$245,000 is a fairly big number. Two things to keep in mind in looking at these types of settlements. One, actual damage is hard to prove, meaning that no one is going to be able to say that getting kicked out of the school resulted in X amount of monetary loss. Large settlements are often driven by significant medical expenses, loss of earning capacity, etc which allows lawyers to “blackboard” significant numbers as a starting point for damages. Two, Montana is not a state where you traditionally see very high personal injury awards. So with those two factors, yeah $245k is significant.