What’s the point in a point estimate?

What do percentage figures mean when stating a legal case’s prospects?

More than once, having drafted legal advice and distilled my opinion on prospects of success into a percentage figure, the client has come back to me and questioned how I arrived at it.

The simple answer is (or in my case was) that a percentage figure is desirable since language can be ambiguous. I read with interest the CIA’s online Intelligence Community Directive 203 on Analytic Standards: paragraph 6(2)(a) of that Directive sets out difficulties arising from purely…