Rather than negotiating each claimant's payment individually, a large mass tort settlement often uses a claims matrix — a point or grid system that assigns each claim a score based on defined factors like injury type and severity, duration or dose of exposure, age, comorbidities, and strength of causation evidence, then converts that score into a settlement payment, sometimes as a percentage of a base value or points-to-dollars conversion.

The matrix is typically negotiated between plaintiffs' leadership and the defendant as part of the master settlement agreement, and individual claim scoring is usually handled by the claims administrator or a special master, with an appeal or audit process available for claimants who dispute their assigned score.

Juricratic models the claims matrix as the mechanism translating a claimant's individualized fact dials — injury severity, causation strength, documentation quality — into an expected payment within a global settlement, which is the same function a jury damages award would serve in an individually tried case, just administered at scale.

Defendants favor a claims matrix because it provides cost predictability across a large claimant pool and reduces the risk of runaway individual verdicts, while plaintiffs' leadership negotiates the matrix's point values and tiers to try to capture the real variance in claim severity accurately.