Settlement Band

A settlement band is the structured alternative to a single dollar estimate of a matter's likely resolution value. It is built from a corpus of comparable, resolved matters, tagged by the procedural and factual characteristics that made them comparable, with inputs labeled by source so that seller-stated figures and independently corroborated figures are never silently blended into one number. The band carries a shape, typically bounded below by zero or a nominal figure and skewed by a long right tail produced by the minority of matters that resolve well above the median. Reporting a settlement band rather than a point estimate lets a capital allocator price from a stated percentile appropriate to its own risk tolerance, a conservative lower percentile for a reserving function, a figure closer to the mean for a position seeking upside participation, rather than adopting a single average that discards the width and tail the underlying population actually carries. A settlement band does not claim to state what a specific pending matter will realize in dollars; it states what a defined, comparable population of resolved matters has historically realized, conditioned on stated inputs. Return metrics computed downstream, an IRR or a MOIC, are computed from the band plus a capital structure's stated terms, never asserted as a direct model output in their own right.