How one law firm rebuilt recovery around understanding each account

For most of the last fifty years, firms that collect consumer debt have worked an account based on a few facts: the balance, the days past due, a phone number, a name in a queue. Recovery meant working that queue by phone, one call at a time, and litigating what didn't resolve. Firms worked this way because the tools to do it differently didn't exist. Now they do.

Debt collection lawsuits are among the most common civil cases in the country, with up to 4.7 million filed in state courts in 2022, and filings have climbed past pre-pandemic levels through 2024 and into 2026.^[1] The accounts behind those suits are not getting simpler. Consumer debt sits at $18.8 trillion, with credit card balances near their record.^[2] The friction in how accounts get worked shows up downstream: the CFPB logged roughly 207,800 debt collection complaints in 2024, nearly double the year before, with “attempts to collect a debt not owed” the most common issue every year since 2013.^[3] More volume, more disputes, and courts straining to keep up, in a system where consumers have a lawyer in fewer than one in ten cases.^[1]

Cohen & Cohen Law, a creditors' rights firm based in New York, handles accounts across the full legal lifecycle, from pre-suit through post-judgment. The firm reached a familiar limit. Phone-based recovery caps out at the number of accounts a person can dial in a day, and it reaches only the consumers who answer. What set the firm apart was its response to that limit: rather than hiring its way around the ceiling, it was willing to test a different way of working and let the results decide.

Reading the account, not the queue

The shift is easy to state and hard to do well. Instead of treating an account as a row in a queue, treat it as a specific person with a history: what they owe, how far along they are, which channel they have responded to before, when they tend to engage, and what they have already said. Then decide each account's next move from that reading rather than from a fixed schedule.

The firm did this by running its outreach on Prodigal, which reads each account and decides its next move. Regulation F, the CFPB's debt collection rule in effect since November 30, 2021, expressly permits collection attorneys to reach consumers by email and text, within defined rules on consent, timing, and opt-out.^[4] That lets a firm match its outreach to where the account actually sits:

• A pre-suit account gets a clear path to resolve before litigation becomes necessary.
• An account in active suit gets messaging that reflects the stakes and the timeline it now carries.
• A post-judgment account gets outreach built around the resolution options that remain.

What makes the sequence work is that Prodigal adjusts it to behavior. Each account is re-scored on what it did the day before, a payment, a promise, a link opened but not acted on, and the next touch reflects that rather than a plan set at intake. A consumer who can resolve on their own does so through a self-service portal, at whatever hour suits them, without a call. The firm's people stay on the accounts that need judgment. Effort concentrates where a message will change something.

Testing it instead of assuming it

Most collections claims are hard to trust because recovery numbers move for many reasons at once. Seasonality, portfolio mix, and the economy all push the figures around, so a before-and-after comparison rarely proves what caused a change.

Cohen & Cohen Law ran a controlled test instead. About 6,000 accounts were split at random into two groups: one worked digitally through Prodigal, the other worked the firm's existing way, over the same window on comparable accounts. Holding everything else equal isolates the effect of the approach. Over the pilot, the digital group delivered:

• 4.3 times the amount recovered, against the existing process.
• Four times the recovery rate.
• Three times as many consumers enrolled in structured repayment.
  
  

What followed at scale

Rolled out to the full portfolio, the approach produced three shifts worth examining.

Portal payments went from a standing start to nearly 40% of every dollar the firm collected within months, then held in that band rather than spiking and fading. When outreach is aimed well, a large share of consumers resolve on their own.

Payment plans overtook one-time payments. Early on, almost every portal transaction was a single payment. Within two months of full rollout, scheduled plan payments crossed over, reaching close to two-thirds of transactions by late summer. One-time payments need a fresh decision each month, so their volume stays flat. Plans accumulate, each month's enrollments adding to those already paying, so scheduled recovery compounds from one contact into a stream that needs no further outreach.

The overdue book grew by more than a quarter over the period. A larger book normally means a smaller share of it gets paid, as new, unworked accounts pile up faster than they can be reached. Here the share of the book that paid rose as the book grew. The program was converting accounts faster than new ones arrived, the real test of whether a method scales or just works once.

Channel quality held up underneath these shifts. Email delivery stayed above 99% and open rates held in the low-to-mid 50s across every month of the program. Text was slower to mature, but as contact data improved, its click rate roughly tripled over the same period.

What a firm can take from this

Treat each account by what it tells you, its stage, its history, its responses, rather than sorting the whole book into a few buckets and sending each the same thing. Beyond that:

• Test a new approach against a held-back control before trusting it, so you know what caused a result.
• Build for recurring plans, since they carry recovery forward with no added effort.
• Meet consumers on the channel they answer, which for a growing share is not the phone.

None of this removes the attorney's judgment or the cases that belong in court. It changes what reaches the court in the first place, and how much of the book resolves before it gets there. Recovery is becoming a measurable system, and the firms treating it that way are recovering more without simply suing more.

Sources

[1] The Pew Charitable Trusts, “Debt Collection Lawsuits Surge to Pre-Pandemic Highs” (Sept. 2025); “Debt Collection Lawsuits Continue to Flood State and Local Courts” (July 2026). https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/09/02/debt-collection-lawsuits-surge-to-pre-pandemic-highs

[2] Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, Q2 2026 (Aug. 2026). https://www.newyorkfed.org/newsevents/news/research/2026/20260811

[3] Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Response Annual Report (2024). https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/2024-consumer-response-annual-report/

[4] Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “Debt Collection Practices (Regulation F),” Final Rule, effective Nov. 30, 2021. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/19/2020-28422/debt-collection-practices-regulation-f