James Aspinwall — February 2026
Ankura Consulting Group has built a practice around a specific problem: when a court, regulator, or bankruptcy trust needs someone to process thousands or millions of claims, verify eligibility, distribute billions of dollars, and prove that every decision was correct — someone who works for the court, not for either side.
Their aggregate numbers: 20 million claims reviewed, $75 billion approved and distributed, across 30 years of engagements. Two proprietary platforms — TrustOnline (asbestos bankruptcy trusts) and ClaimsOnline (settlement administration) — underpin the operation.
Here are the cases that define the practice.
Volkswagen Dieselgate — $10 Billion, 600,000 Claims
The engagement that put the model on display. Appointed by Judge Charles R. Breyer as Independent Claims Supervisor for both the 2.0-liter and 3.0-liter settlement programs. Four years (2016-2020) supervising the buyback, compensation, and remediation of approximately 500,000 vehicles.
Purpose-built claims management system. Every claim audited for eligibility — standard buybacks, lease terminations, branded-title vehicles, multi-owner claims, foreign stakeholders, mass purchasers, dealership claims. Fraud detection across the full claims population. Monthly and quarterly public reporting to the court.
Result: 95%+ fleet remediation (vs. 85% court minimum), $10 billion+ in consumer relief distributed, $9.5 billion+ directly to car buyers. The FTC’s Final Status Report credited Ankura’s “presence, and effective performance” for the result.
PG&E Wildfire Subrogation Trust — $11 Billion
PG&E’s equipment caused the 2017 Northern California Wildfires (21 fires, 8 counties, 245,000+ acres, 8,900+ structures, 44 deaths) and the 2018 Camp Fire (153,000 acres, 18,800 structures, 85 deaths). The resulting bankruptcy established an $11 billion qualified settlement fund for insurance subrogation claims.
Ankura was appointed Trustee — not just claims administrator, but the entity responsible for the fund itself. They established the settlement fund entity, designed the claims process, built the financial operations infrastructure, and managed the distribution of billions to insurance carriers.
The complexity: tens of thousands of claims from hundreds of insurers, each requiring eligibility review, actuarial forecasting, and quarterly payment percentage calculations. Ankura ran the entire operation end-to-end on a customized ClaimsOnline platform.
Asbestos Bankruptcy Trusts — $14 Billion, 5 Million Claimants
The longest-running and largest engagement by volume. Ankura designed, built, and operates TrustOnline — the centralized claims processing system used by multiple Section 524(g) asbestos personal injury trusts. Mark King led the technology effort, building a platform that has now processed over 5 million claimants and distributed more than $14 billion.
Named trusts include Porter Hayden, Leslie Controls, APG Asbestos Trust, Combustion Engineering, NARCO, Quigley, and Yarway. Each trust has its own eligibility criteria, disease categories (asbestosis, lung cancer, mesothelioma), and compensation schedules. The platform handles all of them with consistent processing while maintaining trust-specific rules.
Services span liability forecasting, medical claims audits, claims administration, and settlement design. This engagement has been running for 25+ years and continues.
Transvaginal Mesh MDL — 65,000+ Claims
One of the largest medical device mass tort settlements in U.S. history. Consolidated from over 100,000 lawsuits filed against mesh manufacturers beginning around 2010.
Ankura served as Claims Administrator, processing 65,000+ claims through a customized ClaimsOnline deployment. The work included organizing and analyzing both electronic and hard-copy claim data, designing custom workflows and quality control processes, identifying thousands of duplicate claims, managing lien and bankruptcy review, and processing payments to claimants and lienholders.
The settlement amount runs to several billion dollars (exact figure not publicly disclosed).
Boeing 737 MAX — $600 Million, 30+ Countries
After the Lion Air Flight 610 (October 2018) and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (March 2019) crashes killed 346 people, three separate compensation funds totaling $600 million were established, including a $500 million DOJ-mandated fund.
Ankura provided the claims evaluation operation — reviewing estate documents from 30+ countries to identify eligible heirs. This meant researching foreign intestacy laws, evaluating international estate documentation, and determining eligibility across fundamentally different legal systems. The international complexity made this engagement distinct from domestic claims work.
GM Ignition Switch — Compensation Fund Operations
The 2014 GM Ignition Switch Defect Compensation Fund (administered by Kenneth Feinberg) processed 4,342 claims including 124 eligible death claims. Ankura designed and operated the claims processing facility, managing a team reviewing police reports, accident photos, vehicle sensor data, and company records for eligibility determination.
Stericycle FCPA Monitorship — $84 Million
A different type of engagement. Following a DOJ Deferred Prosecution Agreement in April 2022, Ankura supported the independent compliance monitor on a two-year FCPA monitorship of Stericycle (medical waste management). The work included transaction testing, third-party management reviews, internal controls assessment, and global compliance framework evaluation.
The DOJ moved to dismiss criminal charges with prejudice in April 2025 — the monitorship succeeded.
The Pattern
Every engagement follows the same structural model:
| Element | How It Appears |
|---|---|
| Independence | Court-appointed, regulator-mandated, or trustee role — never working for the defendant |
| Purpose-built systems | TrustOnline and ClaimsOnline platforms customized per engagement, not generic case management |
| Eligibility verification | Every claim audited against settlement-specific criteria, not self-reported |
| Fraud detection | Proactive identification of fabricated, duplicate, or ineligible claims |
| Edge case escalation | Human review for complex cases — multi-owner, international, branded-title, ambiguous eligibility |
| Continuous reporting | Structured reporting to courts, trustees, or regulators throughout the engagement |
| Scale | Systems handle the volume (millions of claims); people handle the exceptions |
The key insight: the claims processing problem is fundamentally the same whether the claims involve diesel vehicles, wildfire damage, asbestos exposure, defective medical devices, or aviation disasters. The eligibility rules change. The compensation formulas change. The regulatory framework changes. But the operational challenge — intake, verify, calculate, pay, audit, report, at scale — is constant.
Ankura’s competitive advantage is that they have solved this problem repeatedly across industries, and their platforms (TrustOnline and ClaimsOnline) encode 25+ years of accumulated edge cases, fraud patterns, and workflow optimizations.
The Team
The claims practice is concentrated around a small group of senior operators:
- Jeremy V. Haynes (Senior Managing Director) — has personally managed distribution of $25 billion+ to claimants across VW, PG&E, Boeing, GM, TVM, Toys “R” Us, and asbestos trusts
- Mark King (Senior Managing Director) — 22+ years in applied technology, architect of TrustOnline, technology lead for VW and PG&E engagements
- Asmir Loncarevic (Senior Director) — VW 2.0L/3.0L (550,000+ claims), Boeing 737 MAX, talcum powder litigation
This is not a thousand-person operation. It is a small team with deep expertise operating purpose-built technology at scale. The leverage comes from the platforms, not headcount.
Why This Matters for AI Compliance
Ankura’s model — independent oversight, purpose-built systems, continuous monitoring, human judgment for edge cases — is exactly what modern AI compliance agents aim to replicate. The difference is speed and cost.
Ankura processes millions of claims over years with teams of people. An AI-powered compliance platform aims to deliver the same structural guarantees — independence, auditability, fraud detection, escalation — in minutes instead of months.
The question is not whether AI can replace what Ankura does. It is whether AI can deliver the same rigor at a fraction of the time and cost, while maintaining the independence and domain expertise that make the model work. Ankura has proven the model. The opportunity is to scale it.