# The Claims Your Attorney Never Files
There is a number your law firm has never shown you, because it does not appear on any invoice or recovery report. It is the total value of the claims they decided not to file.
I run the IDR operation at Kronos Health, and when a practice switches to us from a contingency firm, the first thing my team does is pull the prior year of EOBs and look at what was never submitted. The pattern is the same every time. The big disputes got filed. The $1,400, $2,200, and $3,100 underpayments did not.
Why small claims die at law firms
Nobody is being lazy. The economics simply do not work. A contingency firm earns 20 percent of the award, so a $2,000 underpayment is worth at most a few hundred dollars to the firm, against hours of attorney and paralegal time per dispute. The firm files your six figure spine case and quietly passes on everything that cannot pay for its own labor.
One skipped claim is nothing. The problem is volume. A surgical practice generating 15 out of network claims a month produces a steady stream of small underpayments, and across a year the unfiled pile routinely exceeds the contingency fee the practice actually paid. You write a check for $60,000 and donate a second, invisible sum to the insurer.
The federal data says those claims were winners
Providers win 88 percent of properly filed IDR disputes, and 87 percent of award amounts come in above the insurer's own qualifying payment amount. The win rate does not care whether the claim is large or small. The same arbitration that pays 4.5 times the in network rate on a fusion pays it on an injection. Small claims are not weak claims. They are unprofitable claims, for a law firm.
What changes when filing costs minutes instead of hours
Kronos files every eligible claim regardless of size, one claim per CPT, because our cost per filing is built on software and a trained team rather than billable hours. The claim that was beneath an attorney's time is simply another row in our queue, with the same deadline tracking and the same evidence standards as the largest dispute on your account.
Find out what your pile is worth
Send us 3 to 5 recent EOBs, or better, let us look at the last 12 months alongside what your firm actually filed. We return the math in one business day: what was recovered, what was skipped, and what the skipped claims were worth. Practices are rarely surprised that the pile exists. They are always surprised by its size.