The mass tort mindset: Making multi-party litigation marketing work for your firm
Mass tort marketing is big business in today’s legal industry. Each year as more and more pharmaceutical and medical companies come under fire for improper manufacturing and marketing of drugs and devices, viable group cases against these hugely profitable brands skyrocket—and so to the attorneys looking for a piece of the action.
You’ve heard of many prominent active mass torts in the marketplace today: IVC Filters, Pradaxa, transvaginal mesh, talcum powder, metal-on-metal hip implants, to name a few. While product liability currently dominates the multi-party litigation domain, there are plenty of other mass torts, such as airplane and train wrecks, large-scale fires, asbestos-related cases, employment claims and data security breaches, among others. In fact, it’s estimated that every year between two to four million people are seriously injured or killed in mass tort-related events. That’s a lot of legal clients requiring representation.
Even for attorneys who are already entrenched in specific types of law, it’s hard to look the other way when it comes to the pervasiveness of mass tort, not to mention the sheer economies of scale related to these types of lawsuits. Whether you currently handle mass tort or not, widespread consumer awareness (often created by fear-based advertising campaigns related to adverse medical events) may encourage people who are desperate for legal advice to call your firm anyway. It’s hard to turn down these potential clients, especially when mass tort cases have the potential to add serious revenue to your law practice. Because national mass tort suits essentially involve filing one primary claim for multiple plaintiffs, the math works wonderfully in your favor when you consider that a single claim might settle for $300,000.
Watching this trend unfold, along with the economics involved, many lawyers around the country are either adding select mass torts to a general personal injury practice or beefing up existing multi-party litigation by adding more attorneys and more capable staff to handle the volume and immediacy that comes with mass tort work.
Timing is everything in mass tort
Unlike other segments of law, timing is of the essence in mass tort marketing. While your lawyers can’t always predict when an outbreak of product liability cases will occur, your law firm can start to prepare marketing strategies to take advantage of typical mass tort cycles—and outfox the competition in securing these types of cases.
Attorneys who endeavor to take on mass tort should be prepared to pounce when the time is right. Otherwise there’s not much point in playing in this genre. There are several times during which a practice can enter the picture on behalf clients:
Awareness: This is phase one, when attorneys nationwide begin to inform the public via advertising campaigns centered around adverse events related to a particular mass tort. When this kind of general consumer awareness is at its peak, cases can role in rapidly. While you may choose to run your own localized campaign, in many ways, your firm still benefits from national secondhand advertising.
MDLs: Another prime time for mass tort marketing is when the federal courts create a multi-district litigation docket (MDL) for a specific mass tort. As you may know, some 300 MDLs organize such cases and promote settlements with trials of bellwether cases, while the MDL plaintiffs committee handles scheduling, motions and trials. Mass Tort Nexus is a helpful resource for timing up MDLs.
Settlement: Legal representation is also in demand during the settlement phase of mass torts, when a defendant makes public that it has established a settlement fund. At this time, attorneys are actively signing clients to work through settling their mass tort cases and need to market specifically around this phase of the process.
Timing also relates to the extended timeframe of taking on a mass tort. Because cases can vary greatly, often taking years, it’s not something to enter into lightly. Attorneys and law practices should consider the viability of current staff; in-house capabilities; future allocation of resources; hiring feasibility; outside funding sources; partnerships; and associated mass tort marketing budgets.
The smartest strategy is to consider your firm’s current strengths and to be selective about the types of mass torts you take on in the future. The best scenarios include mass torts with reasonable acquisition costs and high settlement values, strong liability, high-volume plaintiffs and a financially viable defendant. The goal is not to sabotage your current practice by adding mass tort, but instead to embrace what you’re already good at and enhance your existing offerings, making your mass tort silo as efficient and lucrative as possible.
Marketing tactics for mass tort
Once your firm has taken the leap to begin acquiring or boosting mass-tort work, marketing for these time-sensitive legal services requires some very specific marketing tactics. There continues to be no medium that demonstrates mass awareness like TV. How fitting for mass tort. Despite the increasing amount of time that consumers spend online, messages that require a broad reach to diverse audiences are made for broadcast.
In fact, television advertising still works incredibly well for the legal industry when compared to other industries, and when it comes to kicking off a mass tort campaign, TV can quickly put your firm on a level playing field with even the biggest competitors in the space. Likewise you can appropriately position your law firm as the local leader in a particular mass tort, appealing to clients through station-targeted local or regional broadcast advertising.
What’s critical to remember is that no mass tort marketing effort ever worked in a vacuum. A consistent, integrated digital and content marketing strategy must go hand in hand with TV advertising. If you imagine that the message you send on television is your introduction to prospective clients, your online efforts are your relationship builders. People might hear about your firm on TV, but when they want more information increasingly they Google you first before they ever pick up the phone.
One of the most successful digital marketing tactics for mass tort is pay-per-click or PPC. Why? Because when someone searches for “talcum mass tort” and your firm shows up on the first page of the results, one click could quickly convert to thousands of dollars. And you only paid for one click. An investment in the kind of qualified leads PPC can provide is absolutely worthwhile for such a targeted type if law. Remember, these are people who are not just overhearing an advertisement while multi-tasking on other devices; these are prospective clients who are actively searching for mass tort topics or legal representation. What could be more precise than that?
While PPC campaigns can provide the flexibility and control that law firms like, certain competitive PPC keywords can become expensive at “auction.” Your marketing firm can teach you how to navigate around such challenges, and why often paying above-industry standards could pay off in one conversion.
Last but not least is the messaging you include on your website once a prospective client does find your firm online, whether they clicked through from a PPC campaign or heard your mass tort ad on TV. For a person looking for legal help with a legitimate mass tort concern, there’s nothing worse than feeling lost, confused or unimpressed when landing on a legal website. It’s so important that all of your content marketing messages—the copy on your website pages, blogs, social platforms and email campaigns—are sending a consistent, informative, ethical message about the mass torts you are choosing to engage in.
It’s also important to know legal content dos and don’ts, such as steering clear of definitive statements and always using reputable sources to back up the content you are putting out there. A false step here can undermine not only your our reputation but the whole process of building a relationship with a prospective client.
In mass tort in particular, law firms are seen as educational clearinghouses, collecting and organizing clear, concise, truthful information that people can act on when ready. Actionable content might include online forms requesting more information. Likewise live video chats, links to recent government warnings, mass tort timelines and sharable articles will give prospective clients the information they need immediately, as well the confidence they need to make a decision about working with your firm.
In mass tort marketing, you are acting as an authority on very important topics. It’s not enough just to be seen. You must be heard. And to achieve that have to be in the right place at the right time. Our legal marketing experts can help! We’ve been helping lawyers evolve and improve their advertising, marketing and advertising strategies since 1981. Call Network Affiliates today at (888) 461-1016.
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