“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” – W. Edwards Deming
From Evidence to Imperatives, and What Comes Next
In Part One of this Survey Series, we examined fifty years of structured settlement research, from the 1977 Lilly Report through the 2025 MetLife Claimant Poll, and identified a consistent finding across decades: the degree to which settlement funds are directed to structured settlements as opposed to cash or other uses is shaped less by product design alone than by when structured settlements are introduced, how they are explained, and who is responsible for framing them.
In Part Two we translated that empirical record into five imperatives for modern practice:
- Early introduction and timing discipline: integrating structured settlements into discussions at the earliest possible point and embedding timing as a repeatable professional system.
- Professional mastery: elevating education and aligning structured settlement training with the rigor of adjacent settlement planning disciplines.
- Outcome measurement: moving beyond production metrics to track financial stability, benefit preservation, and long-term claimant outcomes.
- Protective settlement design and innovation: strengthening the profession’s ability to translate evidence and professional judgment into settlement structures that preserve long-term protection while responding to real-world uncertainty, competing financial alternatives, and evolving claimant needs—supported by appropriate product design, post-settlement servicing, and enabling technology.
- Institutional alignment and commitment: ensuring that professional associations, structured settlement agencies, funding product providers, assignment companies, plaintiff law firms, courts and guardianship systems, and educational or credentialing bodies adopt and better coordinate systems and processes that reinforce these imperatives consistently across cases and over time.
Together, those imperatives describe what a claimant-centered, modern settlement planning profession must prioritize if it is to remain effective and credible in a changing legal, financial, and regulatory environment.
This third article addresses the next necessary step: standards. Imperatives identify what matters. Standards define how those priorities are carried out in practice. Without standards, even well-intentioned imperatives remain aspirational. With standards, they become teachable, repeatable, measurable, sustainable and applicable across cases, organizations, and generations of professionals.
Why Imperatives Alone Are Not Enough
The structured settlement profession has no shortage of guidance, ethical principles, educational programs, and institutional experience. NSSTA’s Code of Ethics, its Model Qualified Assignment and Release Agreement, SSP’s Settlement Planning Practice Standards, and the CSSC, MSSC, and RSP certification programs all reflect sustained effort to improve professional practice. Yet these resources operate separately rather than as a coordinated professional system.
For example, they do not share a unified vocabulary. They do not define a common workflow. They do not connect documentation practices across disciplines. They do not provide a mechanism for aggregating experience into institutional learning.
Structured settlements today operate within a broader settlement planning environment, intersecting with other planning disciplines such as public and medical benefits planning, financial planning, retirement planning and competing financial products, without a corresponding framework that explains and optimizes how those disciplines integrate in practice.
This institutional fragmentation affects not only how structured settlements are introduced and explained, but also how innovation, particularly product innovation, is developed, evaluated, and deployed across cases and organizations. This fragmentation is not a failure of intent. It is the predictable condition of a profession that has outgrown its original institutional architecture.
What We Mean by “Standards”
Throughout this article, the term “standards” does not refer to regulation, uniform outcomes, or prescriptive decision rules.
A professional standard is defined here as an expectation for how work is performed and documented across cases and organizations. Standards do not replace professional judgment; they create the framework within which professional judgment can be exercised consistently.
Standards differ from:
- Guidance, which is suggestive rather than operational.
- Ethical principles, which define boundaries but not process.
- Credentials, which signal education but not ongoing mastery.
Standards function at the institutional level. Standards need not be implemented simultaneously or at the same level of abstraction; some operate primarily at the level of professional conduct, while others function as analytic or institutional learning mechanisms. They shape how professional judgment is introduced, exercised, recorded, reviewed, and improved over time.
Without standards, performance depends on the particular individuals and institutions involved, each operating within its own firm practices, carrier policies, and professional guidance, without a shared framework for comparing approaches, evaluating outcomes, or translating variation into collective learning across the settlement planning industry.
Institutions, Not Individuals Acting in Isolation, Are the Proper Focus
This article deliberately directs its analysis to institutions, rather than to individual practitioners. As used here, institutions include professional associations, structured settlement agencies, funding product providers, assignment companies, plaintiff law firms, courts and guardianship systems, and educational or credentialing bodies. Consistent outcomes depend not on individual competence alone, but on institutional systems that align expectations, workflows, documentation, and learning across organizations.
A profession that aspires to maturity must therefore ask not only whether individual practitioners act responsibly, but whether its institutions reinforce consistent professional behavior over time.
From Imperatives to Standards: The Framework
The five imperatives identified in Part Two translate naturally into five corresponding professional standards:
- Systematic Early Introduction
- Professional Mastery in Settlement Planning
- Outcome Measurement
- Protective Settlement Design and Innovation
- Institutional Alignment
These standards are interdependent, but they do not all operate in the same way or at the same level. Some define core conditions of professional practice; others supply analytic feedback or institutional durability. Together, they form a coherent system, one that governs professional behavior, evaluates experience, informs design, and sustains learning across organizations and generations.
Early introduction establishes when structured settlements enter the case and how planning discussions are framed from the outset. Mastery ensures that early engagement is accurate and interdisciplinary. Outcome measurement converts experience into evidence. Protective settlement design and innovation translates evidence and professional judgment into client-level settlement structures that preserve long-term protection while responding deliberately to uncertainty, competing financial alternatives, and evolving claimant needs. Institutional alignment ensures that professional expectations, documentation practices, and learning mechanisms are shared across the settlement planning profession, allowing experience to accumulate and standards to endure beyond individual practitioners.
Each standard reinforces the others. Timing without mastery is fragile. Mastery without measurement cannot be evaluated. Innovation without evidence is speculative. None of these can function predictably without institutional support aligned through shared, universally applicable professional standards.
Why Standards Matter Now
Several forces make the absence of standards more consequential today than at any prior point in our profession’s history.
First, settlement planning has become genuinely interdisciplinary. Structured settlements now operate alongside regulated financial advice, public benefits law, trust administration, and compliance-driven planning regimes that expect defined processes and documented reasoning.
Second, recognition that plaintiff attorneys largely shape settlement outcomes has grown as the industry has shifted from a claims-driven orientation toward a more claimant-centric model. Early framing, fee planning, and client counseling occur well before traditional structured settlement engagement points, placing greater weight on timing discipline and professional competence.
Third, competition from cash-based and market-driven alternatives has intensified, with claimants and attorneys increasingly comparing structured settlements to liquid financial solutions that emphasize access, control, and perceived flexibility rather than long-term protection.
Fourth, a generational transition is underway. New professionals expect technology-enabled collaboration, transparency, and institutional coherence. The absence of shared standards discourages long-term commitment to the field.
Finally, new tools, including AI-enabled systems, are emerging rapidly. Without standards, such tools risk amplifying variation rather than improving practice. With standards, they can reinforce consistency, documentation, and learning.
Whether the profession operates with shared professional standards matters not only for internal practice, but for its ability to understand, position, and grow structured settlements in a competitive and evolving settlement landscape. Without a standards-based framework, one that supports consistent processes, documentation, and learning from experience, the profession cannot reliably distinguish between short-term anecdotal pressures, shifts in case mix, genuine structural displacement, or unrealized market opportunity, nor respond coherently to any of them.
VII. What Follows: Developing the Standards
The five standards introduced in this article define a coherent professional framework. The articles that follow will develop each standard in turn, focusing not on abstract theory, but on how these expectations can be articulated, taught, applied, and sustained across modern settlement planning practice.
- Part Four will address Early and Systematic Introduction, focusing on timing discipline and the point at which structured settlements enter the settlement planning process.
- Part Five will address Professional Mastery in Settlement Planning, examining education, interdisciplinary competence, and how professional judgment is demonstrated and documented.
- Part Six will address Outcome Measurement, exploring how the profession converts experience into evidence, evaluates competitive pressures, and learns at scale.
- Part Seven will address Protective Settlement Design and Innovation, examining how professional judgment and evidence are applied to settlement construction, including evolving product features, liquidity trade-offs, and claimant-level decision-making in the presence of competing financial alternatives while also preserving long-term protection.
- Part Eight will address Institutional Alignment, examining how standards are sustained across the settlement planning profession and its institutions over time.
Together, these articles complete the progression from survey evidence, to imperatives, to a fully articulated standards-based framework for modern settlement planning.
Conclusion
Structured settlements have always been grounded in a protective purpose: delivering long-term financial security to people at moments of profound vulnerability. That purpose remains unchanged. What continues to change, at an accelerating rate, is the environment in which this purpose must be fulfilled.
As structured settlements function within an increasingly complex settlement planning ecosystem, professional expertise exercised within varied institutional settings, while essential, is no longer sufficient on its own. Improved systems enable more consistent and reliable outcomes over time.
Standards provide the structure that allows professional judgment to be exercised consistently, documented clearly, evaluated meaningfully, and improved over time. They do not constrain discretion. They allow professional judgment to be sustained, shared, and improved within a consistent professional framework.
The transition from imperatives to standards marks a profession moving from largely informal, experience-based practices toward intentional, evidence-informed design. The question is no longer whether structured settlements must adapt, but whether that adaptation will occur through coordinated frameworks that promote learning and consistency, or through continued fragmentation that limits the profession’s ability to improve outcomes at scale.
The articles that follow develop each of the standards introduced here and are outlined in the preceding section.
By: Patrick Hindert and George Luecke
This article represents the views of the authors. The authors hereof, as well as their employer – Independent Life Insurance Company – do not provide tax, legal, or financial advice. The information contained herein is for general informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to serve as a substitute for personalized advice from qualified professionals
