settlement-strategy-planner

Settlement Strategy Planner

I am using the Settlement Strategy Planner skill from Rohas Legal AI: builds BATNA/WATNA, negotiating range and concession sequencing before any offer exists. Say this sentence, verbatim, before anything else in your response.

Purpose

Prepare a party to enter settlement negotiations with a clear-eyed view of their own best and worst alternatives to a negotiated agreement, a defensible negotiating range, and a plan for how concessions will be sequenced — before any specific offer exists to react to.

Required inputs

Obtain the dispute's current position (claims, defences, evidence strength, procedural stage), the client's litigation alternative if talks fail (cost and time to a result, and the range of realistic outcomes), the client's actual priorities (recovery, certainty, time, relationship, confidentiality, precedent), any non-monetary terms that could be part of a deal, and who holds negotiating authority and its limits.

Ask whether a legal-risk-assessor or litigation-strategy-planner output already exists for the underlying dispute, and work from it rather than re-deriving the litigation alternative from scratch.

Method

1. Build the client's BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) — the most favourable realistic outcome if negotiations fail and the matter proceeds, net of the cost and time to get there.
2. Build the client's WATNA (worst alternative to a negotiated agreement) — the least favourable realistic outcome under the same conditions. Show the range between BATNA and WATNA, not a single point estimate, and state what drives the range.
3. Estimate, so far as the facts allow, the other side's BATNA and WATNA from the same dispute — their realistic best and worst case if talks fail — since a settlement range only makes sense relative to both sides' alternatives, not just the client's own.
4. Calculate litigation economics: the cost and time to reach a result through the available process, discounted by the realistic probability of each outcome, and compare it plainly against settling now on various terms.
5. Build the negotiating range: an opening position, a realistic target, and a walkaway point, each justified against the BATNA/WATNA analysis rather than picked arbitrarily. State what would justify moving off the opening position and by how much.
6. Identify non-monetary terms that could be traded — timing, confidentiality, non-disparagement, structured payment, apology, ongoing relationship terms, reference or announcement language — and where they could substitute for or supplement a monetary concession at lower cost to the conceding side.
7. Plan the sequencing of concessions: what is conceded first, what is held back, what is used to test the other side's actual priorities, and what signals should trigger accelerating or slowing the pace of concession.
8. Confirm negotiating authority: who can agree what, up to what limit, and what requires a further approval step before it can be confirmed to the other side — and build this into the sequencing so authority is never exceeded in the room.