- From Evidence to Imperatives: What Fifty Years of Surveys Require Next
Part One of this series traced fifty years of structured settlement research, from the 1977 Lilly Report through the 2025 MetLife Survey, and showed how claimant outcomes depend on when, how, and by whom structured settlements are introduced.
Across decades of survey research, one finding has grown steadily clearer: plaintiff attorneys play a decisive gatekeeping role in whether structured settlements are introduced, considered, and ultimately chosen. Typically, they are the only participants present from intake to resolution and the only ones positioned to frame financial expectations before negotiations begin, yet they don’t act alone when structured settlements are used. In such cases, plaintiff attorneys rely on structured settlement consultants to introduce structured options and reinforce their use throughout the life of the case. When plaintiff attorneys incorporate structured settlement planning into their workflow at the earliest stage possible, utilization increases, decisions improve, and long-term retention strengthens. When they do not, structured settlements often arrive too late to compete with cash and other alternatives.
The survey record also reveals a second, equally consistent pattern: the American tort system is built for lump-sum payment, and that design shapes every liquidity expectation a claimant brings to settlement. Mediation formats, negotiation workflows, and long-standing attorney-fee customs reflect a litigation system built on lump-sum resolution. Although that framework still shapes claimant expectations today, the growing adoption of structured settlements (and structured attorney fee deferrals) shows how periodic payment approaches are becoming more and more integral to contemporary legal and settlement planning practices.
For decades, the structured settlement industry offered a single fixed and illiquid annuity product in a market where claimants were simultaneously exposed to the oft-misguided psychological inclination toward taking cash up front plus the availability of hundreds, even thousands, of cash-based alternatives—investment accounts, advisory platforms, credit solutions, to name a few. This structural imbalance helps explain why liquidity dominates claimant perceptions both before and after settlement, and why two key drivers of the continued relevance and growth of the structured settlement profession are increasingly essential: education and innovation.
In particular, the absence of innovation has consequences before and after the book ends of settlement events. Pre-settlement, structured settlements must compete with a vast menu of retail financial products promising control, flexibility, and/or market participation. Post-settlement, factoring companies reinforce the cash option by offering immediate liquidity when claimants are no longer supported by advisors or counsel and are therefore most vulnerable.
Part One showed that these challenges are longstanding and have persisted largely because the profession lacked the necessary data, insights, strategies and tools to address them. This remained true, despite the increasingly valuable data from the industry surveys over the last 50 years. What has also been lacking is a clear understanding and analysis of the themes, trends, weakness and opportunities demonstrated about the profession by these surveys – until now, with this series.
The landscape has been shifting for decades, but the pace has been gradual. That evolution will continue, yet the profession has reached a point where all participants can help accelerate the positive momentum now emerging, measured not in decades, but in years and even months. New product designs, most notably index-linked annuities created specifically for the structured settlement market, together with post-settlement “Payee Protection Policies” demonstrate how innovation can reshape claimant expectations, counter pre-settlement cash biases, support attorney decision framing, and reduce post-settlement vulnerability.
Taken together, these developments illustrate a broader conclusion supported by the survey record: progress occurs when the profession builds on evidence, adapts its practices, and aligns its work around clear planning objectives. Over time, the field has moved from a narrow focus on tax compliance to a broader appreciation of how timing, communication, and product design influence claimant outcomes. As these elements continue to evolve, structured settlements can be presented in a clearer and more informed way— one that reflects their long-term value rather than the short-term liquidity assumptions and other impediments that often shape claimant expectations. Together, these insights point toward a modernized framework for structured settlement practice built first on reliable early introduction, followed by strengthened professional competence, outcome visibility, innovation, and institutional support.
This article, Part Two, distills five decades of survey evidence into five interconnected imperatives:
- Early introduction and timing discipline: integrating structured settlements into discussions at the earliest possible point and embedding timing as a repeatable professional system.
- Professional competence: 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.
- Liquidity-aligned design and innovation: expanding the profession’s ability to compete with cash-based alternatives through flexible, modern products; strong post-settlement servicing; and digital and AI-enabled tools that enhance early introduction, professional knowledge, and outcome measurement.
- Institutional alignment and commitment: ensuring that carriers, agencies, associations, and law firms adopt systems and processes that reinforce these imperatives across cases and over time.
Together, these imperatives translate half a century of survey evidence into a forward-looking framework, one that defines what a modern structured settlement profession must do to meet evolving claimant and other payee needs, compete in a cash-dominant, alternative-rich environment, and earn the confidence of plaintiff attorneys who serve as the natural gatekeepers to both structured settlements and attorney fee deferrals. Importantly, strengthening early attorney engagement, including through the responsible use of structured fee-deferral planning, is central to enabling early education and increasing adoption overall, while expanding the industry by unlocking the substantial growth opportunity that exists in the structured attorney fee deferral area.
Part Three will extend this progression by converting these imperatives into recommended standards, governance mechanisms, and measurable performance expectations capable of supporting the profession’s next fifty years.
Imperative #1 — Timing: Where Professional Systems Shape Outcomes
Across fifty years of survey research, several insights recur, but timing is the factor most consistently linked to whether structured settlements are understood, considered, and ultimately chosen. Although early surveys focused more on product use and claimant experience than on attorney behavior, the accumulated evidence, especially in the more recent studies, shows that the point at which structured settlements enter the conversation has a decisive effect on claimant expectations and attorney framing. Introduced early, structured settlements can be compared meaningfully with cash and evaluated within a planning context; introduced late, they compete with liquidity assumptions that have already taken hold. Imperative #1 therefore examines what reliable early timing requires in practice and why it must operate as a system rather than rely on individual habits or late-stage improvisation.
Timing Is a System, Not an Intention
Early introduction cannot depend on individual habits or late-stage improvisation. Firms that consistently succeed treat timing as a procedural discipline. They embed structured settlement education into the earliest stages of case development, well before negotiations begin and long before liquidity expectations harden.
Historically, that discipline has begun with intake, where consultants and plaintiff attorneys first introduce structured settlements to claimants who then learn that periodic payments are an option. It continues through internal workflows that prevent deferring the structured settlement conversation until the settlement number is already fixed in principle. It includes regular, early communication between plaintiff attorneys and consultants so expectations are framed collaboratively rather than reactively. And it is reinforced through decision-support tools that help claimants compare alternatives while choices are still open, as well as mediation practices that treat settlement design, not merely settlement value, as a normal and expected part of the process.
Tools That Reinforce Early Decision Framing
Qualified Settlement Funds (QSFs) support this discipline by creating space for informed decisions in cases that resolve quickly or involve complex benefit planning. They help ensure that structured options remain available, but QSFs are only one component of a broader timing system.
Modern product designs also play a significant role. Indexed-linked structures and diversified index choices now allow attorneys and consultants to introduce meaningful comparisons earlier in the case, comparisons that mirror the financial concepts claimants already understand from their exposure to market-based products. Digital collaboration and illustration tools further reinforce early timing by making it easier for professionals to coordinate education, alternatives, and documentation from the outset rather than at the eleventh hour.
Timing as the Foundation for the Remaining Imperatives
Consistent early timing provides the foundation upon which the remaining imperatives depend. Professional competence is most valuable when applied early enough to influence planning, not merely to document the outcome. Outcome measurement must begin with the moment at which claimants first understand they have a choice. Liquidity-aligned design and innovation are far more effective when structured alternatives enter the discussion before liquidity expectations harden. And institutional alignment requires systems that reliably support attorney-led timing across cases and firms.
When early timing is embedded into professional systems, supported by attorneys, consultants, mediators, and carriers using modern tools and coordinated workflows, structured settlements can compete effectively with cash and deliver the long-term protections claimants consistently say they want.
III. Imperative #2 — Professional Competence: From Programs to Professionalism
Across fifty years of surveys, several results have remained consistent: claimants value security, long-term outcomes improve when advice is clear and coordinated, and professional guidance significantly influences claimant decisions and satisfaction. Yet early-introduction systems succeed only when the professionals guiding claimants possess the knowledge, fluency, and applied skills to frame structured settlements accurately from the outset. At the same time, the structured settlement profession still lacks a unified competency standard comparable to those in adjacent planning fields, a gap that has become more visible as structured settlements integrate into a broader settlement planning ecosystem. This need will intensify as emerging technologies, including AI, reshape expectations for documentation, accuracy, and professional oversight.
A Strong Foundation, but an Incomplete Standard
The CSSC and MSSC programs, sponsored by NSSTA in partnership with the University of Texas, remain the profession’s most substantial educational foundation and now include a case-study requirement that tests applied skills across timing, ethics, benefit integration, documentation, and interdisciplinary coordination. These improvements represent meaningful progress. At the same time, the programs’ completion requirements remain limited relative to the expectations that govern adjacent planning professions, and neither credential currently requires renewal or continuing education. Without external recognition or ongoing expectations for maintaining competence, the programs do not yet reflect the standards observed among financial planners, Medicare specialists, nurse life-care planners, or benefits attorneys.
As products, benefit rules, and planning practices continue to evolve and as emerging technologies, including AI, raise expectations for validated reasoning and transparent documentation, the profession will need to complement these educational foundations with renewable, competency-based standards that reflect modern practice.
Competence Within an Interdisciplinary Planning Environment
Structured settlement professionals now operate within a network that includes plaintiff attorneys, special-needs counsel, trustees, life-care planners, financial advisors, Medicare compliance professionals, and QSF administrators. Within this environment, their expertise remains distinct and essential. It includes mastery of the tax and legal requirements under IRC §§104 and 130; the analysis and design of modern structured settlement products, including indexed-linked annuities; the ability to translate medical, financial, and legal information into compliant long-term payout structures; and the knowledge required to help attorneys convert those requirements into accurate, effective settlement documentation.
These competencies differentiate the structured settlement profession and remain central to integrated planning. But effectiveness also requires understanding how this expertise intersects with adjacent disciplines, benefit-eligibility analysis, trust and estate considerations, Medicare allocation rules, lien resolution, and the timing and negotiation strategies led by plaintiff attorneys. Without this interdisciplinary fluency, structured settlement professionals risk becoming isolated product specialists rather than contributors to a coordinated planning process that strengthens claimant outcomes.
Toward a Higher Standard: Competence as Demonstrable, Renewable Practice
Competence must now be understood as a demonstrable, renewable obligation rather than a one-time credential. Adjacent planning professions, financial planning, Medicare compliance, nursing life-care planning, and benefits law, have long maintained continuing-education requirements and reviewable standards of practice. A modern structured settlement competency framework should follow the same direction by focusing on applied performance, validated reasoning, accurate documentation, and consistent interdisciplinary coordination.
Emerging technologies reinforce this shift. AI-enabled tools will change how payout structures are compared, how assumptions are expressed, and how long-term outcomes are evaluated. Structured settlement professionals will need to review, validate, and document these analyses with the same rigor expected in adjacent fields. This requires competency standards that can be renewed, measured, and embedded into institutional expectations.
A forward-looking framework should therefore align individual performance with the systems examined in Imperative #5, ensuring that structured settlement expertise is applied consistently across cases, updated as benefit rules and technologies evolve, and supported by institutions capable of reinforcing professional expectations.
Imperative #3 — Outcome Measurement: Demonstrating Long-Term Claimant Results
If structured settlements are to function as part of a modern settlement planning profession, the field must be able to evaluate how periodic payments perform over time. Fifty years of surveys have shown that claimants value security and stability, but the profession lacks the longitudinal, segmented outcome data needed to translate these insights into evidence-based practice. Without a framework for measuring claimant experience after settlement, structured settlements remain vulnerable to the misconception that premium totals or case counts reflect success.
Outcome measurement shifts attention from transactions to results. It asks whether structured settlements deliver the financial protection, benefit preservation, and long-term stability they are designed to provide, across diverse claimants, market segments, and planning contexts.
The Limits of Current Evidence
Existing research offers valuable insights but remains fragmented. Traditional industry reporting focuses on total premium or number of cases, which reveal nothing about post-settlement experiences such as payment retention, budgeting confidence, or benefit continuity. Surveys like the 2025 MetLife Claimant Poll offer important snapshots but cannot substitute for systematic outcome tracking.
Three gaps are particularly significant:
- First, current reporting does not distinguish between payment continuity and the risk of factoring, leaving the profession unable to trace how external solicitation affects long-term claimant stability or undermines the purpose of periodic payments.
- Second, outcome data is seldom segmented, even though different market sources, qualified personal injury, non-qualified cases, attorney-fee deferrals, and emerging market-specific applications, carry distinct planning considerations, produce different long-term experiences, and reveal different levels of market potential.
- Third, newer product designs and post-settlement protections are rarely analyzed on their own terms, creating an incomplete picture of how innovations such as indexed-linked structures or Payee Protection initiatives perform in practice.
What Outcome Measurement Should Capture
A modern outcome framework should measure results that matter to claimants and to the profession’s protective mission. These include the continuity of periodic payments over time; the degree to which claimants experience financial stability and budgeting confidence; the preservation of SSI, Medicaid, and other safety-net benefits; the clarity and effectiveness of professional communication at the point of settlement; and the role of innovations such as indexed-linked structures, attorney-fee deferrals, and post-settlement protection programs. Segmentation across market-specific sales categories would allow the profession to see where structured settlements perform strongly and where planning practices may require adjustment.
These measures move the field beyond production metrics toward a clearer understanding of how structured settlements operate within the broader conditions of disability, income replacement, household economics, medical costs, and public-benefit interaction.
Infrastructure for Generating and Governing Outcome Data
Outcome measurement requires shared definitions, consistent reporting, and a governance structure capable of supporting confidential, accurate, and comparable information. Professional associations such as NSSTA, SSP, and AASC are best positioned to define outcome categories, create voluntary reporting frameworks, and encourage participation across agencies, carriers, and planning firms. If standardized carefully, anonymized data could be aggregated in ways that show general trends, payment retention, benefit preservation, satisfaction, vulnerability to factoring, without compromising individual privacy or exposing proprietary information.
Carriers and agencies can support this effort by integrating outcome-tracking fields into administrative systems, reinforcing document integrity, and encouraging follow-up touchpoints that capture claimant experience after settlement. Law firms can assist by providing optional satisfaction data or confirming whether clients later experienced benefit-eligibility disruptions. Over time, shared reporting conventions would give the profession a clearer picture of long-term results across both traditional injury claims and market-specific applications such as attorney-fee deferrals.
The Role and Responsibility of Emerging Technology
Technology, including artificial intelligence, will accelerate the shift from periodic surveys to continuous, anonymized outcome insights. As described in a forthcoming Independent Life AI article, AI can assist in classifying case types, identifying timing patterns, monitoring anonymized payment records, and synthesizing post-settlement trends. Yet these tools raise significant responsibilities. Structured settlement records contain sensitive medical, financial, and legal information; any AI-assisted system must therefore comply with strict privacy, confidentiality, and data-retention rules. The profession must ensure that AI enhances accuracy and visibility without compromising claimant privacy or weakening human oversight. Outcome measurement cannot be delegated to algorithms; professionals must validate the reasoning, review the results, and apply judgment consistent with ethical and regulatory obligations.
Toward a Profession That Can Demonstrate Its Value
Although it is not the final imperative, outcome measurement is the integrative one. It links the early imperatives of timing and professional competence with the later imperatives of liquidity-aligned design and institutional alignment, providing the evidence needed to demonstrate value, identify improvement opportunities, support policy advocacy, and strengthen public trust. A profession that measures outcomes can show how structured settlements protect claimants over time. A profession that does not risks continuing to rely on intuition rather than evidence.
As Part Three will show, outcome measurement forms a key component of the standards, governance models, and performance expectations required for the profession’s next fifty years.
Imperative #4 — Liquidity-Aligned Design and Innovation
Claimants naturally compare structured settlements to the cash alternatives that dominate their financial environment—investment accounts, managed-asset programs, and immediate-access consumer finance products. These expectations shape how liquidity, flexibility, and growth potential are perceived long before structured settlements enter the discussion. Traditional designs, built around fixed payment streams, often reach claimants too late to compete effectively. Imperative #4 therefore focuses on liquidity-aligned design and innovation: developing structured solutions that meet long-established expectations while preserving the protections that make periodic payments valuable.
Liquidity as a Multi-Stage Challenge: Before and After Settlement
Liquidity is not a single issue; it operates at multiple points in the claimant experience.
Before settlement, claimants encounter financial options framed around immediate or near-term control—investment accounts, managed-asset programs, and a wide array of consumer-finance products. These alternatives promise flexibility, market participation, or faster availability of funds, and they shape expectations long before structured settlements are introduced.
After settlement, the liquidity theme reappears through the secondary (factoring) market. Factoring companies exploit the moment when claimants feel newly “finished” with litigation and are emotionally receptive to quick cash. Survey data show that post-settlement regret is highest among those who sold payments—often because they did not fully understand what protections they were giving up until after the sale.
Liquidity pressure, therefore, is a continuum, not an event. It begins before structured settlements are ever discussed and resurfaces after they are funded. Addressing it requires both early decision framing and sustained post-settlement protection.
Innovation: Competing Credibly with Cash
For decades, the structured settlement profession approached liquidity challenges with limited tools. With a historically limited set of fixed annuity designs, the industry could not easily counter the breadth and flexibility of cash-based alternatives. The result was predictable: liquidity concerns dominated decisions, and structured settlements were often perceived as restrictive rather than protective.
That landscape is now changing. Innovation has become essential, not optional, to the profession’s future. One of the most important product developments is the emergence of modern indexed-linked structures that provide planning flexibility while preserving the tax and benefit protections unique to §104(a)(2). Independent Life’s iStructure Select illustrates how contemporary design can respond directly to the liquidity expectations claimants bring to mediation. It offers indexed growth potential within defined limits of protection, together with diversified index choices that connect naturally to the market-based comparisons many claimants and attorneys already use in evaluating financial decisions. Presented early and explained clearly, these features help reposition structured settlements as modern planning tools rather than inflexible fixed-income products.
Evolving technology will reinforce this progress. AI-enabled and AI-assisted decision tools will soon make it possible to compare payout structures, indexed-growth potential, liquidity profiles, and long-term outcomes in clearer and more intuitive ways than traditional illustrations alone can provide. As these tools mature, they will support earlier, more informed discussions at precisely the point where liquidity expectations are forming. These same tools also create new opportunities for outcome measurement by enabling structured and cash alternatives to be compared on consistent, evidence-based terms.
Innovation is also reshaping the post-settlement environment, where liquidity pressure resurfaces most acutely. To counter post-settlement vulnerability, Independent Life introduced its Payee Protection Policy, a voluntary program that monitors transfer petitions, routes notices to payees and their advisors, and provides educational outreach on the risks of factoring. The program offers no-cost support and coordination with courts and counsel to ensure informed decision-making before any sale of payments. In doing so, it extends the protective intent of structured settlements beyond issuance and reinforces the profession’s commitment to long-term claimant security.
Imperative #5 — Institutional Alignment: Creating the Infrastructure for Consistent, High-Quality Practice
Structured settlement performance depends not only on individual professionals but on the institutions that shape how those professionals work. Carriers, agencies, law firms, and professional associations create the documents, standards, procedures and educational programs that determine whether the earlier imperatives – timing, professional competence, outcome measurement, and liquidity-aligned design and innovation, are applied consistently or only intermittently. Imperative #5 examines how institutional structures can transform best practices into routine practice.
Institutions Shape Practice More Than Intentions
Professionals work within the systems created by their institutions. Documents, standards, educational programs, and internal workflows determine when structured settlement discussions begin, how advisors collaborate, how options are compared, and how compliance is documented. These structures, rather than individual preference, largely dictate whether the four earlier imperatives of timing, professional competence, outcome measurement, and liquidity-aligned design are applied consistently across cases. When institutions reinforce these expectations, structured settlements function as part of an integrated settlement-planning process; when they do not, professionals must rely on habit or improvisation.
Legislation, Documents, Standards, Education, and Ethics: An Institutional Architecture That Must Evolve
The structured settlement profession relies on an institutional architecture built over four decades by carriers, agencies, law firms, and especially by NSSTA and SSP. This architecture consists of five interconnected layers—legislation, model documents, standards of practice, professional education, and ethical commitments—that together determine whether the earlier imperatives of timing, professional competence, outcome measurement, and liquidity-aligned design are applied consistently across cases.
The first layer is legislation. For example, NSSTA played a defining role in the development and nationwide adoption of the Model State Structured Settlement Protection Acts, which created judicial oversight, standardized disclosures, and reinforced the long-term purpose of structured settlements. These statutes helped stabilize the market during a period when factoring activity threatened to undermine the protective intent of periodic payments.
The second layer consists of model documents, most notably NSSTA’s Model Qualified Assignment and Release Agreement. Developed when structured settlements were still emerging, the Model QAR established a common template for secure and compliant assignments, facilitating uniform practice across life companies, agencies, and attorneys.
The third layer is standards of practice. SSP’s Settlement Planning Practice Standards have helped clarify expectations for timing, interdisciplinary coordination, documentation, and claimant communication—key elements of integrated settlement planning.
The fourth layer is professional education. NSSTA’s CSSC/MSSC programs and SSP’s RSP credential provide an overlapping knowledge base for a diverse professional community. These programs cover the fundamentals of IRC §§104 and 130, structured product design, public-benefits integration, Medicare considerations, and professional ethics among other topics. As discussed throughout this article, these educational requirements will need to evolve toward more renewable, competency-based expectations to support the next stage of the profession.
The fifth layer is ethics. NSSTA’s Code of Ethics articulates core professional values, integrity, competence, transparency, and claimant-centered conduct, that anchor professional judgment, especially in areas where statutes and standards may not provide explicit guidance.
While these five layers created a durable foundation, many were designed for an earlier era centered on tax compliance, assignment procedures, and post-issuance protections. NSSTA’s legacy documents and models reflect that historical focus. SSP’s Settlement Planning Practice Standards, by contrast, do more to anticipate the interdisciplinary environment in which structured settlements now operate. The next step for NSSTA is to extend its work beyond a structured settlement mandate and adopt a broader settlement planning framework, one that aligns structured settlements with Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, trust administration, QSFs, Medicare Secondary Payer rules, and attorney-fee deferral strategies. Advancing this direction will require both policy leadership and updated technical guidance.
A clear illustration is the authors’ proposal to amend the Social Security Act to create an income exclusion for structured settlement payments, allowing periodic payments to integrate cleanly with SSI and Medicaid rules. Advancing such a reform would extend the original protective purpose of structured settlements and modernize federal benefits policy to reflect contemporary settlement planning needs. This step represents the next phase of institutional alignment—building on existing legislation, documents, standards, education, and ethics while expanding the profession’s policy agenda to place structured settlements within the broader architecture of claimant-centered planning.
Coordinated Governance: Making Alignment Work Across Cases
Institutional alignment becomes meaningful only when its elements operate in a coordinated way. Shared documents, renewable standards, interdisciplinary education, and claimant-centered ethical expectations must function together so that timing, liquidity framing, professional competence, and innovation are applied consistently across cases, not only when an individual attorney or consultant happens to prioritize them. When institutions reinforce these expectations through aligned workflows, documentation practices, and collaborative planning, structured settlements function as part of a unified settlement planning process rather than as isolated insurance products. This coordinated governance provides the practical foundation for a profession capable of delivering consistent, high-quality claimant outcomes across diverse markets and case types.
Conclusion: From Imperatives to Standards
Part Two translated fifty years of survey insights into five imperatives that define what a modern structured settlement profession must do to meet claimant needs, compete in a cash-dominant environment, and operate as part of an integrated settlement planning framework. These imperatives – timing, professional competence, outcome measurement, liquidity-aligned design and innovation, and institutional alignment, describe the practices that reliably support claimant security across cases and over time.
What they do not yet provide is a recommended system of standards, governance, and accountability capable of making those practices consistent across institutions and durable across generations of professionals. That is the work of Part Three. It will take the framework developed here and convert it into operational expectations – model practices, enforceable standards, measurable outcomes, and shared professional responsibilities, designed to guide the structured settlement profession through its next fifty years.
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
