Introduction
What a difference a sense of purpose coupled with an exciting new career path can have on the trajectory of a person’s life. Back in the spring of 2010, before a fateful fracture caused BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig to violently gurgle, spurt, and spew more than 130 million gallons of oil toward my home along the coast of Florida, I knew virtually nothing about mass torts.
Years earlier, I’d given the movie Erin Brockovich a spin, but that pretty much represented the extent of my knowledge about mass torts. If anyone had slipped the acronyms MDL or PSC into a conversation, I would’ve had absolutely no clue what they were talking about.
As a tech-savvy immigrant from Denmark, I was too busy enjoying my little slice of the American dream in sunny Florida. At the time, I was running my family’s business, which developed and sold specialized sanding equipment to the woodworking industry. Multidistrict litigations (MDLs) and plaintiff steering committees (PSCs) were about as far from my mind as possible.
Nevertheless, when you’re raised in an entrepreneurial family as I was—my father was a shipbuilder who developed specialized woodworking equipment—you tend to see the world at slightly more oblique angles than most. Most people are content to employ whatever tools and strategies are currently in use, while some of us yearn to upend the status quo in hopes of reinventing it anew.
I sit squarely in the latter camp. I enjoy peering inside machines— as well as systems and industries—to better understand not only how they work but also how they can be improved by leveraging new technologies.
Lawyers, victims, and legal-services vendors interact within the mass tort industry the way individual gears spin, mesh, and clamp together within an elegantly designed piece of technology.
The world of mass torts is a complicated and interconnected system, even if most lawyers don’t have the engineering background to see it that way. Sometimes, the simple act of identifying the difference between what is being done versus what should be done is the quickest way to achieve real progress.
I know this because I’ve seen the mass tort world from two vastly different perspectives. I’ve been impacted by corporate negligence firsthand, and I’ve worked with mass tort lawyers across the country to help plaintiffs receive just compensation for their injuries under the law.
I no longer specialize in high-powered sanders anymore. I specialize in helping mass tort lawyers find clients through Facebook and digital TV advertising. I’ve done my very best to be as transparent as possible about what I do and how I do it because I think it’s vital for mass tort lawyers to forge connections with worthy clients who need their expertise.
If we are all interconnected—vendors, victims, and lawyers alike—then we can lean on each other to help fight injustice wherever and whenever it might emerge.
For me, it’s something of a calling. Those of us on the plaintiff side of the courtroom have devoted our careers—and in some cases, our lives—to helping victims because we’ve experienced the gratification of helping the aggrieved. For in doing so, we can help kickstart a new and more virtuous cycle that transforms individual lives as well as society as a whole.
Given some of the victims I’ve met over the last decade, I think that calling my family and me “victims” of the BP oil spill might be too strong of a word. People lost their lives on the Deepwater Horizon. And I know plenty of Floridians who lost their businesses. I know people who got sick as a result of the spill. And I know others whose lives were forever changed by that tragedy. But no one would argue that my family and I weren’t, in the very least, impacted by the spill.
I remember turning on our local news on April 20, 2010, and seeing surreal images of “burning” water drifting across the Gulf of Mexico. The oil spill had caused millions of barrels of flaming oil to literally float atop the seas. From afar, it looked like some kind of bizarre magic trick.
Over the years, I’ve seen a great deal in my travels across the globe. I grew up in Denmark before going to the Copenhagen Business School. I learned English at Oxford, studied French at the Collège International de Cannes, and even traveled eastward to Russia, where I boarded with a charming family in Odessa while being tutored by a professor from the University of Odessa.
What I witnessed after the BP oil spill was unlike anything I’d ever seen in my life. It was an unnatural and unnecessary tragedy. And sure enough, over time, negligence did indeed come to light. The story is worthy of its own book, but suffice to say that a damaged wellhead connected thousands of feet below the oil rig fractured and the pipe’s accompanying shut-off valve didn’t work properly.
Far too little attention and resources, in my opinion, had been devoted to maintaining these vital safety features—and scores of us along the Gulf Coast paid the price.
It was—and remains—a classic example of a company that prioritized maximizing profits over the welfare of people, which continues to be a far-too-common occurrence in corporate America.
This string of fateful decisions unleashed nothing less than man-made hell in our direction.
If you’ve ever seen the film Deepwater Horizon, you know what followed. Lives were sucked and burned out of existence that evening as rig workers toiled to contain the disaster. Despite these efforts, some 3.19 million barrels of oil poured out into the Gulf of Mexico, transforming those waters into a receptacle of slick black ooze.
The oil kept burbling its way over the water for eighty-seven straight days in what became the largest man-made oil spill ever recorded.1
Day after day, my family and I could see it crawling, fingering, and slicking its way toward our neighbors and us. We lived in a little community called Navarre, Florida, not far from Pensacola. It’s a stunning place, which some people refer to as “Florida’s best-kept secret.” But it didn’t take long for our postcard-worthy little community to transform into what could accurately be called “Paradise Lost.”
The waters, once a shimmering aquamarine, turned black as sackcloth. BP was granted permission to try and “fix” the problem by dumping an oil-dispersing agent called Corexit—a dangerous chemical that had been banned in the United Kingdom.
What surprised me more than anything was the relative silence that greeted these paltry efforts. Outsiders seemed to pay very little attention to what was going on along the coast, including the legal community.
That old cliché that says whenever a tragedy occurs, you’re bound to find a lawyer, business card in hand, wasn’t true for us.
Our community, like so many others along the coast, felt completely alone and utterly abandoned. We were, both literally and
figuratively, swallowed up by a dark force, like Jonah in the belly of the whale.
In the years since, I’ve come to understand why. At the time, it was far more difficult for mass tort lawyers to find clients immediately following a tragedy.
How does a lawyer living miles—or in some cases, half the country—away knock on doors, erect billboard ads, or launch TV ads to those affected by the spill? It’s not only a difficult task but the return on investment ran the risk of being very low. Thus, practically no one arrived to take stock of what was going on.
Back in 2010, this ignorance angered me. I was angry that no one, including the media, seemed willing to document how the spill was destroying the livelihoods of so many people. So I decided during the summer of 2010, as the sea continued to thrust black and smelly oily dross, to launch a simple blog.
The site was meant to inform victims of the spill of what I was seeing and provide all of us a platform to share ideas. I was, to say the least, shocked by the response I received.
In short, people felt as if they were alone—that they were unseen and unheard. Completely invisible. They felt as if the tragedy was only happening to them. Only it was happening to all of us, in different places but in similar ways.
On my blog, I documented as accurately as I could what was happening in Navarre that July. I became an information source to people. I documented the arrival of the “men in green” and how these BP scrubbers in green suits tried (rather unsuccessfully, in some cases) to rid our beaches of this oil and the chemicals.
Imagine for a moment that horrible juxtaposition of images. One inviting; one worthy of tears. One day, you’re surrounded by beautiful beaches covered with glistening sand, the sort of magical powder my children would curl between their toes and pack into tiny sandcastles. Suddenly, those same grains turned into the equivalent of black quicksand. Greasy and dangerous. A kind of slick sandpit that felt capable of sticking to the soles of your feet and dragging you under.
Someone needed to do something. That much I knew. And based on the growth of my little blog, which reached hundreds of thousands of readers by the fall, lots of people agreed with me. It took seven to eight months before lawyers realized what was going on in our communities. Which by my estimation was far too long.
As it turns out, I was one of the people who decided to do something about it. Today, I help mass tort lawyers find potential clients using Facebook. My company, X Social Media, deploys more than $50 million in advertising every year on behalf of lawyers across the country. We have been named by Inc. Magazine as the 159th fastest-growing company in the United States, as evidenced by our 2,440 percent growth rate over the last three years. Our work has been profiled in countless publications, both within the legal community and beyond.
We find ourselves in a unique position—with an ability to truly help those affected by corporate negligence—because we understand the needs of both victims and law firms. We see the whole playing field. We know all the major players who are involved in mass torts. And all the networking that’s required to bring a tort to settlement. As well as all the new technologies and strategies that can be leveraged to achieve those aims.
We reject greed in every form—refusing to overcharge or spring unexpected billing surprises on our legal clients—because we firmly believe that our mission to help victims is a worthy pursuit.
We partner with the best lawyers in our field and are committed to helping other lawyers in different fields join this worthwhile fight.
That’s why this book was written. I want to improve the lives of those who’ve been injured due to unsafe products, while simultaneously encouraging more lawyers to join us in our crusade. It’s also why some of the best legal minds and most skilled vendors in our field have chosen to contribute to this book.
The technologies and client-finding strategies that we provide to mass tort lawyers have dramatically lowered the bar of entry for outsiders. Normally, lawyers don’t take on cases unless they are sure they will win them. Nine out of ten times, mass tort plaintiff lawyers win cases because large corporations fail to properly warn users that their products can indeed cause harm. In this way, the bar required to win a settlement is far lower in mass torts than in other areas of the law. The US legal system provides lawyers the ability to go after manufacturers who fail to warn us of potential dangers hiding within their products or actions.
What lawyers struggled to do, for many years, was find clients quickly and efficiently. We’ve helped ease that initial hurdle.
Back in the summer of 2010, I wanted to help anyone who was affected by the BP oil spill receive compensation for their pain and suffering. I was saddened to hear from many victims that they were agreeing to small $5,000 payouts, which they needed simply to stay afloat, rather than choosing to band together to get what they actually deserved.
That’s when I contacted several high-profile mass tort lawyers, including Brent Coon of Brent Coon & Associates in Texas.
We hit it off immediately because I felt our values were perfectly aligned and that he was committed to holding BP’s feet to the proverbial fire.
He’d already taken BP to court over the Texas City explosion in 2005, and he seemed committed to doing the same for our communities.
I wrote a blog post about Mr. Coon, intent on providing readers another option. By the close of the BP oil spill, Mr. Coon would sign up over three thousand victims thanks in part to my website.
Today, using our advanced Facebook targeting, that number would probably rise beyond one hundred thousand.
Early on, I realized that Facebook was not just a platform for monitoring what your friends and family did over a given weekend. It was, at its core, a discovery tool. It could be used to help mass tort lawyers “discover” clients and help victims “discover” more about the products or corporations that played a role in their injuries.
Many victims of the BP oil spill had no idea that they could even file a claim against BP. They assumed it was like any other catastrophe that they’d experienced in the past: an unfortunate fact of life. They figured pain and economic losses were merely the price they had to pay for all the benefits of living on the coast. The phrase I heard time and again was simply that “shit happens.”
“It happens everywhere,” my neighbors would tell me. “We just suck it up, take our licks, and move on.” They had no idea that there were lawyers out there willing to help them claim compensation for their injuries and the financial losses brought about by the spill.
I’d like to hope that my efforts and the efforts of Brent Coon helped play a role in revealing a different path.
By the summer of 2011, I was helping other law firms use Facebook to find other clients for different mass torts. My work generated eyebrowraising results, which have grown more impressive with each passing year.
I had found a way to deconstruct the traditional way mass tort lawyers look for clients and help them adopt a new and far more efficient process. All my training, including my business and engineering acumen as well as my ability to deconstruct how and why systems function the way they do, have led me directly to what I do today.
Today, my core client list includes more than 350 plaintiff-side law firms in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. And I feel, after the success of my first book, that I can reveal a new path and use what I’ve learned to help other lawyers in other fields join us. All you need to do is turn the page and read on.
1 “Gulf Oil Spill,” Smithsonian, accessed June 17, 2021, http://ocean.si.edu/gulf-oil-spill.