It should be no surprise that self-insured defendants (or annuity insurers representing those defendants) would try to do everything possible to minimize their cost of annuity products needed to guarantee periodic payments that are to be paid to their plaintiffs.

No plaintiff can fault a defendant for trying to keep his/her costs down to the absolute minimum possible -as long as it does not result in the plaintiff getting the short end of the stick.

One of the oldest tricks in the book that many defendants try to pull on plaintiffs is to somehow make their cost of providing those periodic payments appear to be larger than the actual. There are many (underhanded) ways that some (not all) defendants employ in their pursuit of inflating their "apparent" cost of financing your structured settlement payments.

Some of those unscrupulous "cost saving" methods that many defendants resort to are listed below:

• Defendant insists on using a self-administered or a non-competitive annuity program
  
• Defendant insists that the entire transaction be managed by their pre-approved structured annuity brokers
  
• Defendant receives payback in the form of illegal/undisclosed broker kickbacks, and broker referral fees
  
• Uses deceptive/misleading annuity pricing rates to inflate their apparent financing costs
  
• Receives undisclosed annuity volume discounts
  
• Switches to cheaper annuity product carriers at the last moment, or post-settlement

Just like the rest of us, your attorneys may also have no way of really keeping up with the latest in the many tricks that a defense-loyal structured settlement broker can possibly pull on unsuspecting plaintiffs and their attorneys. It is highly advisable, therefore, to insist that your attorney acquire services of a duly certified professional structured settlement broker to help you and your attorney forestall and safe-guard you aginst any such trickery.