What the Insurance Industry Built to Keep You Out
The Insurance Industry System Was Designed to Prevent This. That’s Exactly Why It Works.
Someone said something to me recently that I’ve been sitting with ever since.
They said: “Renée, your business is deeply counter-culture.”
They were right. And I don’t think I’d fully articulated it that way until that moment.
What Red Stapler Project does isn’t simply unusual. It isn’t just a niche service in an underserved market. It is, in the most literal sense, the thing the insurance claims industry was architecturally designed to prevent.
Let me explain what I mean and why it matters for your practice.
The Industry Built Walls. On Purpose.
Think about how insurance claims knowledge is actually transmitted.
There are no 4 year state universities offering degrees in claims handling. There is no standard curriculum that anyone outside the industry can access. The trade organizations that confer professional designations the CPCU Society, which includes the AIC designation have explicit provisions that prohibit their licensed members from working directly with plaintiff firms.
Read that again: the professional bodies governing insurance claims expertise formally prohibit their members from bringing that expertise to your side of the table.
This isn’t an accident of history. It isn’t an oversight in how the industry developed. It is a deliberate structural feature a wall built around proprietary knowledge to ensure that the people who learn how claims are evaluated, how reserves are set, how software scores cases, and how carriers make settlement decisions can only apply that knowledge on behalf of carriers.
Licensed adjusters work through claims TPAs. They work for carriers. They work within a system that has, by design, no legitimate pathway to the plaintiff side.
Until now.
The MTV Model: When Access Becomes the Product
In the early 1990s, MTV ran a memorable campaign built on a single provocative idea: “I want my MTV.”
The ads didn’t explain what MTV was. They didn’t describe the programming or list the artists or make a case for why cable television was worth paying for. They did something more subversive. They made it seem like MTV was being withheld that there was something happening that you weren’t part of, that other people had access to, and that the system standing between you and that access was the problem, not the solution.
It worked because it was true. Cable operators were slow to carry MTV. The knowledge the music, the culture, the thing that was clearly happening was being gatekept. The campaign named the gatekeeping and made the audience feel its injustice.
Red Stapler Project exists for the same reason.
The insurance claims knowledge that determines how your clients’ cases are valued has been gatekept for the entire history of the industry. Not because it’s genuinely proprietary in the way a trade secret is. Not because there’s a legitimate public interest in keeping it confidential. But because the system was built to benefit from the information gap and it has been extraordinarily successful at maintaining it.
Your clients are being evaluated by systems you have never been permitted to see from the inside. The people doing the evaluating were trained specifically and extensively on how to do so. The organizations that certify that training prohibit its practitioners from working with you.
I’m doing what the entire insurance claims industry was built to prevent.
That’s not a marketing line. It’s a structural fact and it’s exactly why what I offer is different from anything else available to plaintiff firms.
Why I Can Do This (And Why Others Can’t)
California’s and the Federal Trade Commission’s removal of non-compete agreements established since 1872 under Business and Professions Code §16600 and recently reinforced by AB 1076 and SB 699 means that the knowledge I gained over 23 years inside the insurance industry cannot be legally restricted from the people I choose to share it with.
The industry built walls. California law and the Federal Trade Commission now says those walls cannot apply to me.
I am not violating any ethical obligation. I am applying knowledge, experience, and pattern recognition developed over a 23-year career to help plaintiff attorneys understand how the other side of their negotiations actually operates.
This is knowledge that should have always been available to you. The only reason it wasn’t is because the industry was structured to prevent it.
What This Means in Practice for Your Firm
Here’s how I recommend approaching this, and I want to be straightforward about the reasoning.
The place to start is with case file audits.
Not training. Not consultation. File audits first because before I can tell you where your firm’s opportunities are, I need to see your firm’s actual work. The audit process does something that no generic training program can: it shows me your specific strengths to build on, the areas where your team’s approach creates negotiation exposure, and the patterns that are particular to your practice, your caseload, and the carriers you deal with most.
The number of audits that makes sense to begin with depends on your firm’s size and volume. A solo practitioner with a focused docket needs something different than a firm handling hundreds of files across multiple case types. We determine that together in an initial conversation.
What comes out of the audit phase is not just insight into individual cases. It’s the foundation for a training program that is actually tailored to your firm a half-day or full-day session built around what I found in your files, not around a general curriculum designed for an imaginary average firm. Your people are not average. Your practice is not generic. Your training shouldn’t be either.
And what comes out of that training ideally is an ongoing relationship. Advisory access. A resource you can call when something in a negotiation doesn’t feel right. Someone who knows your firm, knows your patterns, and can help you read what’s happening on the other side of the table in real time.
That progression audits, then firm-specific training, then ongoing advisory is how this works best. Each stage builds on the last. Each stage makes the next one more valuable.
The Counter-Cultural Case for Working Together
I want to close with something that I think gets to the heart of why this matters beyond the practical.
The insurance claims industry didn’t build these walls because plaintiff attorneys are their adversaries in some petty sense. It built them because information asymmetry is profitable. When one side of a negotiation has access to the evaluation systems, the training, and the institutional knowledge and the other side doesn’t the outcome of those negotiations is predictably skewed.
Your clients absorb the cost of that skew in every settlement that comes in below what the carrier actually had available to pay.
I spent 23 years on the profitable side of that asymmetry. I grew increasingly uncomfortable with what that meant in human terms the legitimate injuries undervalued, the people who trusted their attorneys and got less than a fair outcome not because anyone failed them but because the system was built to produce that result.
So I left. And I started doing what the industry was built to prevent.
I want your clients to receive what their cases are actually worth. That’s the whole project. Everything else the audits, the training, the advisory work is in service of that.
If that sounds like something your firm wants access to, let’s talk.
How to Get Started
The first step is a free 30-minute consultation. We’ll talk about your firm, your caseload, and what a pilot audit engagement would look like. I’ll tell you directly whether I think the fit is right and what the realistic upside is.
No obligation. No one-size-fits-all pitch. Just a real conversation about whether what I do is what your firm actually needs.
Schedule Your Free Consultation
Case Audits: Starting at $550
Firm-Specific Training (Half-Day): $3,500
Firm-Specific Training (Full-Day): $6,500
Ongoing Advisory: Available following initial engagement
Renée Soileau
Red Stapler Project
renee@redstaplerproject.com
La Mesa, CA | Serving plaintiff attorneys nationwide
HIPAA-compliant. Fully confidential. NDA signed before every file review.
Renée Soileau spent 23 years inside the insurance claims industry before founding Red Stapler Project to bring that knowledge exclusively to the plaintiff side. She is doing what the entire insurance claims industry was built to prevent and California law was the first to make it possible.
By Renée Soileau | Red Stapler Project | July 2026
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