Welcome back to The Built Environment Bulletin. This month’s edition covers themes that have arisen during and after my attendance at this year’s Property & Liability Resource Bureau Claims Conference.
PLRB always tells you something about where the claims sector is heading; you just have to piece it together from a dozen different conversations. This year, four threads kept surfacing: fewer claims coming through, AI moving from panel talk to job titles, PE circling harder than ever, and firms racing to build out full-service platforms.
Here’s what stood out to me.
Claims volume is quietly shrinking
One of the more understated conversations at PLRB this year was about the numbers themselves, as several people I spoke to pointed to a general softening in claims volume across the industry. Nobody was sounding an alarm about it, but it’s the kind of shift that changes how teams are resourced and how carriers plan headcount. Something worth watching.
AI isn’t a panel topic anymore, it’s a hire!
If claims volume was the quiet story, AI was the loud one. Every hallway conversation seemed to loop back to it eventually. And the industry didn’t wait long to prove the point: less than a month after PLRB, The Vertex Companies LLC, the New York-headquartered claims and disputes consultancy, announced Chad Paulin as its new AI Strategy Officer, starting this August. That’s a named leadership seat dedicated to AI strategy at a firm operating across technical claims and disputes. When AI graduates from panel topic to org chart line item, that tells you where the industry actually is, not just where it says it’s heading.
Digital transformation means data centers now, too
That AI conversation didn’t stay abstract for long and kept pulling toward data centers. People at PLRB were talking about AI strategy in the same breath as the infrastructure underneath it: where the compute lives, who builds it, who insures it, who investigates when something goes wrong there. It’s a new intersection for the claims world and a possible new market for the claims industry to investigate.
This is exactly where I think Metric has something useful to offer. Alongside Metric Geo, our sister brand, Metric DCX works, operates specifically within data center and digital infrastructure executive. Put the two together, we support claims and data center specialist businesses, and the PE firms backing them, with one executive search partner that actually understands both sides of that picture. Rather than trying to explain your data center exposure to a generalist claims recruiter, or your claims context to a data center specialist, you get both under one roof.
An increase in PE activity in the space
Building on that: private equity’s appetite for this space came up again and again at PLRB, and the deal activity since has only reinforced it. The clearest example: Leonard Green & Partners has completed its acquisition of Cumming Group from New Mountain Capital. Cumming is a pure-play project and cost management platform serving over 4,000 clients, including 41 Fortune 100 companies, through roughly 2,900 professionals in 60-plus offices, and it works across end markets that include data centers. This signals that sophisticated capital sees real value and disruptive potential in the market, beyond just a bolt-on acquisition.
Building a full-service platform
The other thread running through PLRB conversations was diversification, firms talking about broadening what they offer rather than staying narrowly specialized. We saw that played out almost immediately: J.S. Held LLC acquired Shechter & Everett, LLP, a part of J.S. Held, a Florida-based forensic accounting and litigation consulting firm, bringing that expertise in-house to broaden its own offering. I am seeing this pattern frequently across this space, with firms deciding it’s better to own adjacent capabilities than to refer clients elsewhere for them.
The people behind all of this
None of the above happens without the right people, and PLRB was a good reminder of that, too.
On the emerging side, Chase Anderson, P.E., a forensic engineer based in Tampa who’s led rapid-response work on everything from the FIU pedestrian bridge collapse to Hurricane Ian recovery, was named to Engineering News-Record 2026 Top 20 Under 40. Well-deserved recognition, and a good example of the caliber of talent building careers in this space.
In other leadership news in the insurance space, John Runkle has joined Allana Buick & Bers, Inc. as Vice President and Principal in their First Party Forensics division. This is an example of another significant appointment that will have an impact on the industry.
