ok great. Sounds like you have done a lot more work than me. I...

ok great.  Sounds like you have done a lot more work than me.
I agree that the financials are one of the hardest to work out that I have seen.  And even when you work them out i'm not sure that they give any accurate reflection of how the company is going.

Firstly the thing that attracted me to IMF was the CAGR in their book value.  While the past 3 years have been quite lean (still positive) the 5 and 10 year CAGR is really strong at 18.22% and 15.71% respectively.
This is in stark contrast to the CAGR for the market cap (which has barely kept pace with the growth of shares on issue (meaning a flat share price which it has been for long time holders).

At some stage this coiled spring will reverse and the share-price CAGR will outperform the constant growth in the shareholders equity.  (i.e the company cannot keep growing their book value at 18.22% without the stock price reflecting this sooner or later).   

Forecasting.

When I dug into the stock to try and understand the mechanics of the business I did it a few ways but probably the easiest way to understand is to use the 2016 AGM slide "IMF Track record".   I haven't mastered the Hotcopper attach and image or I would do that for you but i'm sure your familiar with the slide.

Picking out the important numbers from that slide:

Total Settlements: $1,847,000,000
Settlement to clients: $1,162,000,000
Settlement to IMF: $685,000,000
Litigation Costs: $268,000,000
Net Revenue to IMF: $417,000,000
Losts cases costs: $47,000,000
Withdrawals: $5,000,000
Sum of Lost and Withdrawals: $52,000,000

From this I also calculated Claim Value for the book using their guide that 15% of the Claim Value ends up in Litigation Income ($685,000,000 / 15% = $4,566,666,666).  

Applying these % to our current Claim book.  We know our current claim book is $3,370,3000,000 which is 73.8% of the total historical record for IMF.

Therefore assuming all the percentages stay the same (essentially all items are 73.8%) I would get the following amounts for the current claim book.

Current claim value: $3,370,300,000
Total Settlements: $1,363,126,445
Settlements to clients: $857,581,445
Settlement to IMF (Litigation Income - LI): $505,545,000
Litigation Costs (LE):$197,789,869
Net Revenue to IMF (LI-LE): $307,755,131
Lost Cases(LC): $34,687,029
Withdrawals (W): $3,690,109
"Gross Profit" (LI - LE-LC-W): $269,377,993

Now we know the average case is 2.5 but to be conservative say we get this over 3 years we can "create" a profit and loss as follows.
Less already expensed. Total Assume over 3 years
Litigation Revenue: $505,545,000   $505,545,000   $168,515,000
Litigation Expense:   $197,789,869    $119,472,000 $  78,317,869    $  26,105,956
Net Revenue:    $307,755,131   $426,227,131   $142,409,044
Less: Losses and with  $38,377,139 $38,377,139    $  12,792,380
Less: Overheads    $  30,000,000
EBIT $  99,616,664
Tax $  29,884,999
NPAT $   69,731,665

The $119,472,000 I have taken from the 2016 accounts as the external portion of the intangibles.  This should be for amounts already spent.  I realise that doing this process half way through the year is not ideal because some of that may have been for cases in FY 2017.

At the current share price the market cap of the company is around $300million which on these numbers puts the company on a PE of 4.33x.  Further than that the business has $166mill cash on hand and debt of $80mill meaning an Enterprise value of $216.1mill.  This puts the business on an EV/NPAT of 3.1x which to me seems extraordinarily cheap no matter which way I look at it.

I haven't done some sensitivity analysis as well but while I am a proficient at word and excel I haven't yet mastered the program that is Hotcopper.  Thoughts.