Tech Queen

It’s been two weeks since I started my internship and I can already see the ways I’m contributing to the company. I’ve been put on three teams: one technology product development project, one bankrupt client project, and one environmental cleanup/ insurance allocation project. Due to the nature of each of these projects, I can’t say I’m officially a fully “active” member on the bankrupt client or environmental cleanup projects. Those are both cases which slightly differ from the company’s specialties, so the contexts for these cases take more time to explain. Luckily, the background needed to work on the product development project overlaps with much of my training, so I have been able to actually contribute tangible value to the company through this project.

One thing the company guarantees to its clients is updated databases. One of my tasks has been to manually scan each of the site pages with potentially relevant information for any changes. This is a tedious task, but the process has become much more efficient overtime, with the help of a web scraping tool that was created in-house by one of the technology employees. The tool looks through a set of webpages and compares a previous page to the new page, thus picking up on any additions or deletions to the page. For the past two weeks, I’ve taken part in analyzing the changes for relevant updates, which is then translated into a manual document import to our current databases. It is extremely important for our databases to be as up-to-date as possible, not only because we guarantee this to our clients, but because our clients use the information we provide to run estimated costs and future payment percentages to claimants.

Note: I understand the context is fuzzy to non-existent, but this is intentional. I do not know the extent to which I can share about our products.

Another way I notice I have been contributing is by doing independent research for quality assurance purposes. Recently, I noticed inconsistencies in readings and testimonies I was given for training, and what was presented on our product’s platform. The inconsistency I’m referring to refers to certain state legislatures regarding bankruptcy trust transparency laws. KCIC keeps track of states that have enacted laws to ensure transparency between filing bankruptcy trust claims and the tort system. Since these are two separate systems, plaintiffs have easily “played” defendants in order to get more money than defendant is liable for, otherwise known as “double-dipping”.

The inconsistency may be a very small thing, but ultimately it could lead to issues in court if there is a misunderstanding of particular states’ laws. If it leads to issues for our clients, then we could lose the trust of our clients, or worse, their business. Looking at the bigger picture, this may be a critical weak spot in our technology that I have spotted, and am now addressing.

In this next week, I am hoping to develop a deeper understanding of the two other projects I have yet to get into as much. I am ready to learn how to run different insurance allocation scenarios, as well as problem-solve for two our unique clients. Before getting into that work, I need to understand exactly what their problem is, and why they came to KCIC for help.

One thought on “Tech Queen

  • Sounds like you’ve had the opportunity to contribute in some significant ways already and that indeed, the issue you found could be a disruptive thing if not addressed. Excellent work. I am sure that some of the work (e.g. review of the web pages) can be tedious at times, though it sounds like you have a useful tool that assists in that regard. But again, checking for discrepancies, errors, etc. seems key to other elements of the company’s work.

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