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A
Acceptance Test
An acceptance test is a defined, pre-agreed check a model, dataset, or system component must pass before it is accepted into production use. Acceptance tests convert a subjective judgment about whether something is good enough into a checkable pass-or-fail criterion set in advance of the result.
Administrative Law Judge
An administrative law judge is an official who presides over hearings within an agency, takes evidence and issues an initial decision. The agency or a court may review the decision.
Advance Rate
An advance rate is the discount applied to a collateral pool's stated value to determine how much capital a lender will advance against it. In legal-asset lending, the advance rate should be applied against a stated percentile of the collateral's distribution rather than against its mean or a point estimate.
Appeal
An appeal is a request that a higher court review a lower court's decision for legal error. It adds a separate layer of time and risk to a matter that has otherwise been decided.
Appellate Base Rate
An appellate base rate is the historical frequency of affirmance, reversal, or modification on appeal, computed by jurisdiction and case type, the primary pricing input for a judgment's residual risk once merits uncertainty has already resolved at trial and liability and damages have been decided.
Arbitration
Arbitration is a private dispute resolution process in which an arbitrator or panel decides a case under an agreement between the parties, producing an award that is generally enforceable in court. It is usually faster and less public than litigation.
Asset Tracing
Asset tracing is the investigative discipline of identifying and locating a defendant's assets, used to assess and manage collection risk on a judgment. Asset tracing draws on a different data set than pre-judgment outcome modeling and is a core competency for judgment preservation.
ATE (After-the-Event Insurance)
ATE (after-the-event insurance) is a policy taken out after a dispute has arisen to cover a claimant's adverse costs exposure if the matter is lost. ATE increasingly wraps litigation finance positions directly, requiring the insurer to price the same underlying litigation outcome risk the funder is also pricing.
Attachment Point
An attachment point is the level of loss at which a layer of coverage begins to pay. Everything below it is borne by the underlying layers or the policyholder.
Attorney Lien
An attorney lien is a lawyer's legal claim on a client's recovery, or on the file, to secure payment of fees and costs. It ranks among the claims on settlement proceeds and affects what a funder behind the firm or the client can recover.
AUC
AUC, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, measures how well a model separates cases where an event occurs from cases where it does not, independent of any threshold. It describes ranking ability, not whether stated probabilities are right.
Audit Trail
An audit trail is the time-ordered record of what was estimated, decided and changed, by which method version and on what evidence, kept so that any later review can reconstruct the reasoning.
B
Backtest
A backtest is a validation method that freezes a model at a defined baseline and scores it against matters it has not seen, comparing the frozen model's stated probabilities to actual resolutions once they occur. A backtest run against a model's own training data measures nothing and is not a genuine backtest.
Bad-Faith Claim
A bad-faith claim alleges that an insurer unreasonably failed to pay, defend or settle a covered claim, and it can expose the insurer to liability beyond the policy limits. It changes how insurers and claimants approach settlement.
Base Rate
A base rate is the underlying frequency at which a defined outcome occurs across a specified population, the foundation any calibrated probability estimate is built from. A base rate estimated from too small or too narrow a sample is noise dressed up as a finding, not a validated base rate.
Bellwether
A bellwether is a representative matter tried first within a multidistrict litigation to inform the valuation of the broader consolidated docket. Bellwether outcomes create a correlation structure across every other matter in the same MDL that does not exist in an independently proceeding case.
Borrowing Base
A borrowing base is a defined pool of collateral against which a lender advances capital, discounted by an advance rate and certified on a regular cadence so the lender's exposure tracks the collateral's current value. Extended to legal receivables, the collateral itself requires re-scoring as procedural events occur, not only at each scheduled certificate.
Brier Score
The Brier score is the mean squared difference between a model's predicted probabilities and the actual outcomes coded as zero or one. Lower is better, and it rewards both discrimination and calibration.
C
Calibration
Calibration is the property of a probability estimate matching realized frequency across a defined population. A model that states a given probability across enough comparable matters is calibrated if that share actually resolves that way over a sufficiently large sample, checked out-of-sample and out-of-time rather than against its own training data.
Capital Call
A capital call is a fund's request for committed but undrawn capital from its limited partners, timed against the fund's actual deployment schedule. Duration-aware underwriting improves capital call planning by giving a fund a real distribution, rather than a single assumed date, for when deployed capital returns.
Capital Velocity
Capital velocity is how quickly capital committed to a position returns to the investor and can be redeployed. In legal assets it is set by the duration of matters and the time to cash, and it determines how many times capital can work over a period.
Case Management Order
A case management order is a court order that sets the schedule and procedures for a case or a group of cases, including deadlines for discovery, motions and trial. It fixes the calendar that duration estimates are built against.
Case-Cost Funding
Case-cost funding is capital advanced to a firm to pay the out-of-pocket costs of pursuing matters, such as experts, filing fees and discovery, and repaid from fees on resolution. It supports the investment a firm must make before it is paid.
Cash-at-Date
Cash-at-Date is the probability that a defined share of a book resolves by a given date. It restates realization planning as a distribution of when cash arrives, not a hope pinned to one date.
Cease-and-Desist Order
A cease-and-desist order is an order requiring a party to stop a practice that an agency finds unlawful. It can be issued after a hearing or by consent.
Censoring
Censoring is the condition in which a matter has not yet reached its end event when it is measured, so its true duration is known only to be at least its current age. Ignoring it biases duration estimates toward optimism.
Challenger Model
A challenger model is a candidate trained or configured differently from the model in production and run beside it on the same sealed data, so that a change is made only when the challenger is shown to be better.
Champerty
Champerty is the old common-law doctrine that prohibits a third party from funding a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the proceeds. Many jurisdictions have abolished or narrowed it, and the surviving rules shape what funding structures are permitted.
Checkpoint
A checkpoint is an event that changes what is known about a matter and therefore re-times one or more of its clocks, such as a survived motion, a certification decision or a scheduling order. Estimates are updated at checkpoints, not on a calendar.
Civil Penalty
A civil penalty is a monetary sanction imposed by an agency or a court for a violation of a statute or regulation, paid to the government. It is distinct from compensation to injured parties.
Claims Triage
Claims triage is the early sorting of incoming claims by expected cost, complexity and likelihood of litigation so that effort and reserves go where they matter. It allocates attention before the file has developed.
Class Certification
Class certification is a court's decision that a lawsuit may proceed on behalf of a defined group of people with common claims. Whether a class is certified often determines the value and the settlement posture of the case.
Co-Investment
Co-investment is an arrangement in which a capital partner invests directly alongside a fund in a specific position or portfolio segment, typically to gain concentrated exposure to opportunities the partner has separately underwritten confidence in. Co-investment terms in legal-asset finance turn on the same distributions a fund's own positions are priced from.
Cohort
A cohort is the set of comparable matters a distribution is computed from, defined by stated filters such as forum, case family and filing window. Two figures can only be compared if their cohorts are defined the same way.
Collateral Read
A collateral read is a structured review of the matters backing a loan or facility, checking each against the eligibility criteria and re-scoring its distributions at a stated date. It tells a lender what the pool is worth now.
Collection Risk
Collection risk is the risk that a judgment, though legally valid, cannot actually be collected because a defendant lacks the capacity or willingness to pay. Collection risk is priced from defendant-specific asset and payment data, a different data set and discipline than pre-judgment outcome-probability modeling.
Common-Benefit Fund
A common-benefit fund is a pool, created from assessments on settlements or judgments in a consolidated litigation, that pays lawyers who did work benefiting all plaintiffs. It reduces what individual firms and their funders receive from each claim.
Comparative Fault
Comparative fault is the rule that reduces a plaintiff's recovery by the share of responsibility assigned to the plaintiff. Some jurisdictions bar recovery above a threshold of fault, and others reduce it proportionally at any level.
Concentration Limit
A concentration limit is a cap on how much of a pool or portfolio may sit in a single matter, firm, venue, judge, defendant or legal theory. It limits the damage any one failure or common driver can cause.
Concentration Risk
Concentration risk is exposure clustered along a specific axis, judge, legal theory, defendant relationship, or duration profile, that a conventional credit framework built around counterparty and sector does not capture. A legal-asset portfolio diversified on conventional axes can still be concentrated on the axes that actually govern this asset class.
Confidence Interval
A confidence interval is a range computed from data that, under repeated sampling, would contain the true value of a parameter a stated share of the time. It expresses the uncertainty of an estimate, not the spread of outcomes.
Consent Order
A consent order is a binding order entered with the agreement of the respondent, resolving an enforcement matter without a contested hearing. It sets the obligations the respondent accepts and usually the penalty.
Contingency Fee
A contingency fee is a lawyer's fee paid only if the client recovers, taken as a share of the recovery. It makes the firm's revenue depend on outcome and timing, which is why contingency practices need working capital.
Contingent Risk
Contingent risk is risk whose materialization depends entirely on a future, uncertain event, such as a litigation outcome, rather than on a counterparty's independent capacity to perform. Legal-asset positions are a pure form of contingent risk, which is why outcome-probability modeling, not conventional credit analysis, is the correct pricing tool.
Corpus
A corpus is the full body of structured, resolved-matter records a platform's models are built from, whose real value lies in its verified unique record count rather than its raw ingested total. A corpus's scale should never be cited from raw counts without disclosed deduplication and provenance status.
Cost of Capital
Cost of capital is the return required by the providers of the money used to fund a position. A position creates value only if its risk-adjusted return, after time, exceeds that cost.
Counterparty Tape
A counterparty tape is a dataset of actual, realized-dollar outcomes supplied by a capital partner who deployed real positions in a specific asset class, the specific evidence required to activate a realized-outcome prediction claim for that class through a preregistered backtest against unseen matters.
Coverage Snapshot
A coverage snapshot is a stated, dated description of which jurisdictions, case types, or asset classes a model or corpus reliably covers, distinguishing deep, validated coverage from thin, nominal coverage. A coverage claim without a snapshot date and sample depth should be treated as potentially stale.
Criterica Score
The Criterica Score is a 0 to 100 score with a defined target, horizon, reference population and mapping from model output to score, returned as not rated where the evidence is insufficient. It is not a merits opinion and not a return forecast.
Cross-Collateralization
Cross-collateralization is a structure in which the assets in a pool secure the whole obligation, so a shortfall on one matter can be covered by proceeds from another. It lets a lender look at the pool rather than at each matter alone.
Cutoff Date
A cutoff date is the date after which no information is used in producing a figure. Every estimate is as of its cutoff date, and a figure restated after that date is a new figure with a new cutoff.
D
Damages Cap
A damages cap is a statutory limit on the amount a plaintiff can recover for a category of damages, most often noneconomic or punitive damages. It truncates the upper end of the outcome distribution.
Decision Record
A decision record is the timestamped artifact documenting an underwriting decision, price, structure, capital committed, and portfolio context, captured at the moment capital is committed and referencing the specific prediction record it relied on. Kept separate from the prediction record, it is what lets a later review distinguish a bad model from a bad price.
Deduplication
Deduplication is the process of identifying and merging records that describe the same underlying event, entered into a corpus more than once through overlapping sources, repeated harvesting, or unverified merged datasets. Deduplication must run continuously as a corpus grows, not as a one-time cleanup.
Default Judgment
A default judgment is a judgment entered for the plaintiff because the defendant failed to respond or appear. It resolves liability without a contest, though the court may still examine the damages.
Deferred Prosecution Agreement
A deferred prosecution agreement is an arrangement in which prosecutors file charges but agree to dismiss them if the company meets conditions over a set period, such as paying a penalty and improving compliance. It resolves a criminal matter without a conviction.
Delay Concentration
Delay concentration is the share of a book's time exposure that rides on a common driver, such as one court's calendar, one doctrine or one procedural regime. It identifies where a single event could delay many matters at once.
Discovery
Discovery is the pretrial phase in which the parties exchange information and evidence through document requests, interrogatories and depositions. It often accounts for much of a case's cost and duration.
Disgorgement
Disgorgement is a remedy that requires a wrongdoer to give up profits obtained through the violation. It aims to strip the gain, not to compensate the victim or punish.
Disposition
A disposition is the specific, defined resolution class a matter concludes with, dismissal, settlement, judgment for the claimant, judgment for the defense, within a regulated market's own outcome taxonomy. The disposition taxonomy differs across regulated markets even where the underlying subject matter looks similar.
Distribution, Not Average
Distribution, not average is the principle that a legal outcome or duration should be reported as a full distribution with its spread and tail, never reduced to a mean. A mean hides the cases that decide the risk.
Diversification
Diversification is spreading exposure across positions whose outcomes are not driven by the same factors, so that no single event can decide the result of the portfolio. In legal assets it has to be measured along the axes that actually cause matters to move together.
Docket
A docket is the chronological record of filings, rulings, and procedural events in a matter, maintained by a court, and the primary source of the historical ground truth that makes court-record corpora verifiable rather than self-reported. Docket data also supports duration modeling, since procedural events are recorded with dates.
Due Diligence
Due diligence is the verification a buyer or lender performs before committing, checking that the assets, records and representations are what they are said to be. For legal assets it extends to the provenance and handling of the data behind any valuation.
Duration Distribution
A duration distribution is a probability distribution over the time a matter takes to reach resolution, built from a corpus of matters that actually resolved, rather than a single expected date. It typically carries a right-skewed shape, with a median shorter than the mean because a minority of matters extend well past the bulk of the population.
Duration Drift
Duration drift is the movement of the duration distribution for a matter or a book since underwriting or the last review. It is the honest record of what changed, preserved against the original estimate.
Duration Risk
Duration risk is the risk that a matter takes longer than the time for which capital was priced, reducing the annualized return and tying up capital that could have been redeployed. It sits mostly in the tail of the distribution, not the median.
E
Eligible Collateral
Eligible collateral is the subset of a legal receivables pool that qualifies for inclusion in a borrowing base, defined by exclusion criteria built for this asset class's specific weaknesses, procedural age, defendant or judge concentration, independently disputed claims, rather than the criteria conventional receivables lending uses.
Enforcement Action
An enforcement action is a formal proceeding by a regulator or prosecutor to compel compliance or to penalize a violation, ending in a settlement, an order or a judgment. It is the regulatory counterpart of a lawsuit.
Estimate Versioning
Estimate versioning is the practice of keeping every prior estimate beside its successor, with its own cutoff date and method version, so that accuracy and drift can be audited after the fact.
Evidence Class
An evidence class is a category of underlying data distinguished by its provenance, sensitivity, and handling requirements, such as public court records versus medical lien data versus seller-stated inputs. Treating every evidence class identically in a governance program overlooks distinctions that materially affect how each class should be verified and used.
Excess Insurance
Excess insurance is coverage that pays only after the loss exceeds the limit of an underlying policy, up to its own limit. It protects against the severe outcomes that primary coverage does not reach.
Excess Time at Risk
Excess time at risk is the 90th-percentile time to resolution minus the median. It is the distance between the figure a plan is built on and the figure one matter in ten actually delivers.
Expected Calibration Error
Expected calibration error, ECE, is a summary of how far a model's stated probabilities are from the frequencies actually observed, averaged across bins of its predictions. A lower value means stated likelihoods are closer to what happened.
Explainability
Explainability is the ability to say, in the terms of the underlying litigation or claim, why a model's output moved. It depends on inputs that are inspectable and a method that can be traced from a feature to a result.
F
Facility
A facility is a committed credit arrangement under which a lender advances funds up to a limit against a defined pool of assets. For legal assets it is usually governed by a borrowing base, eligibility criteria and reporting covenants.
Feature Engineering
Feature engineering is the rules-based process of constructing the specific inputs a model scores against from raw ingested data, built to be inspectable and reproducible rather than generated by a free-form reasoning process. Feature engineering is one of the stages a rules-based pipeline keeps deliberately narrow and auditable.
Frequency
Frequency is how often claims occur relative to a measure of exposure, such as policies in force or insured units over a period. Combined with severity, it gives expected losses.
Frozen-Date Replay
A frozen-date replay re-runs a model against a file exactly as it stood on a past date, using only information available on that date, and then compares the output to what later happened. It is the practical test of whether a score would have been available and correct at the time a decision was made.
Fund Life
Fund life is the defined remaining term over which a fund can hold positions before it must wind down, a structural constraint that has to be checked against a portfolio's duration distributions, not only its expected durations, to avoid holding positions the fund cannot wait out.
G
Global Settlement
A global settlement is an agreement that resolves a large group of related claims at once, usually with a defendant's participation thresholds and a claims process. It converts many individual outcomes into one coordinated event.
Governance Artifact
A governance artifact is a non-predictive component of a model registry, a reference table, a retired experiment, a quality-control check, distinct from a production predictive model. Citing governance artifacts and production models under a single undifferentiated total overstates the size of the genuinely predictive fleet.
Ground Truth
Ground truth is the verified result against which a prediction is judged, such as the recorded disposition of a resolved matter. For a measurement to be trusted, its ground truth must come from a source independent of the model.
H
Haircut
A haircut is a downward adjustment applied to a stated collateral value to build in a margin of safety, distinct from and often applied on top of an advance rate based on percentile pricing. Haircuts in legal-asset lending should reflect specific, disclosed risk factors rather than a flat, undifferentiated discount.
Hazard Rate
The hazard rate is the instantaneous rate at which a matter resolves at a given age, among matters still open at that age. It shows when in a matter's life resolution is most likely.
Horizon
A horizon is the stated period over which a score or probability applies, such as resolution within a defined number of months from the cutoff date. A probability without a horizon is incomplete, because the likelihood of an event always depends on how long one is willing to wait for it.
Human in the Loop
Human in the loop means a named person reviews, can override and remains accountable for a decision that an automated system informs. The system supplies measurement. The person supplies judgment and signs the decision.
Hurdle Rate
A hurdle rate is the minimum annualized return a position or fund must earn before the manager shares in profits or before an investment is considered acceptable. In legal assets it has to be tested against the time a matter actually takes.
I
IBNR
IBNR, incurred but not reported, is the estimate of losses that have occurred but have not yet been reported to the insurer, held as part of reserves. It exists because injuries and claims are often reported long after the event.
Identity Resolution
Identity resolution is the work of confirming that different identifiers, name formats and filing conventions refer to the same matter, party, attorney or judge. A record base is only as sound as its resolution.
Investment Committee
An investment committee is the body that approves a capital commitment after reviewing the underwriting. It decides on the evidence presented, and its decision is recorded with the information it saw.
IRR
IRR, the internal rate of return, is the annualized rate at which a series of cash outflows and inflows nets to zero, so it reflects both how much came back and when. For legal assets it is highly sensitive to duration.
J
Joint and Several Liability
Joint and several liability is the rule that each of several liable defendants can be required to pay the whole judgment, leaving the paying defendant to seek contribution from the others. It protects the plaintiff against an insolvent co-defendant.
Judgment Enforcement
Judgment enforcement is the process of turning a court's judgment into collected money, through liens, garnishment, asset seizure or recognition in another jurisdiction. It is a separate clock and a separate risk from winning the case.
Judgment Preservation
Judgment preservation is the discipline of maintaining a judgment's value after entry, through appellate defense and active collection, distinct from the merits-risk modeling used before judgment. It requires asset tracing and monitoring of a defendant's financial condition, a different data set and skill than pre-judgment outcome prediction.
Jurisdiction
Jurisdiction is a court's legal authority to hear a case and decide it, based on the subject matter and the parties. It also names the body of law that governs the dispute.
K
Kaplan-Meier Estimator
The Kaplan-Meier estimator is a non-parametric method that estimates the share of a cohort still unresolved at each age, correctly handling matters that are still open. It produces the survival curve from which medians and percentiles are read.
Key-Person Risk
Key-person risk is the risk that a firm's results or a fund's performance depend on one individual whose departure, incapacity or loss of focus would damage the asset. In law firm lending it often attaches to the lead trial lawyer or the rainmaker.
L
Label Basis
A label basis is the documented source and rule by which an outcome label was extracted from a record. A label is only as good as its basis, and where the basis is weak the claim is qualified or withheld.
Labeled Distribution
A labeled distribution is a settlement or award distribution built from comparable resolved matters with every input tagged by source, distinguishing what a party stated about a matter from what the corpus independently corroborates. Labeling discipline is what prevents a distribution from silently blending unverified assertions with verified evidence.
Law Firm Capital
Law firm capital is financing provided to a law firm, secured on its case inventory or fee receivables, to cover case costs, working capital and growth. It lets a contingency practice carry matters through to resolution without waiting for fees.
Leakage
Leakage is a modeling defect in which information that would not actually be available at prediction time enters a model's training process, inflating its apparent accuracy without producing a genuinely predictive model. Leakage findings are disclosed and the affected models retired or restricted rather than left in production quietly.
Legal Asset
A legal asset is a financial interest whose value depends on the resolution of a legal matter, such as a claim, a receivable, a lien, a judgment or a share of a contingency fee. Its value is a function of outcome, timing and collection.
Letter of Protection
A letter of protection is a promise by a claimant's attorney to pay a medical provider from the recovery in exchange for treatment without upfront payment. It lets injured claimants obtain care while a case is pending.
Lien
A lien is a legal claim against settlement proceeds asserted by a medical provider, insurer, or other party with a financial interest in a claimant's recovery. Lien behavior, aggregated across resolved matters, functions as a structured data asset for modeling injury severity, case duration, and net-to-claimant proceeds.
Lineage
Lineage is the documented path from a primary source to a field used in a calculation, including the source, the retrieval date and every transformation applied on the way. A figure without lineage cannot be audited.
Litigation Funding
Litigation funding is capital provided to a party or a law firm to pursue a claim, repaid from the proceeds of that claim and usually non-recourse if the claim fails. It turns a legal outcome into a financed asset with a return that depends on the result, its timing and its collection.
Litigation Management
Litigation management is the insurer's or a company's control of its legal matters, including counsel selection, budgets, strategy and settlement decisions. Done well, it reduces both cost and the time claims stay open.
Loss Development
Loss development is the change in the estimated cost of claims as they mature, usually shown as a triangle comparing estimates at successive dates for each period in which the losses occurred. It shows how reserves have moved toward their final amounts.
Loss Ratio
Loss ratio is incurred losses, with loss adjustment expense where stated, divided by earned premium. It indicates how much of premium is consumed by claims.
M
Mandate
A mandate is an institution's stated risk appetite, portfolio context, and capital availability at the moment a position is committed, information a prediction model was never built to hold and should not be built to hold. The human decision at the point of commitment exists specifically to apply the mandate to the model's output.
Mark
A mark is the value a holder assigns to a position at a reporting date. For legal assets, where no market price exists, a mark is a model-based or evidence-based estimate that should be re-derived as the matter moves.
Mass Tort
A mass tort is a set of many individual injury claims against one or a few defendants arising from the same product, drug or event. The claims stay individual but are often managed together, which links their outcomes and timelines.
Material Change
A material change is a shift in methodology, training corpus, or target definition significant enough to require disclosure against a fixed prior state. A material change is only checkable if a sealed baseline captured before the change exists to compare the new state against.
MDL (Multidistrict Litigation)
An MDL (multidistrict litigation) is a federal procedure consolidating similar civil matters filed across different districts into one court for coordinated pretrial proceedings. MDL structures introduce bellwether trials and aggregated settlement mechanisms that behave differently, as an asset class, from a single-plaintiff matter proceeding independently.
Median
The median is the middle value of a distribution: half of observations fall below it and half above. For durations it is the time by which half of a cohort has resolved.
Mediation
Mediation is a confidential, non-binding process in which a neutral helps the parties negotiate a settlement. It ends a large share of litigated matters without a trial.
Medical Lien
A medical lien is a claim by a healthcare provider on a patient's personal injury recovery to secure payment for treatment. It is paid from the settlement or judgment and affects what remains for the claimant and any funder.
Model Card
A model card is the standing document that states what a model is for, what it was trained and tested on, how it performed and where it should not be used. It travels with the model through every version.
Model Drift
Model drift is the loss of a model's accuracy or calibration over time because the world it describes has changed, whether in court behavior, procedure or the mix of matters it sees. It is detected by testing on periods after training.
Model Registry
A model registry is a full accounting of production models at the level of signature uniqueness, target definition, filter, sample size, and validated metric, distinguishing true predictive models from governance artifacts and reference tables. Registration asserts that two models sharing an identical signature are one model, not two.
MOIC
MOIC, the multiple on invested capital, is total cash returned divided by cash invested. It states how much came back per dollar put in, with no reference to how long the money was out.
Monitorship
A monitorship is an arrangement in which an independent person reviews a company's compliance for a set period as a term of a resolution with an authority. It extends the effect of an enforcement action over time.
Motion to Dismiss
A motion to dismiss asks a court to end a case at the outset because, even if the facts alleged are true, they do not state a legal claim. Its resolution is a major checkpoint in the life of a matter.
N
NAV Lending
NAV lending is a financing structure advancing capital against the net asset value of a fund's existing portfolio, rather than against a single receivable. Applied to legal-asset funds, NAV lending requires the same portfolio-level distribution and duration modeling this platform builds for underwriting individual positions, applied at fund scale.
No-Action Letter
A no-action letter is a statement from agency staff that they will not recommend enforcement against a described activity, given the facts presented. It gives limited comfort and binds only the staff who issue it.
Non-Recourse
Non-recourse is a structure in which a capital provider's recovery depends entirely on a specific matter's resolution, with no independent claim against the claimant's other assets if the matter is lost. Non-recourse structures concentrate a lender's risk directly in the outcome distribution, with no secondary repayment capacity to fall back on.
Not Rated
Not rated is the result a scoring method returns when the evidence does not support a score, instead of a number produced anyway. It is a deliberate output, not a failure, and it tells a user where the method has no standing to speak.
O
Origination
Origination is the sourcing and initial documentation of a new position, from first contact through underwriting and funding. The quality of origination sets the data quality of everything downstream.
Out-of-Sample Validation
Out-of-sample validation is the practice of testing a model against data it was not trained on, a minimum requirement for a calibration or accuracy claim to carry any evidential weight. A model checked only against its own training data will appear calibrated by construction, regardless of its real predictive value.
P
Percentile Band
A percentile band is an interval between two stated percentiles of a distribution, such as the 25th to the 75th, used to show a range of likely values instead of a single figure. The percentiles chosen are always stated.
Percentile Pricing
Percentile pricing is the practice of pricing a position off a stated percentile of its underlying distribution rather than its mean, with the choice of percentile reflecting the capital's actual risk tolerance. Percentile pricing lets different capital layers price the same underlying distribution differently and honestly.
Point Estimate
A point estimate is a single number, an average settlement value or a median duration, that collapses an entire distribution into one figure and discards the width and tail information a capital allocator actually needs. Pricing capital from a point estimate treats genuinely different risk profiles as though they were identical.
Policy Limits
Policy limits are the maximum amount an insurance policy will pay for a covered loss. They cap the recovery available from the insurer and shape settlement dynamics.
Portfolio Finance
Portfolio finance is capital deployed against a diversified pool of legal-asset positions rather than a single matter, priced using portfolio-level concentration and correlation analysis across judge, legal theory, defendant, and duration axes, not only conventional counterparty and sector diversification a borrowed credit framework checks.
Post-Judgment Interest
Post-judgment interest is interest that accrues on an entered judgment from the date of entry until it is paid, at a rate set by statute. It partly compensates for the delay of collection.
Pre-Settlement Advance
A pre-settlement advance is money paid to a claimant before a case resolves, repaid only from the recovery and typically without recourse to the claimant if the case is lost. Its price depends on the likelihood of recovery, the expected duration and the liens ahead of it.
Prejudgment Interest
Prejudgment interest is interest awarded on a recovery for the period between the loss, or the filing, and the judgment. It compensates for the time value of money and varies widely by jurisdiction and claim type.
Preregistered Backtest
A preregistered backtest is a validation whose population, cutoff date, metrics and pass criteria are written down and locked before any result is generated. It prevents the test from being reshaped after an unfavorable early result.
Preregistration
Preregistration is the practice of locking a backtest's population, cutoff date, and success criteria before any result is generated, preventing the evaluation from being adjusted after an unfavorable early result to find a framing that passes. Preregistration is what separates a genuine test from a search for a favorable description.
Primary Source
A primary source is the court, agency or regulatory system that generated a record, or a feed that is itself traceable to that system. A vendor summary that has already interpreted a filing is not a primary source.
Procedural Posture
Procedural posture is a matter's current position within its regulated market's defined process, the specific stage, motion pending, discovery underway, appeal filed, that determines which portion of the outcome and duration distribution is actually still live. Procedural posture is what triggers re-scoring between scheduled reviews.
Production Model
A production model is a model actively deployed to generate outcome or duration predictions used in real underwriting decisions, distinct from an experimental, retired, or reference model still present in a broader registry. Only production models should be counted toward a claim about an institution's active predictive capability.
Promotion Gate
A promotion gate is the fixed review a model must pass before it is used in client work, covering discrimination, calibration, sufficiency of data and leakage checks on a holdout it never saw. A model that fails stays visibly experimental.
Provenance
Provenance is the documented record of where a specific piece of data actually came from, what license or public-record basis it rests on, and its verification status. Provenance documentation is what makes a corpus's scale claim checkable rather than a figure a counterparty is asked to trust.
Public Record
A public record is a filing, order or disposition held by a court or agency and available to the public under the rules of that forum. Public records are the starting evidence for outcome and duration work, with known limits on what they encode.
Punitive Damages
Punitive damages are awarded to punish especially culpable conduct and deter others, in addition to compensation for actual losses. They are rare, highly variable and constrained by caps and constitutional limits.
R
Re-Underwriting
Re-underwriting is the repeat of an underwriting analysis on a position already held, triggered by new evidence such as a ruling or a schedule change rather than by a calendar. It replaces a stale estimate with one that reflects what is now known.
Realized Outcome
A realized outcome is the actual, structured result of a resolved matter, matched back to its original prediction. Realized-outcome claims about actual dollar returns activate per asset class, only once a model trained on counterparty tapes with real realized dollars has passed a preregistered backtest for that specific class.
Receivable
A receivable is a right to future payment, in this asset class typically a litigation finance advance, a law firm fee receivable, or a judgment, used as collateral in a borrowing base or securitization structure. Legal receivables lack a fixed maturity and are frequently non-recourse, distinguishing them from conventional trade receivables.
Reconciliation
Reconciliation is the process of identifying and merging duplicate records describing the same underlying event across sources, a required step before a corpus's scale or a base rate's sample size can be reported honestly. Reconciliation has to run continuously as new data enters a growing corpus, not once.
Recoverable Time
Recoverable time is the portion of expected delay that feasible action could remove without damaging the position. It is defined so it can be measured, and it is reported only where intervention histories and outcomes exist to support it.
Reference Population
A reference population is the defined set of comparable resolved matters against which a score, a distribution or a rate is computed. A figure means nothing until its reference population is stated, because the same matter ranks differently against different peers.
Regulated Market
A regulated market is a body of matters resolved under one procedural and regulatory regime, with its own defined outcome taxonomy, timeline structure, and recordkeeping conventions, the correct analytical unit for organizing outcome intelligence in place of a practice-area or industry-vertical label a market map might use.
Regulated Outcome
A regulated outcome is the result of a matter decided under a defined procedural or contractual regime, such as a court judgment, a regulatory disposition, an arbitral award or an insurance claim resolution. The regime fixes the possible endings, the timeline and the record, which is what makes the result measurable.
Reinsurance
Reinsurance is insurance purchased by an insurer to transfer part of its risk to another carrier. It stabilizes results and extends capacity, and it ties the reinsurer to the quality of the primary insurer's claims handling.
Reliability Curve
A reliability curve is a plot of stated probability against realized frequency across bins of a model's score, the specific artifact that demonstrates a calibration claim rather than merely asserting it. A reliability curve without the sample size behind each bin disclosed is incomplete evidence.
Remand
Remand is the sending of a case back to a lower court or to the original court, for example from federal court to state court after a removal was found improper, or from an appellate court for further proceedings. It changes the forum and often the timeline.
Remittitur
Remittitur is a court's reduction of a jury's damages award that it finds excessive, usually offered to the plaintiff as an alternative to a new trial. It lowers the realizable amount of a verdict.
Reserve
A reserve is the amount an insurer or a company sets aside for a claim or a book of claims that has been incurred but not yet paid. Its adequacy depends on how much the claims will cost and how long they will take to close.
Reserve Adequacy
Reserve adequacy is whether the amount held for claims is enough to pay them as they develop. It is judged by comparing past reserves with what claims eventually cost and how long they took.
Right Skew
Right skew describes a distribution with a long tail on the high side, so a minority of values are far larger than the rest. Case durations are right-skewed, which places the mean above the median.
Risk Intelligence
Risk intelligence is the practice of turning an uncertain outcome into a defined, checkable measurement that a counterparty can price, reserve against or finance. It differs from analytics because every number carries its definition, its population and its validation, so a second party can reproduce it.
S
Sample Size
Sample size is the number of observations a figure is computed from. It determines how stable the estimate is, and methods should state a minimum below which they decline to report.
Sealed Baseline
A sealed baseline is a frozen, timestamped snapshot of model versions, inputs, and outputs, locked against retroactive edit at the moment it is captured. It gives every later claim of improvement, drift, or material change a fixed prior state to be measured against, rather than a description someone wrote from memory.
Sealed Outcome
A sealed outcome is the resolution of a matter, with any amount collected and any resolution date, held apart from the file that is scored so that the score cannot see it. The outcome is joined back only at evaluation, after the scored file is fixed.
Secondary Sale
A secondary sale is the sale of an existing legal-asset position, or a whole book of them, by the holder to another investor. It converts a position that would otherwise be held to resolution into cash at a negotiated price.
Selection Bias
Selection bias is a distortion that arises when the matters included in an analysis are not representative of the population the conclusion is meant to cover. It can come from how data were collected or from who chooses to bring a case.
Self-Disclosure
Self-disclosure is a company's voluntary report of suspected misconduct to an authority before it is discovered. Policies commonly offer reduced penalties for timely disclosure and cooperation.
Servicing
Servicing is the ongoing administrative and monitoring function that tracks a legal-asset position's procedural status, re-scores its distributions as events occur, and manages collection once a matter resolves. In this asset class, servicing is inseparable from monitoring, since procedural events change the position's priced value continuously.
Settlement Band
A settlement band is a labeled distribution of settlement or award value, built from comparable resolved matters and bounded by a stated percentile range, rather than a single dollar figure. It states what a population of comparable matters has historically realized, not what any one pending matter will realize.
Settlement Bridge
A settlement bridge is short-term capital advanced to a law firm against its fee on a settlement that has been signed but not yet paid. It covers the gap between agreement and funds, and it is repaid when the settlement is disbursed.
Settlement Conference
A settlement conference is a meeting, often supervised by a judge or magistrate, at which the parties discuss resolving the case. It is a scheduled point of pressure that frequently produces agreements.
Severity
Severity is the size of a loss when a claim occurs, usually the average or distribution of the amounts paid per claim. Together with frequency it determines expected losses.
Signature Uniqueness
Signature uniqueness is the registration principle that two models sharing an identical target, filter, sample size, and validated metric are counted as one model, not two, preventing a model registry's headline count from being inflated by duplicate entries describing the same underlying model.
Statute of Limitations
A statute of limitations is the legal deadline for filing a claim, counted from a defined event such as the injury or its discovery. A claim filed after the period can be dismissed whatever its merits.
Stay of Proceedings
A stay of proceedings is a court order that pauses all or part of a case or the enforcement of a judgment, usually for a defined period or until a condition occurs. It extends duration without resolving anything.
Structured Settlement
A structured settlement is a resolution in which a claimant receives payments over time, often through an annuity, rather than as one lump sum. The stream is a financial asset that can sometimes be sold, subject to court approval and protective statutes.
Subordination
Subordination is the ranking of one claim behind another in the order of payment, so the junior holder is paid only after the senior claim is satisfied in full. It determines who bears a shortfall first.
Subrogation
Subrogation is the right of an insurer that has paid a claim to step into the insured's position and recover the amount from the party responsible. It turns a paid loss into a recovery claim.
Sufficiency Floor
A sufficiency floor is the minimum cohort size below which a method returns a tier or declines to rate, instead of a precise-looking figure. It is part of the method and is published.
Summary Judgment
Summary judgment is a ruling by the court, without a trial, that there is no genuine dispute of material fact and one party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. It is a principal way cases end before trial.
Survival Analysis
Survival analysis is a family of statistical methods for modeling the time until an event occurs, designed to handle subjects whose event has not yet happened. For legal matters, the event is resolution and the open matters are the censored ones.
Survivorship Bias
Survivorship bias is the error of drawing conclusions only from matters or entities that survived a filter, such as funders still operating or cases that reached trial, while ignoring those that dropped out. It makes outcomes look better than they were.
Syndication
Syndication is the sharing of a position or facility among several funders, with each taking a portion of the exposure and the return. It lets a large position be financed without any one party carrying all of it.
Synthetic Data
Synthetic data is simulated or generated records that were not drawn from real filed matters. Production models that support claims about courts and regulators are not trained on it.
T
Tail Risk
Tail risk is the risk concentrated in the extreme end of a distribution: the matters that take far longer, cost far more or recover far less than the typical case. It is invisible in averages and decisive for reserves and borrowing capacity.
Tape
A tape is the matter-level data file that describes a pool of legal assets, with one row per position and the fields a buyer or lender needs to value it. The quality of the tape sets the quality of any valuation built on it.
Target Definition
A target definition is the precise statement of what a model predicts, including the event, the population, the period and the data source the label comes from. A model is only as clear as its target.
Temporal Validation
Temporal validation tests a model on a period after its training window, so it is graded the way production will use it. It exposes regime change that a random split conceals.
Time at Risk
Time at risk is the family of tail-first measures of how long capital or an obligation stays exposed to an unresolved matter. It is stated as a distribution with a named tail, not a single expected duration.
Training Population
A training population is the specific set of resolved matters a model was fit against, distinct from the population it is later evaluated on. A model's calibration claim is only as strong as the training population's size and representativeness relative to the population the model will actually be scoring.
V
Venue
Venue is the particular court or location where a case is heard, chosen among those with proper jurisdiction. It affects the judge, the jury pool, the procedure and the speed of the case.
Vintage
A vintage is the cohort of positions a fund originated within a defined period, typically a year, used to compare performance across an institution's own deployment history. Comparing an early vintage's returns to a mature vintage's without adjusting for construction cost produces a misleading comparison in both directions.
W
Warehouse Facility
A warehouse facility is a revolving credit facility that finances a growing pool of legal receivables before permanent capital or securitization takes them out, structured around a borrowing base that re-scores continuously as the underlying collateral's procedural posture changes, rather than only at each scheduled reporting date.
Waterfall
A waterfall is the contractual order in which proceeds from a resolved legal-asset position or portfolio are distributed among capital providers, typically senior debt, then subordinated capital, then equity or residual claimants. Waterfall mechanics determine how a labeled settlement distribution translates into what each capital layer actually receives.
Weighted-Average Life
Weighted-average life is the average time to cash across a pool, weighting each position's time by the dollars it returns. It summarizes how long a book keeps capital out, and it is read alongside the tail, not instead of it.
Wells Notice
A Wells notice is a communication from securities regulator staff that they intend to recommend an enforcement action, giving the recipient a chance to respond. It signals that a matter is moving toward formal proceedings.
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