What do IDR filing services charge?

Across the category, most filing vendors and law firms charge 15 to 25 percent of the recovery. Flat fee filing, where the price per arbitration is fixed regardless of award size, is the main alternative.

Is a law firm better than a filing service for IDR?

For the administrative process itself, no: federal IDR is decided on written offers and evidence, not advocacy in a room. Firms matter when a dispute is likely to spill into litigation or involves eligibility fights worth briefing.

Can I switch from a contingency vendor to software later?

Yes. Disputes already in flight usually finish under the old arrangement, new remittances start under the new one, and the transition risk is continuity of deadline tracking during the handoff.

Answers / Software vs service

IDR software versus filing services versus law firms

Three models run No Surprises Act arbitration. Software: your team operates the tool, cost is fixed, recovery stays yours. Filing services and law firms: they do the work and typically keep 15 to 25 percent of recovery. Lido IDR combines them, software operated by a filing team, for a flat fee per arbitration.

The three models

Software gives your existing revenue cycle staff the deadline engine, eligibility rules, batching logic, and filing workflow, and they run it. Filing services take the whole function: you hand over remittance data, they negotiate, batch, file, and argue, and they get paid from what comes back, typically 15 to 25 percent of recovery across the category. Law firms do the same with attorneys, which matters for disputes that might leave the administrative process, and generally price the same way, on contingency.

The cost math

Contingency pricing is indifferent to your volume and very interested in your award sizes: the fee scales with recovery, so the better federal IDR works for you, the more you pay per dispute for the same work. Fixed pricing inverts that, which is why the crossover point arrives fast for groups with real out-of-network volume. The published record puts typical awards around 4.7 times the qualifying payment amount; on awards like that, a percentage is not a rounding error.

What contingency buys you

Honesty requires the other column. A percentage deal means no fee on losses, no internal staffing, and no learning curve, which fits groups with a handful of disputes a year or no capacity to touch the process. It also aligns the vendor toward bigger awards, though baseball-style arbitration already pushes everyone toward credible offers, since the arbitrator must pick one offer or the other.

When each fits

A few disputes a year with no staff time: a service or firm on contingency is rational. Real monthly volume and a revenue cycle team: software, because the fee drag at 15 to 25 percent eventually dwarfs the cost of running it yourself. Disputes entangled with litigation strategy: a firm. The model most groups actually want is the hybrid, software-grade process without staffing it, which is what Lido IDR is: the software and the team, for a flat fee per arbitration, so the economics stay fixed while the effort stays zero.

Price the two models on your volume

Bring your dispute counts and typical awards; the comparison between a percentage and a flat fee per arbitration takes ten minutes. Talk to an IDR specialist.