A settlement offer or offer to settle is a term used in a civil lawsuit to describe a communication from one party to the other suggesting a settlement - an agreement to end the lawsuit before a judgment is rendered.
Attorneys typically negotiate terms of a settlement on behalf of their clients, so a settlement offer is usually conveyed by one party's attorney directly to the other party's attorney.
In the English Law, Part 36 of the Civil Procedure Rules governs this area.
In the US, evidence of settlement discussions generally, and of settlement offers specifically, is generally inadmissible in court. This is a policy-based exclusion, intended to encourage the settlement of cases out of court, thus freeing up the resources of the court system.
In Australia and the United Kingdom, offers of settlement may be called Calderbank Offers, Calderbank Letters and Offers of Compromise and often have a major impact on the allocation, by courts, of legal costs between parties.
Famous quotes containing the words settlement and/or offer:
“The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new—whether it be the settlement of new lands or the initiation of new ways of life—is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear. It is the misfits, failures, fugitives, outcasts and their like who are among the first to grapple with the new.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)