Conclusion
Cynics may scoff, but I firmly believe that we all—no matter what industry you may work in—can play a key role in fostering positive change.— Jacob Malherbe, X Social Media
The only constant in the mass tort industry is change. If my collaborators and I have highlighted a single through-line over the course of this book, it’s that change has not only arrived but it will continue to accelerate in the years to come. If mass tort lawyers fail to remain in front of the curve, they’re inevitably going to fall behind it.
From the moment I launched X Social Media in 2015, I vowed we’d never surrender the technological advantages that we worked so hard to establish nor would we fail to continue to build upon those advantages as we sped further ahead.
We’ve made good on that promise. I can say with absolute confidence that we remain light-years ahead of others in this space. Th ese are not empty platitudes.
Go straight to the source. Look at Facebook itself, which has been so impressed with our results that its data teams send us optimization reports every single quarter.
Facebook does not hand out gold stars very easily. But month after month, these reports prove that we are maximizing the potential of the Facebook platform, while optimizing our clients’ ad spends.
No one devises a more thorough report card than Facebook. Everything is graded. Are we crafting ads that use the right images and videos? Are we placing our ads in the right feeds? Are we leveraging the best initial targeting strategies and retargeting techniques and then following up with the most qualified look-alike audiences?
In essence, Facebook looks at its own best practices and compares them to ours. Our grade? Straight As across the board with optimization rates that continually rise well above 90 percent.
These reports are both an extraordinary differentiator and a daily motivator. When the platform you’re using to help victims is watching and monitoring your every move, you can’t allow yourself to overlook anything. Any advancement. Any new technology. Any overlooked feature.
Here are just a few examples of how we’re making the grade by continuing to stay on the bleeding-edge of mass tort advertising strategies.
Looking Backward, Moving Forward: The Facebook Time Machine We’ve already discussed the power of geo-targeting, specifically our ability to pin an individual location and then draw an expanded search radius around that point. As any personal injury lawyer will tell you, geo-targeting is the most accurate, efficient, and cost-effective means of finding car accident victims. There are, however, some inherent limitations to this approach, as it prevents us from tagging victims at the actual location and moment of the accident.
When we use geo-targeting to zero in on an emergency room, we’re casting a pretty wide net. We’re diving into a data bucket that includes plenty of people who may be suffering from a wide array of other illnesses or injuries rather than the car accident victims whom personal injury lawyers are seeking to find.
Until recently, these same limitations carried over to mass torts. Consider, for example, the tragic commuter train accident that occurred on September 29, 2016, when a train plunged into Hoboken train station at rush hour, killing one individual and harming one hundred others.
We were unable to send ads to everyone who might have been at that train station when the event occurred. We had to identify the various stops and passengers who might have made their way to that station. And then we had to blanket the particular communities encircling those stops with our ads.
This required multiple steps. We had to establish an initial audience, including anyone who might have tagged a story or photo about the crash, and then follow the breadcrumbs to find the injured parties.
It would have been far more effective to ping the actual location of the train crash and then turn back the hands of time to the actual moment of the crash and identify who was actually there. At first blush, this sounds like the stuff science-fiction movies are made of, but today we can do just that thanks to the more precise GPS used by smartphones as well as a special tool we call the Time Machine.
As noted previously, Facebook sees all, but it also stores the locations that people have visited for extended periods of time. At X Social Media, we can now ask Facebook to delve into its geo-targeting records and identify every Facebook user who visited a particular location for up to two weeks after a given date.
Thus, in the case of the Hoboken train accident, we no longer need to spend time or energy backtracking from the scene of the accident, moving back along the rail line routes to specific communities that may have fed into that train station. We can simply ping the location of the crash, turn back the clock to the moment of the event, and identify which Facebook users were present during the moment of impact.
Consider, for a moment, the implications of this technology and the opportunities it provides mass tort lawyers. Think about the tragic mass shooting that occurred in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, when a sixty-four-year-old gunman opened fire from the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay resort into a crowd gathered for a country music festival.
Imagine the terror of that moment. According to police reports, the gunman continued to pump bullets into the crowd for nine to eleven minutes, indiscriminately killing more than fifty people and injuring 850, until police and SWAT members broke into his room and found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It was nothing less than an American horror story. As the dust settled and more details came to light, we were approached by mass tort lawyers who believed that the victims injured during the shooting should band together to press for damages.
Our legal clients wanted to know if we could scour the nation and find the specific concertgoers who attended the music festival.
Our answer? Yes, we can. Our process began by first using geotargeting to draw a search net around the Mandalay Bay resort and the nearby concert area. Then we leveraged the Time Machine to see which Facebook users were present on October 1, 2017.
Remember that the Time Machine only works for two weeks after a given date, so we had to move quickly. As a result, we devised a unique strategy: We slipped videos into peoples’ feeds, and when they clicked on our ads, we tagged them and bundled them together into a new audience group. As soon as we received the green light from our client to implement the search, we initiated our strategy.
And sure enough, using Facebook, we found more than five hundred victims who attended the festival on that particular night, a feat that would have taken exponentially more time and resources if not for this new technique.
I think it’s important to note that sometimes lawyers shy away from cases like the Las Vegas mass shooting because they assume their chances of ever seeing a reward are slim. They view it as a two-step hurdle: It’s not only too difficult to find clients but the end verdict could go either way. By utilizing technology like the Time Machine, you dramatically reduce the effort and expense required to find clients, thus increasing the time required to work and win the case.
Too often lawyers underestimate the PR risks that come with cases like this. When a large company, like MGM Resorts International, is faced with the prospect of a PR nightmare, they want to broker a quick settlement. Often, their insurance providers are on the hook for the majority of the settlement, while they only have to pay out a small fraction out of their own pocket.
Which is exactly what happened in the case of Mandalay Bay. In the end, between four thousand and five thousand worthy claimants were awarded $800 million when the settlement came in 2019. That stunning result was made possible thanks to technologies like the Time Machine.
Using the Time Machine to help mass-shooting victims is just the beginning. Consider any of the potential cancer-causing products we’ve discussed thus far, from Zantac to Roundup. Let’s say a new finding emerges that shows a particular drug increases the likelihood of a particular signature cancer. We know that signature cancers require signature medical specialists.
We now have the ability to draw a targeted ring around hospitals and individual practices and then turn back the clock for two straight weeks to tag everyone who entered or exited that particular office or building. Once we have that information, we have a warm audience to whom we can immediately start feeding ads at an extraordinarily quick and inexpensive clip.
Whatever the injury or illness may be, we can isolate, ping, and then time-lapse our way through two weeks of visits. It’s nothing less than a game changer for referral and mass tort trial lawyers.
Preserving Your Reputation: Advanced Inbox Commentary Tools Scouring feeds and online forums to weed out negative and vindictive comments can be a full-time job. Just ask any restaurant that’s been forced to play defense when a disgruntled customer or a tech-savvy competitor wages an online offensive against their establishment via Yelp, Twitter, or Facebook.
Like it or not, a single inflammatory accusation can inflict serious harm on a brand if it’s not quickly identified, refuted, and scrubbed before it goes viral.
Those same risks apply to mass tort lawyers who run ads on Facebook. It’s impossible for us to prevent a random user from spewing clichés and voicing his personal bias against lawyers in the comment boxes under our ads.
This is a particularly dangerous threat given the feelings that so many PNCs experience. You can imagine the psychological trauma of battling cancer as well as the burst of hope that wells up in them when they see an ad promising to provide them more information about a defective product.
Should a PNC scroll down to the comments section and find a post that says that mass torts are a scam or that the law firm in question is crooked, they’re far less likely to click on that ad and actually visit our landing page.
At X Social Media, we help insulate our law firm clients against unwarranted or blatantly false comments by using our own proprietary AI tool, which screens all comments and determines which comments should be allowed and which should be blocked.
Once we establish these parameters, which we do in concert with our clients, our commentary tool takes over from there. They automatically erase unsavory or falsified statements as they appear, which preserves the reputation of the tort and the law firms connected to it.
Real-Time Analysis: The X Social Media Portal Advances in AI are posed to alter the legal profession—and society as a whole—in the years and decades to come. But few lawyers realize that there are AI tools available to them at this very moment that can dramatically impact their practices.
We refer to the central hub of our operation as the X Social Media Portal. Our portal oversees and guides every facet of what we do, from handling invoices and receiving money via credit cards to monitoring conversion rates and cost-per-client rates.
This central digital brain of ours can record, for example, how much a particular client has spent in advertising dollars and can then cross-reference that number with how successful those ads have been in signing up clients. If we know which ads work best, we can tailor our next wave of ads to ensure they work even better, thus reducing ad spends for our clients.
Our portal also allows us to automatically shut down advertising campaigns when they reach a certain threshold.
Over the years, I’ve heard countless stories from mass tort lawyers who complained about advertisers bilking them with add-on expenses. The less reputable advertisers working in the legal field tend to lowball clients with initial estimates only to jack up the prices midway through the campaign.
Not us. When, for example, a law firm says it wants to spend $10,000 exactly on a campaign, we can shut off the spigot exactly at $10,000. No fuzzy overspend charges allowed.
That being said, our use of advanced AI has only begun. We are rapidly approaching the point when we will be able to use our AI to curate so much data that it will completely take all guesswork out of the equation.
We can tell our portal to analyze all of the landing pages we’ve ever created, every image we’ve ever used, and every video-based ad we’ve ever slipped into a Facebook feed and tell Facebook to create customized ads that will give our clients the highest hit rates possible.
If we know, before we ever start a campaign, that a given ad will resonate with a particular demographic, we can dramatically cut the cost-per-victim rates for every one of our law firm clients.
We can mix and match our ads based on a desired audience. One ad might be best suited for women of a particular age who live in a particular urban area. A totally different ad may appeal to a fortythree-year-old man who lives in a rural area.
In short, we can now show the perfect ads to individuals. We are at the point where we can test images, evaluate their effectiveness, generate better ads, and then slip them into the feeds of the people our clients need to find.
These tools are beginning to take shape right now thanks in part to the synchronicity we’ve created between our portal and Facebook’s broadening capabilities.
In short, we can now show the perfect ads to individuals.
We are at the point where we can test images, evaluate their effectiveness, generate better ads, and then slip them into the feeds of the people our clients need to find.
A Brighter Future for Mass Tort Victims and Plaintiff-Side Attorneys
I’m highlighting these new advances not only because we’re excited about the future of our company but we’re also bullish about the future of the mass torts industry in general. One of the reasons why I’ve chosen to write this book now—and am trying to marshal new forces to join our cause—stems directly from an incredible change that is about to take root in the state of Arizona.
Some background is required here. When I first entered the mass tort world in 2011, I was struck by how many seasoned mass tort attorneys told me that the scales of justice weren’t exactly balanced between plaintiff-side and defense-side attorneys.
Common sense told me that the attorneys defending larger corporations would certainly have much deeper pockets than those representing victims. What I failed to realize was just how much more money the defense had to work with than plaintiff attorneys.
Since the vast majority of defendants are publicly owned companies, backed by wealthy investors, these corporations have access to nearly unlimited funds. The capital markets provide them money at very low single-digit interest rates. Plaintiff-side attorneys, by contrast, usually have to lean on hedge-fund money, which as we’ve discussed, usually comes with a 20 percent interest rate.
Unlimited capital at ultralow rates versus very limited capital at a very hefty price tag. Not exactly a fair fight, right? Thanks, however, to a recent law change in Arizona, that imbalance may become more equitable for plaintiff-side lawyers.
As of 2021, Arizona will allow law firms to have silent partners. That means savvy investors—people with real money—can come in and buy into existing law firms.
This new wrinkle, in my mind, is an absolute game changer. At X Social Media, we’re gearing up hard for this new law change, which I consider to be nothing less than the next great Arizona gold rush.
Why is all this occurring in Arizona? Because if you know your legal history, you know that Arizona was the state that changed the rules for legal advertising. In 1977, Arizona ruled that attorneybased advertising was a form of commercial speech protected by the First Amendment.
We happen to believe that this new precedent is going to usher in new ownership structures for many law firms. A snowball effect in the desert? Absolutely. Think, for example, about the revolutions that are occurring within the tech space. What if new technologies revolutionized the legal space and by contrast the mass tort space? These advances could provide underserved communities with greater access to these services and help us further drive down the cost of finding clients and spearheading new mass torts.
I should pause here and say that many lawyers are deeply concerned about this law change, and some even fought against these changes becoming law. They see what’s happening in Arizona and think immediately of what happened to New York cab drivers when ride-share services started flooding in.
Those New York cab companies paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to secure their taxicab medallions over the last few decades. They made a huge long-term investment, only to see their business opportunities shrink.
Some lawyers look at how much time and resources they spent going to law school and establishing their practices and can’t help but view the move in Arizona as a threat to their future earnings. They fear, perhaps justifiably so, a hedge fund coming in and buying 90 percent of their firm, leaving them with just 10 percent ownership. They envision a future in which cases become more expensive, while their settlement cuts, as paid out in attorneys’ fees, remain static.
I see a totally different future, especially for mass tort lawyers.
I see this law change as a huge opportunity for mass tort lawyers because it will bring boatloads of money into the industry. And I think, especially during the first few waves, it’s not going to be smart money coming in. These new investors and hedge funds aren’t likely to know what you do as a lawyer. And they certainly don’t know what we do at X Social Media.
Therefore, these new investors will need us because they can’t spearhead mass torts or find clients or vet them. And that presents all of us with a unique opportunity to step up and prove our worth.
Who’s going to get in on the ground floor and establish themselves in the mass tort space when these new players come in and start throwing money around? My profound hope is that it’s you—the skilled lawyers in other fields who’ve had their interest piqued by the contents of this book.
These forthcoming changes are more incontrovertible evidence, in my humble opinion, that the time to take a leap into mass torts is now.
At X Social Media, we help lawyers find victims because I believe it’s the right thing to do, but I’ve chosen to write books and reveal every facet of our operation because I’m a firm believer in the power of transparency. My hope is that society will become as transparent with its citizens as we are with our clients. Cynics may scoff, but I firmly believe that we all—no matter what industry you may work in—can play a key role in that positive revolution.
Most of the people I’ve met in mass torts help victims because they feel a calling to do so. They do well, financially speaking, by doing some good on behalf of victims. After a while, most people tire simply of making a profit. If they can band together with other like-minded people and find success, that becomes a more fulfilling proposition. And from there, they feel emboldened to join with an even larger group of like-minded crusaders and engender real change on a societal level.
That’s a higher-level aspiration. That’s meshing business with purpose, technological progress with human advances. Which brings me back to the essential reason for the creation of this book.
I wrote this book to encourage lawyers currently working in other fields to join us in the mass tort space. If you do good working with a network of people, you can do exponentially more with fresh ideas and new talent.
That’s why I want you—anyone who picked up this book—to join the mass tort movement. In short, I want to help you so you can help others. That’s the definition, in my eyes, of a life and career well lived, the X Social Media virtuous circle in action.
My hope is that society will become as transparent with its citizens as we are with our clients. Cynics may scoff, but I firmly believe that we all—no matter what industry you may work in—can play a key role in that positive revolution.