Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFA) are becoming more popular in the insurance world. An insurer will hand over substantially all of their plain vanilla cases in a certain line of business (usually workers comp) in a specified geography to an outside counsel firm. That firm is paid a fixed fee per case, not per hour. To protect the firm, the firm is allowed to "opt-out" of some number of claims each year and bill those claims hourly.

Insurers are reporting significant savings. Law firms that get the work are happy. The rest... not so much.