Q21 - Justine: Pellman, Inc. settled the lawsuit

[samuelfbaron]

Had a heck of a time with this one...one of the most confusing disagreement questions I've ever come across!

J: Pellman settled out of court, so they expected to lose.

S: Unclear whether they expected to lose, legal fees of going to court would be higher than settling.

(A) No, Simon says it's unclear whether or not Pellman would lose.

(B) Irrelevant, out of scope.

(C) From what I gather this answer basically restates what Simon says, however, since there is no response from Justine, we don't know if they would agree/disagree about this.

(D) expected legal fees for going to trial would have been less than settling --> would have went to trial

(E) expected to win in court --> ~settled the lawsuit out of court

Here is where I got lost. I selected (D) but the answer is (E). I am starting to see why (E) is the answer, but could someone clarify? Is (E) the answer because Simon believes that Pellman would have not went to court regardless of whether of Pellman's expectations?

[sumukh09]

Is (E) the answer because Simon believes that Pellman would have not went to court regardless of whether of Pellman's expectations?

Exactly. Simon says regardless of the outcome of their case, the legal fees would have been more than settling.

Justine says because they expected to lose they settled; but if they expected to win then they would have gone to court.

[shodges]

How is B wrong?

Is it because Justine makes no mention of Pellman's corporate leaders?

[sumukh09]

No Justine does mention Pellman's corporate leaders.
B is wrong because neither of them say anything about what they thought about Pellman's estimation of their chances of winning in court. Justine says they expected to lose but nothing about the accuracy of this prediction. Simon says he's not sure if they expected to lose or not so nothing can be said here either about their estimation of their chances of winning in court.

[ericha3535]

Here is my run down:

A) We don't know Simon would have said this because he says "it's unclear."

B) Accurately esimate is out of scope

C) We don't know what Justine would have said since she does not mention anything about cost-effective

D) Fell for this one too... But again, for the same reason as C, We don't knw what Justine would say.

E) This is correct. Justine would have said "yeah, if they expected to win, they would have taken to the court; otherwise, they would they pay up?"

Simon would have said "no, even if they thought they would win the case, they would have settled with 1 milion dollars since it's the most cost effective."

Bottom line of this question is that obviously, they both concede the fact that Pellman has paid a hefty amount of money for the settlement; their dispute is about the "cause" or "motivation" in regards to their decision for the settlement.

[christine.defenbaugh]

Nice process ericha3535! Mind if I add my own take?

In Identify the Disagreement questions, it's easy to make assumptions about what one of the parties would agree to. The test-writers are counting on that!

Notice how much new information Simon brings up that Justine never has a chance to comment on: legal fees, cost-effectiveness, etc! But since we read from top to bottom, by the time we're done with the stimulus, we have a tendency to fill in the blanks on what we think Justine mostly likely might have thought of those things. And that's exactly what we shouldn't do!

Let's distill their comments:

JUSTINE:
1) Pellman settled
2) Settlement indicates leaders expected to lose
SIMON:
1) unclear whether leaders expected to lose
2) leaders expected legal fees > settlement costs (whether win or lose)
3) Therefore, settling would seem most cost-effective.

Also notice how little Justine actually says: 1) Pellman settled 2) settlement indicates the leaders expected to lose. That's it! We don't need to twist ourselves in knots trying to figure out if a statement lines up with Simon if we have no idea what Justine would think about it!

The only answer choice Justine even has a chance at having an opinion on is (E). If they'd expected to win, they wouldn't have settled. So, the fact that they settled indicates that they thought they'd lose. This is Justine's second statement, so she clearly agrees. Simon disagrees in his first statement: he thinks it's unclear that they expected to lose, despite the fact that they settled.


Not the Disagreement
(A) Neither of them claim what would have happened, only what the corporate leaders expected to happen.
(B) Neither of them claim anything about the accuracy of the corporate leaders' expectations, only what the corporate leaders expected.
(C) & (D) Simon probably agrees with both of these - but Justine never gets a chance to weigh in on legal fees, cost-effectiveness, etc!


This is a tricky Identify the Disagreement question! Don't assume the first person disagrees with things they've never had a chance to respond to!

I hope this helps!

[ttunden]

so I guess in order to get this question right we have to assume Justine is committing to this: Settled lawsuit --> Corp leaders expected to lose

this is diagramming the 2nd sentence of Justine. If we would have interpreted it that way, then we can arrive at E. Because E is just the contrapositive of the aforementioned conditional statement. Simon disagrees with E because regardless of whether the leaders expected to win/lose they would have settled since it is the most cost-effective solution.

[mornincounselor]

(Initially I believed that) Roughly translated J believes that since Pellman's expected to lose in trial they therefore settled out of court.

Then J would disagree with (D) (who cares what the costs are, we are likely to lose and therefore don't want to proceed to trial) while S would agree with (D).

Except that J is more accurately translated -- Pellman settled out of court --> therefore they expected to lose. So J would not necessarily disagree with (D).

On (E) Simon would disagree with this and Justine would agree with it. Therein lies the correct choice.

[logicfiend]

This question is very similar to PT 66, S2, Q20, where the correct answer is also written as the contrapositive of main sentence disagreement between the two people. That's why I think these types of hard disagreement questions are actually easier: it's very easy to see where they disagree! It's just once sentence—Settled because Pellman expected to lose in court. Being able to recognize this in an answer choice makes it difficult.

I remember a previous post on a disagreement question that was very helpful in not getting caught up in the wrong answers: see where the two responses overlap.

Here, Justine says nothing about whether the settlement was settled because it was more or less costly than the legal fees, so that knocks out (C) and (D). (B) is out because we don't know what either of them think about Pellman being "able to" estimate winning. We only know whether they think Pellman "expected to" win or not. (A) is out because neither of them talk about whether it was likely Pellman would have actually lost, only Pellman's expectations based on the settlement and the legal fee comparison.

Hope this doesn't sound too confusing, but watch out for these contrapositive answer choices, in other question types too!

[HazelZ814]

Please correct me if my thoughts are wrong.

For D, I think Justine would disagree with it, because J thought the reason to not go to the trial is to avoid losing in court. As long as this establishes, then it doesn't matter if the legal fees are cheaper or not. However, I don't think we know Simon's opinion regarding D, because we don't know if "less costly" would affect cost-effectiveness or not. Let's assume the legal fee is "one dollar cheaper" (which is valid for "less costly" as mentioned in D), would trial or no trial be more cost-effective? we don't know.