscar-winning documentary editor, a former television producer, and a Fortune 500 Director of Technology. The PLD team produces dynamic, web-hosted demand and mediation packages constructed around customized settlement videos — “micro-documentaries” that tell the story of the client’s journey.
In 2023 Steve partnered with Jesse Wilson (Tell The Winning Story) to offer Day-in-the-Life and Settlement Videos informed by Jesse’s groundbreaking “Victim-to-Victor” paradigm. Meanwhile, Steve continues work on his forthcoming book The Adjustor’s Journey – a work that aims to educate other lawyers on his team’s strategy for overcoming the insurance industry’s settlement paradigms.
When not supporting other lawyers in winning transcendent settlements for their clients, Steve continues to work as a practicing attorney, serving as the Director of Litigation at The People’s Law Firm (www.the-plf.com) – the multi-state civil rights and plaintiff’s personal injury firm he founded in 2014.
3-months, 7-figure, excess settlement.
Steve's 15-year-old client was paralyzed in a high-speed collision caused by a farm vehicle. Her family had no experience with the legal system and was resistant to hire a lawyer because they didn't want to put her through the stress of a trial--in part because she had taken her seatbelt off moments before the crash. Steve was brought in by another law firm to help sign the case. He did so--and, three months later, convinced the adverse farm to personally contribute to settle the case beyond its policy of $3m. He then negotiated an 80% reduction of the ERISA superlien, to put $2m in the client's pocket. The judge who reviewed the settlement called his work "extraordinary" and approved the settlement on the spot.