How a Texas-Based, Multi-Billion-Dollar Enterprise Recovered 16% of Lost Revenue from Cancelled Cases in a Week.

Client Overview

A Texas-based, multi-billion-dollar enterprise handling high-volume outbound follow-up calls with custodians to support litigation and legal review workflows for law firms and legal service providers across the U.S.

Over time, a significant number of cases had been cancelled due to unsuccessful contact with custodians despite repeated human follow-up attempts.

The Challenge

The organization faced a hidden but costly operational issue.

Over three months, approximately 7,500 cases were cancelled because traditional agents were unable to successfully reach custodians after multiple attempts. These cancellations were not due to denials or refusals but purely due to a lack of contact with custodians.

Key constraints included:

• Long IVRs and extended hold queues

• Human agents limited by shift hours and hold time tolerance• To complete this task in 7 days, they would have required around 14 FTEs

• Since these are cancelled cases, they would need the most experienced agents

• Cases ageing beyond acceptable follow-up windows

• Cancelled cases translate directly into lost downstream revenue

Once cancelled, these cases were effectively written off, even though many custodians were still reachable under different calling conditions.

The organization wanted to answer one critical question before reinvesting effort:

Can autonomous calling reach custodians where humans could not? 

The Pilot Objective

The objective was singular and measurable:

• Attempt contact on previously cancelled cases

• Identify how many custodians could still be reached

• Re-open only those cases where live custodian contact was established with a potential for resending the request.

• To remove traditional constraints, the pilot was designed with no hold time limits. Calls were allowed to remain on hold for extended durations, including one hour or more, disconnecting only when systems timed out naturally.

The Solution

The organization deployed Orvera's autonomous calling platform to reattempt outreach on cancelled cases.

Orvera was configured to:

• Dial previously cancelled cases at scale

• Navigate complex IVRs autonomously

• Remain on hold indefinitely until a custodian answers or the call drops

• Identify successful custodian contact, also referred to as Forward Progress

• Provide clear outcomes for case reactivation decisions

The pilot was executed over seven business days.

Results (7-Day Pilot Outcomes)

During the pilot window, Orvera delivered the following results:

• Total cancelled cases attempted: 7,661

• Successful custodian contacts (Forward Progress): 1,252 cases

• Forward Progress Rate: approximately 16.3 percent

• Total autonomous call time: 35,519 minutes

• Zero human agent involvement during calling

Each successful custodian represented a previously written-off case that could now be reopened and processed.

Business Impact

The pilot conclusively demonstrated that:

• A meaningful portion of cancelled cases were still reachable after human efforts

• Autonomous calling succeeded where human attempts had failed

• Cancelled inventory could be converted back into active, billable work

By reopening only cases with confirmed custodian contact, the organization avoided unnecessary rework while preventing revenue loss from previously written-off work.

Why It Matters

• Cancelled cases are often treated as final losses, but this pilot showed they do not have to be. Autonomous calling created a new way to recover previously cancelled cases.
• To achieve the same outcome within the same timeframe, the organization would have required an estimated 14 full-time human agents (FTEs).
• This comparison excludes additional costs related to hiring, training, quality management, supervision, and attrition.
• Orvera enabled the organization to recover value from dormant cases without disrupting ongoing operations or reallocating human resources.