Claims Futures 2026

The legal and claims landscape is undergoing a structural shift. With fixed recoverable costs, rising operational overheads and regulatory updates squeezing margins across personal injury and financial claims, the traditional playbook of chasing top-line caseload volume at all costs is officially broken.

At the recent Legal Futures Claims Futures 2026 conference at Emirates Old Trafford, the tone across the auditoriums was decisive: sustainable growth in claims is no longer about raw volume. It is about data clarity, customer experience and ruthless margin discipline.

Here are our team’s key strategic takeaways from an outstanding line-up of industry leaders, and what they mean for the future of legal operations.

From volume to value and margin protection

Shirley Woolham (CEO, Minster Law) delivered a standout session on steering through industry disruption to secure solid, well-founded growth. Rather than pursuing caseloads indiscriminately, her focus centred on prioritising margin protection through the balanced interplay of people, data and technology.

By letting smart systems absorb the heavy operational burden, firms can free practitioners to deliver an effortless, high-touch client experience.

Key takeaway: AI and automation investments cannot simply be an exercise in novelty. They must deliver direct, measurable protection to your operating margins and help your firm build proprietary, defensible operational IP.

Consumer experience is the new competitive battleground

In a high-impact panel featuring James Maxey, Mark Hallam, Simon Williams and Sabrina Basran, the discussion tackled pricing models, financial incentives and client acquisition.

With rigid, fixed-cost regimes strictly limiting price variation, firms can no longer compete effectively on price alone. Customer experience has become the decisive differentiator.

Winning client trust requires:

• Frictionless onboarding: eliminating repetitive forms and manual document chasing from day one.
• Radical transparency: clear, early communication about fee structures, timelines and deductions.
• Proactive communication: automated, real-time milestones that keep clients informed without draining fee-earner hours.

Profitable by design: smarter case selection

In a session dedicated to law firm profitability, Johan Larsson, Rhys Davies and Philip Liptrot highlighted a widespread industry blind spot: data quality.

When case data is fragmented across legacy management platforms, spreadsheets and departmental silos, leadership gets a distorted picture of what genuinely drives revenue. Firms end up pouring resources into protracted, low-margin files while missing high-value opportunities.

• Clean historic and real-time data gives leadership the confidence to allocate capital and fee-earner capacity to high-yield matters.
• Predictive insights let teams spot risk early and confidently reject unprofitable claims before they consume overhead.

The golden thread: unifying your data foundation

Whether the goal is deploying high-ROI AI, streamlining client onboarding, or running predictive profitability modelling on incoming claims, every initiative hits a wall if systems remain disconnected.

You cannot automate broken workflows, and AI is only as capable as the data feeding it.

At Toca, we work with legal and claims organisations to solve this foundational headache. By connecting and unifying disparate legacy platforms, case management systems and court portals, Toca turns siloed data into clean, actionable intelligence. That gives firms the modern operational foundation they need to deploy scalable automation and practical AI without costly, multi-year IT overhauls.

Ready to modernise your claims operations?

If you’re exploring how to protect your margins, unify fragmented case data, or automate routine claims workflows:

• Reach out on LinkedIn.
• Contact the Toca.legal team to see how our low-code automation and integration platform can streamline your case handling.