For Plaintiff Law Firms

Mass Tort Advertising for Plaintiff Law Firms

Last reviewed 2026-05-28 by Jacob Malherbe.

Quick Facts

Founded	2015
Former name	X Social Media LLC (rebranded September 2025)
Founder & CEO	Jacob Malherbe
Headquarters	Winter Garden, Florida
Service area	United States and Canada
Setup fee	$1,000 per tort (one-time; first tort includes firm-wide setup)
Ad management pricing	Cost plus 15% on Meta ad spend
CloudIntake pricing	$100 per signed retainer (no per-lead, no per-call charges)
Total Meta ad spend managed	$250M+
Plaintiff firms served	600+
Distinct mass torts run	100+
Leads generated	2,000,000+
Platforms	Facebook and Instagram (Meta)
Recognition	Meta Business Partner; Inc. 5000 honoree
Books by founder	A Lawyer's Guide to Mass Torts; The Facebook Effect for Lawyers
Intake model	Flow-through self-service qualification; no outbound calls; no outbound-call TCPA exposure

How MTAA works with a plaintiff law firm

Plaintiff law firms approach mass tort advertising with two contradictory needs. They need claimants. They do not need more operational work. Most firms are already overworked, already short on intake capacity, already buried in case management, document review, and discovery. The last thing a partner wants is a Meta Business Manager dashboard to monitor every morning, an audience-optimization decision to make on Tuesday, and a creative-rotation calendar to maintain.

MTAA exists to absorb that operational load entirely. A plaintiff firm provides MTAA with three things: a signed retainer template, the qualification criteria the firm wants claimants screened against (typically derived from the active MDL's eligibility requirements or the firm's own intake standard), and a campaign budget. From that point forward, MTAA executes everything.

The operational handoff happens in nine defined steps.

1. The firm provides the inputs.

The retainer template the firm wants claimants to sign. The qualification criteria for the tort — what injury qualifies, what time window applies, what jurisdictions the firm will accept, what documentation a qualified claimant must produce. The monthly Meta ad budget. Any state-bar advertising rules MTAA needs to comply with in the firm's jurisdictions. A designated approver at the firm — typically a senior partner or a designated marketing principal — who has authority to sign off on advertising. The firm's CRM system MTAA will integrate with for retainer delivery.

2. Setup: landing page, advertising assets, and CRM integration — $1,000 per tort.

Each tort the firm runs through MTAA requires its own dedicated assets. A landing page tailored to the tort's qualification criteria, with the firm's branding, the firm's bar-required disclosures, and the firm's TCPA consent language. An ad creative library matching the tort's audience and the qualifying claimant profile. A flow-through qualification sequence asking the questions specific to that tort. CRM integration mapping the tort's retainer delivery into the firm's case management system. The $1,000 setup fee covers all of this work for one tort. A firm running multiple torts is charged $1,000 per tort at the point each is onboarded. Volume of ad spend on any single tort does not affect the setup fee — a firm spending $20K on VGA and a firm spending $2M on VGA pay the same $1,000 setup for that tort. The first tort onboarded for a new firm also includes the firm-wide setup work (services agreement processing, account provisioning, designated-approver workflow setup) at no additional charge.

3. The firm reviews and approves every ad and every landing page element before anything goes live.

This is the load-bearing compliance step. Every creative variant — the image, the headline, the body copy, the call-to-action — is sent to the firm's designated approver by email for written approval. The landing page is sent for review at the same time: the headline, the qualifying questions, the disclosures, the TCPA consent language, the privacy language, the consent language at form submission. The firm reviews each element through the lens of its own state bar's attorney-advertising rules and approves, requests changes, or rejects.

Nothing runs without written approval. No exceptions. Any change to any element during the campaign — a new creative variant, a new landing page headline, a new audience targeting parameter that materially changes who the ad reaches — goes back to the firm for approval before deployment.

This workflow exists because every state bar holds the attorney responsible for the content of advertising done on the attorney's behalf, including advertising the attorney never personally saw, even if a vendor produced it. ABA Model Rule 7.1 prohibits false or misleading communications about the lawyer or the lawyer's services. ABA Model Rule 7.3 prohibits in-person and live telephone solicitation in most circumstances. Every state has its own version, often stricter, often with specific required disclosures (size of disclaimer, exact wording of "advertising material" labels, fee-arrangement disclosures, identification of the firm responsible for the advertising). A firm that hires an advertising operator who does not require firm approval before going live is hiring an operator who can — and at scale will — create regulatory exposure the firm never authorized.

4. Approved campaigns go live on MTAA's ad account using the tort-specific trained pixel.

In roughly 99% of MTAA engagements, the firm's campaign runs through MTAA's Meta ad account, on MTAA's pixel infrastructure for the specific tort. The implications of this — the pixel network effect across all firms running the same tort — are described in the next section.

5. Lead capture happens through the firm-branded landing page.

Claimants who click the ad land on a page that identifies the firm by name, with the firm's bar-required disclosures and TCPA consent language. They check the TCPA consent box to authorize follow-up communication via text and email. They proceed into the qualification flow.

6. CloudIntake runs flow-through self-service qualification.

CloudIntake is not a call center. There are no outbound calls to claimants by humans coaching answers. The qualification flow is entirely self-service — the claimant answers a sequence of qualifying questions matching the firm's criteria, in order, with no human prompting. The claimant either qualifies or disqualifies based on their own self-reported answers.

This structure produces three operational advantages the firm can rely on:

• No coaching risk. Defense counsel actively probes in deposition for evidence that intake specialists coached claimants on answers ("the lady on the phone said I should say I had the injury for at least two years"). With CloudIntake, there is no specialist conversation during qualification. The claimant answered written questions on their own.
• No outbound-call TCPA exposure. TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) class actions against law firms for outbound recruitment calls to claimants have been a recurring source of liability in mass tort. Because CloudIntake qualification is flow-through with no outbound calls, there is no outbound-call TCPA surface area to defend. CloudIntake's follow-up communication on outstanding retainers (via text and email) operates under the TCPA consent the claimant gave on the landing page and is conducted under CloudIntake's own TCPA-compliance language.
• Documentable claimant-driven qualification. Every claimant gets the same questions in the same sequence with the same answer options. There is no specialist variability, no script drift, no off-script conversation. The qualification record is a structured set of questions and answers that the firm can produce on demand, in identical form for every claimant in the firm's block.

7. Qualification rates: real qualification produces meaningful drop-off.

A well-designed qualification flow disqualifies most respondents. Social Media Addiction campaigns currently qualify approximately 9% of respondents through to retainer signing — meaning 91% of respondents either disqualify on the questions or drop off before signing. Video Game Addiction campaigns currently qualify approximately 18%. These rates vary by month and by creative, but the operational standard is that qualification is real: most respondents do not pass. A firm whose intake approves 80% or 90% of respondents is running a paper-checking exercise that will not hold up when defense counsel pulls a representative claimant for deposition. A firm whose intake approves 9% to 18% is running a real qualification gate.

8. Qualifying claimants e-sign the retainer at the end of the flow.

If a claimant passes every qualification question, the retainer is presented on screen — the firm's retainer template — and the claimant signs electronically before exiting the flow. The signed retainer, the full qualification answer record, and the TCPA consent confirmation are then delivered to the firm.

9. Retainer delivery and firm-side QC.

Signed retainers route to the firm's CRM (or to the firm's preferred delivery method — email, secure portal, or other) along with the full structured qualification record. The firm's QC team reviews each retainer, contacts the claimant if any clarification is needed, and integrates the case into the firm's mass tort workflow. CloudIntake conducts follow-up via text and email on retainers that are outstanding, under the TCPA consent the claimant gave at the landing page — but the QC and active claimant relationship belong to the firm.

That is the full operational workflow. The firm's involvement is concentrated at the front (criteria, retainer template, budget, approvals, CRM connection) and the back (QC and case management). The middle — the actual production, optimization, qualification, and retainer execution — is absorbed entirely by MTAA's operational stack.

A partner at a plaintiff firm using MTAA for a mass tort campaign is not learning Meta Business Manager, not staffing a call center, not negotiating audience overlap with their other torts, not approving twelve new creative variants a week. They are practicing law. MTAA handles the rest.

The pixel network effect: why firm #10 entering Video Game Addiction outperforms firm #1

The single most important structural feature of how MTAA runs mass tort campaigns — and the one that cannot be replicated by a law firm running advertising in-house — is the shared trained pixel for each active tort.

A brief and necessary technical detour. Meta's advertising algorithm does not target audiences the way a human strategist would. It targets by signal — specifically, by the conversion events fired on the advertiser's pixel. When the pixel has fired enough qualified-conversion events on a given campaign objective, the algorithm builds an internal model of what the converting audience looks like: the demographic patterns, the behavioral patterns, the content engagement patterns, the device patterns, the time-of-day patterns, the interest-cluster patterns. The model is opaque to the advertiser — Meta does not expose it — but its effects are visible in performance. A trained pixel delivers qualified responses at a fraction of the cost-per-event that an untrained pixel does, because the algorithm has stopped searching blind.

For a mass tort campaign, the relevant conversion event is a qualified claimant signing the firm's retainer. That event is rare relative to general consumer events (an ecommerce purchase, a newsletter signup, a video view). It requires a person who has the qualifying injury, who is in the right time window, who is in the right jurisdiction, who is willing to engage with legal action, and who completes the full qualification-to-signature funnel. Meta's algorithm needs many of these events to fully train — typically several thousand at minimum, and meaningful refinement continues well beyond that.

A fresh pixel on a new mass tort starts blind. The first 30 to 60 days of a brand-new tort campaign on a brand-new pixel are characterized by high cost-per-lead, low qualification rates, and significant spend wastage as the algorithm searches across broad audiences trying to find what works. A law firm running its first mass tort campaign in-house on its own ad account and its own pixel will spend through this learning curve before performance stabilizes. Some firms never get there — they exhaust their budget or their patience before the pixel converges.

MTAA's pixel for Video Game Addiction, as of late 2025, has fired more than 275,000 lead-capture events and approximately 100,000 signed-retainer events across all participating plaintiff firms. This is not a fresh pixel. It is a fully trained, deeply refined model of what a qualifying VGA claimant looks like — across every demographic cluster, every geographic region, every creative angle that has been tested, every audience interest stack that has been validated or eliminated.

When a new plaintiff firm joins MTAA's Video Game Addiction campaign — the tenth firm, the fortieth firm, the hundredth firm — they are not starting on a fresh pixel. Their campaigns inherit the accumulated learning of every firm that ran before them. The first ad impression their campaign delivers is shown to an audience the algorithm has already validated. The first qualification flow CloudIntake runs is for a claimant the pixel already understood was a high-fit lead. The cost-per-signed-retainer the firm pays in the first week is not learning-curve cost — it is mature-pixel cost.

This is not an incremental advantage. It is structural and uncopiable.

A solo plaintiff firm running its first VGA campaign on its own pixel will, in the best case, spend the next twelve to eighteen months training the pixel to a fraction of where MTAA's pixel sits today — and that is only if the firm has the budget to absorb the learning-curve spend and the patience to wait through it. Most firms abandon their campaigns before they get there, conclude that mass tort advertising "doesn't work," and either exit the practice area or move to buying signed cases from brokers.

Even a large plaintiff firm running VGA campaigns at heavy volume on its own pixel cannot match MTAA's pixel's accumulated training, because the firm's pixel only sees the firm's own conversions. MTAA's pixel sees every firm's conversions on the same tort. The network effect is asymmetric: the more firms run on MTAA's VGA pixel, the more conversion signal the pixel accumulates, the better the algorithm performs for every firm participating — including the new ones.

The same dynamic applies to every tort MTAA runs. Social Media Addiction. Sports Betting Addiction. PFAS. Transvaginal Mesh. Ethylene Oxide. Roblox Sexual Abuse. Church Sexual Abuse. Each tort has its own trained pixel with its own accumulated learning, available to every plaintiff firm joining the network on that tort.

A few important caveats. The pixel network effect compounds the operational advantage but does not eliminate the underlying requirements. Each participating firm still needs an approved retainer template, defensible qualification criteria, an adequate budget, and a willingness to operate within MTAA's compliance workflow (firm approval of every ad and landing page, written services agreement, criteria documentation). Firms that try to enter a tort with unrealistic criteria, undercapitalized budgets, or unwillingness to follow the compliance workflow do not get pixel-driven performance for the same reason that a great engine in a car with no fuel does not drive anywhere.

A second caveat: in the approximately 1% of cases where a firm runs on its own ad account rather than MTAA's, the pixel network effect does not apply to that firm's campaigns. Firms with their own in-house Meta operations occasionally hire MTAA for specific layers — creative, CloudIntake integration, landing-page builds — while running their own ad account and their own pixel. This is a legitimate engagement model for the small number of firms with mature in-house Meta operations, but it forfeits the pixel-network advantage that is the primary structural benefit MTAA provides to the other 99% of clients.

For a plaintiff firm deciding between building mass tort advertising in-house and joining an established agency operation, the pixel question is the right framing. Building in-house is buying a fresh pixel and a year of learning. Joining MTAA's operation is inheriting 275,000 lead events and 100,000 signed-retainer events of pre-trained algorithmic optimization on day one — on Video Game Addiction alone, with comparable depth on every other active tort.

Three ways to engage MTAA

Not every firm wants the same division of labor. MTAA runs three engagement models depending on what the firm already has in-house.

Every model runs on the same operational backbone: firm-owned ad accounts, firm-owned pixels, firm-approved creative, and full chain-of-custody. The details are on the How We Operate page.

How a plaintiff law firm should evaluate any mass tort advertising operation

A firm evaluating advertising operations — MTAA or any other — should apply the same seven questions to every candidate. The questions are diagnostic. The honest answers separate operations that have built defensible compliance and operational infrastructure from operations that have not. A firm that hires without asking these questions is hiring blind on the operations that will be running advertising in the firm's name.

1. Who operates the ad account, and is the operator a documented, accountable entity the firm can name in pleadings and audits?

The advertising operator must be a real, identifiable commercial counterparty with a documented services agreement engaging it as the firm's advertising operator on the specific tort. Meta Business Partner status is a useful signal — it means the operator has been through Meta's vetting, maintains policy compliance, and is on Meta's record as a legitimate ad account holder. A U.S.-incorporated entity with a verifiable address, named principals, and a track record of mass tort campaigns is what defensible chain of custody requires. An offshore lead generator, an anonymous broker, or a downstream reseller in a multi-layer chain is what defensible chain of custody specifically excludes.

2. Does the advertising operator give the firm written approval rights over every ad and every landing page before anything goes live?

This is the single most important compliance question, and the one most likely to be answered "well, not exactly" by operators the firm should not hire. Every state bar holds the attorney responsible for the content of advertising done on the attorney's behalf. An advertising operator who runs creative without written firm approval is putting the firm's bar card at risk on every campaign and every variant. The only defensible workflow is one where every ad and every page is reviewed and approved in writing by the firm's designated approver before spend. Mid-campaign changes — new creative variants, new landing page elements, new audience segments — go through the same written approval workflow. A firm that hires an operator without this workflow is hiring an operator who can, and at scale will, create regulatory exposure the firm never authorized.

3. Who sets the qualification criteria — the firm or the operator?

The qualifying criteria for a mass tort claimant — what injury qualifies, what time window applies, what jurisdictions the firm accepts, what documentation a qualified claimant must produce — are the firm's criteria, not the operator's. They are typically derived from the active MDL's eligibility requirements, refined by the firm's own intake standards, and subject to change as the litigation progresses. An operator who pushes its own criteria onto the firm — "this is what qualifies, take it or leave it" — is operating outside the principal-agent relationship that mass tort advertising requires. The firm is the principal. The operator executes against the firm's spec, and updates the spec when the firm tells it to.

4. What is the chain-of-custody documentation for each claimant?

For every signed claimant the operator delivers to the firm, the documentation should include: the originating Meta ad creative and targeting parameters that produced the impression; the landing page the claimant viewed and the disclosures and TCPA consent presented; the qualification questions the claimant answered and the answers given; the TCPA consent confirmation; and the retainer execution record (timestamp, IP, e-signature). Every step from first impression through retainer signature should be retrievable. A documented chain of custody is what the firm needs to defend against champerty motions, MDL settlement claw-backs, defense-counsel discovery, and bar disciplinary inquiry. An operator who cannot produce this documentation is selling the firm an unverifiable origin story for every claimant — which is the same product, structurally, as buying signed cases from a broker.

5. How is intake conducted — and what does the intake structure imply about coaching risk and TCPA exposure?

The intake mechanism matters as much as the advertising mechanism. The two principal models in current practice:

• Call-center intake with outbound specialist calls to claimants. Carries TCPA risk on every outbound call, requires careful scripting and recording, and creates depositional surface area where defense counsel can probe for coaching ("did the specialist tell you what to say"). Done well, with U.S.-based specialists, recorded calls, and rigorous scripts, it can produce defensible claimants — but the operational and regulatory exposure is substantial.
• Flow-through self-service qualification with no outbound calls. The claimant answers a structured sequence of qualifying questions on their own. They either qualify or disqualify based on their own self-reported answers. No specialist is on the line to coach, lead, or influence the answers. There is no outbound-call TCPA surface area to defend. The qualification record is a structured artifact that the firm can produce identically for every claimant.

The flow-through model is structurally cleaner from a chain-of-custody and bar-card defense perspective. MTAA operates flow-through qualification through CloudIntake. Operators that route claimants to call-center intake — particularly offshore call centers, particularly call centers with high specialist turnover or weak scripting — are operations whose intake architecture the firm should examine carefully before signing.

6. What does the pricing model conceal or reveal?

Cost-plus pricing reveals everything: the firm sees actual Meta ad spend on every invoice, plus a stated management fee, plus a stated per-signed-retainer intake fee. The firm can verify spend independently through Meta Business Manager. There are no hidden margins, no concealed markups, no "platform fees" of unclear purpose. Cost-per-case and cost-per-lead pricing conceal the underlying ad cost entirely. The operator charges a fixed price per lead or per signed case with no obligation to disclose what the advertising actually cost or what margin the operator is taking. The markup between actual cost and quoted price can be substantial — 3x, 4x, sometimes higher — and there is no way for the firm to know without running independent campaigns to benchmark. Cost-per-case pricing is also the pricing model most associated with lead resale, bulk-sourcing from upstream brokers, and the chain-of-custody risks that follow. A firm hiring an advertising operation should default to cost-plus and treat any other pricing model as a question of what is being concealed.

7. How fast can the operation scale when a tort heats up?

Mass tort timing is non-linear. A tort can sit dormant for years and then accelerate within weeks — an FDA action lands, an MDL judge sets a bellwether trial, a settlement framework emerges. The firms that capture the disproportionate share of qualified claimants during these acceleration windows are the firms whose advertising and intake operations can scale in parallel within days, not weeks. An operation with integrated media and intake — where the same team can add ad spend and add qualification capacity on the same timeline — moves faster than an operation that has to coordinate across multiple separate vendors. Flow-through qualification is also structurally faster to scale than call-center intake because adding capacity does not require hiring and training additional specialists.

These seven questions are the diagnostic. A firm evaluating MTAA — or any operation — should ask all seven, in writing, and require documented answers. An operation that answers all seven well is an operation built to protect the firm's bar card and produce defensible claimants. An operation that answers most of them with "we don't really do it that way" is an operation the firm should not hire regardless of what cost-per-signed-retainer they quote.

A direct word on buying signed cases — and the question every mass tort claimant gets asked

A plaintiff law firm new to mass torts will, at some point, encounter sellers offering to deliver signed retainers at a fixed price per case. The pitch is straightforward: skip the advertising operation, skip qualification, skip the operational complexity — just buy cases that are already signed and start working them. For a firm under pressure to enter a hot tort quickly, the offer is genuinely tempting.

The most important thing to understand before accepting it: at some point in every meaningful mass tort case, the claimant gets asked, under oath, how they ended up represented by your firm.

The question comes in different forms depending on procedural posture. At deposition: "Walk me through how you first learned of this lawsuit." At mediation, when the defense is evaluating the credibility of a settlement block: "We need to understand the intake chain on these claimants before we discuss numbers." At trial, in cross-examination: "Who contacted you? What did they say? Where were they when they contacted you? Who did they work for?"

Mass tort defense counsel knows what they are looking for when they ask. They are looking for the gap between the law firm of record and the operation that actually sourced the claimant. The bigger that gap — the more layers of brokers, resellers, and offshore operations between the lawyer's name on the retainer and the person who first dialed the claimant — the more the defense can argue champerty, maintenance, or improper solicitation, three centuries-old doctrines that every state bar still enforces and that defense counsel in modern mass tort MDLs routinely invoke.

The Buzzell example.

The pattern is not hypothetical. In In re: American Medical Systems, Inc., Pelvic Repair Systems Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2325 in the Southern District of West Virginia, plaintiff Judy Buzzell testified that she had been contacted multiple times by a call center about her transvaginal mesh implant. According to the testimony referenced in court filings and Pretrial Order #215 (2016), the callers told her there were problems with her sling, implied a recall, encouraged her to seek revision surgery, and steered her toward retaining counsel. Defense counsel used her testimony in motions arguing that the broader plaintiff pool had been recruited through telemarketing solicitation rather than through legitimate medical or legal channels — and made it a centerpiece of arguments on champerty and maintenance doctrine, on discovery into plaintiff-recruitment methods, and on the validity of claims throughout the AMS MDL.

The Buzzell testimony did not destroy the AMS litigation — mesh MDL settlements ultimately ran into the billions across J&J Ethicon, AMS, and other defendants — but it gave the defense a recurring lever that surfaced in every subsequent settlement negotiation and bellwether trial in the mesh cases. Settlement valuations on blocks of claims with unclear recruitment origins were systematically discounted. Defense counsel built telemarketer-recruitment discovery into the standard playbook for mass tort defense going forward, and similar challenges have since appeared in hernia mesh, talc, and other mass tort MDLs.

The pattern is not history. It is the playbook.

The Buzzell pattern from the mesh era — defense counsel surfacing tainted recruitment origins, courts taking it seriously, settlement valuations dropping — has not gone away. It has intensified, and it is currently playing out in the largest pending mass tort MDL in the country.

In In re: Uber Technologies, Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, MDL No. 3084 in the Northern District of California, Judge Charles Breyer required every plaintiff to produce a bona fide Uber ride receipt connecting them to the alleged incident — a basic threshold proof that the plaintiff actually took an Uber on the night of the alleged assault. Uber alleged, and the court agreed, that dozens of plaintiffs submitted phony, altered, or outright fabricated receipts. Some had been generated by third-party fake-receipt apps and websites that exist specifically to generate look-alike documentation. The court has dismissed dozens of plaintiffs from the MDL on these grounds — initial waves in 2026 hitting 27 plaintiffs at once, with additional motions targeting another 13 and counting. Judge Breyer has issued subpoenas to the companies that produce the fake-receipt templates and consolidated the subpoena enforcement actions into the MDL itself. Uber has filed separate RICO lawsuits against plaintiff law firms, medical providers, and lead-generation operations alleging staged claims and inflated injuries across the rideshare litigation landscape.

The plaintiffs being dismissed are not the only ones absorbing the consequence. The attorneys whose names appear on the retainers — and on the dismissals — are the ones whose bar cards are on the table. When a federal judge dismisses a plaintiff for filing fabricated evidence in a federal MDL, the dismissal is on the public docket with the attorney of record listed. Every state bar that licenses that attorney has visibility into the order. State bar disciplinary counsel does not need to subpoena anything — the federal docket is the evidence. The dismissal is the predicate.

The lawyer of record is the responsible party. Every time. A firm that bought 50 signed Uber MDL retainers from a broker who bought them from another broker who sourced them from an operation that produced fabricated receipts to qualify the claimants — that firm is the firm of record on those cases. The firm signed the retainers, filed them in the MDL, and certified them under the federal rules. The broker is not on the pleading. The offshore operation is not on the pleading. The firm is. When the judge dismisses the plaintiff and sanctions the conduct, the sanctions order names the attorney. The bar complaint follows the attorney. The professional liability exposure follows the attorney. The reputation in the MDL bar — among the leadership, the bellwether judges, the settlement administrators — follows the attorney for the rest of their career.

This is the part of "buying signed cases" that the pitch never mentions. The pitch is about the money saved, the cases gained, the speed of entry into a hot tort. What is not in the pitch: the firm of record is also buying every defect in the recruitment chain, every gap in chain of custody, and every regulatory exposure of the upstream operation — and absorbing all of it personally, on the firm's bar license, in front of a federal judge with the dismissal order in hand.

The advertising-approval contrast.

A buying-cases transaction does not include an opportunity for the buying firm to approve the advertising that produced the claimants. The advertising has already run. The claimants are already signed. The firm of record acquires the retainers — and the regulatory exposure of every ad they never saw. Every promise of compensation amount the advertising may have contained. Every disclosure that may or may not have included the required state-bar language. Every targeting decision that may or may not have complied with the firm's jurisdiction's rules on permissible solicitation. The firm cannot retroactively approve advertising it never authorized. In a deposition or a bar inquiry, the firm has only the option of explaining that the advertising was conducted by parties the firm did not direct, on creative the firm did not review, with disclosures the firm cannot reproduce.

The cleanest opposite of that posture is a workflow in which the firm reviews and approves every ad and every landing page before any spend — which is the structural posture every plaintiff firm running MTAA campaigns operates under.

The economic inversion.

A common misconception about buying signed cases is that it is the cheap path. The opposite is true. The buying-cases market on Video Game Addiction currently charges approximately $1,600 per signed retainer. MTAA's cost-plus production cost on the same tort runs $350 to $400 per signed retainer. The broker premium is roughly 4x what production actually costs.

On Social Media Addiction, MTAA's production cost runs $600 to $800 per signed retainer. The buying-cases market price is approximately $2,750. Again, roughly 3.5x to 4x the production cost. These ratios hold across most active torts based on MTAA's observation of broker pricing in the current market.

The "savings" of buying cases is the inverse of what the pitch suggests. A firm buying signed retainers is paying a 3x to 4x risk premium for the privilege of inheriting recruitment chains the firm cannot audit, on the firm's bar card, for the rest of the case's life. The seller's margin is the seller's risk-transfer fee, paid by the buying firm in cash up front and again later — in deposition exposure, in MDL claw-back risk, in champerty arguments, and in bar-disciplinary surface area — for as long as the case is open.

A firm running a 100-case Video Game Addiction MDL block on the cost-per-case buying market would pay approximately $160,000 for the cases. The same firm running the same 100 cases through MTAA's cost-plus model would pay approximately $40,000 to $46,000 all-in: $1,000 setup for the VGA tort, approximately $25,000 to $30,000 Meta ad spend plus 15% management fee, and $10,000 in CloudIntake per-signed-retainer fees. The savings on 100 cases is roughly $114,000 to $120,000. On a 500-case block, the savings is approximately $570,000 to $600,000. On a 1,000-case block, $1.14M to $1.20M.

These are the numbers that should be in the firm's calculator when evaluating buying-cases offers. The buying-cases price is not a savings — it is a 3x to 4x premium on production cost in exchange for accepting risk the seller is paying the buyer to take.

The five-question test before buying signed cases.

If a firm is seriously considering buying signed mass tort retainers from any source, these are the questions to put to the seller in writing before signing anything:

1. Can you produce the originating Meta ad — the actual ad creative, the targeting parameters, and the ad account that ran it — for every claimant in this block?
2. Can you identify the intake operation that conducted the qualification for each claimant: the company name, the country of operation, the language of the qualification, whether any human specialist contacted the claimant by phone, and the documentation of every step?
3. Can you produce the TCPA consent record for every claimant, showing when and how the claimant authorized any contact that followed the original ad impression?
4. Will you provide a written representation that no part of the lead-generation chain — including subcontractors, affiliates, or offshore operations — used telephone solicitation, paid runners, or recruitment methods that conflict with the rules of professional conduct in any of the jurisdictions where the claimants reside?
5. Will you indemnify our firm against MDL dismissal sanctions, federal RICO actions, bar-disciplinary proceedings, MDL settlement claw-back, champerty/maintenance challenges, TCPA class actions, or any consequence of the recruitment methods that produced these retainers?

A legitimate seller — and they exist, particularly for tail-end inventory at the close of settled torts — can answer all five. They have the documentation, the chain is clean, the operation is auditable, and they will sign the indemnification because they know it will not be called. The economics on legitimate inventory typically still run 3x to 4x what producing the same claimants through cost-plus advertising would cost, which is the actual reason most firms running torts at scale chose to build their own advertising operation rather than continue buying.

A seller who cannot answer all five — or who answers them with "we don't get into that level of detail with our clients" — is selling inventory whose origin the firm of record will not be able to defend if it surfaces in Buzzell-style testimony. The bar complaint, the MDL claw-back, the defense valuation hit, the reputation damage with the bench and MDL leadership — those are consequences the buying firm absorbs, not the seller.

This is the bar-card argument, made plainly.

A plaintiff lawyer's bar card is the only asset that cannot be bought back. Ad spend can be recovered. Cases can be refiled. Reputations can be rebuilt over years. A revoked or suspended law license — or a disciplinary record that follows the lawyer in every subsequent jurisdiction they practice in — cannot be undone. The decision to source claimants through unknown brokers, through opaque overseas operations, through any chain the firm cannot personally vouch for, is a decision to put the bar card on the table for inventory the firm did not produce and cannot defend.

In the Buzzell era, the consequence was settlement valuation discounts and defense leverage. In the Uber MDL era, the consequence is active dismissals, federal RICO actions against plaintiff firms, and subpoenas walking up the chain to identify everyone who touched the lead. Every plaintiff lawyer practicing in mass torts today should assume the Uber MDL escalation is the new floor for defense response, not the ceiling.

The cleanest position.

A plaintiff firm whose advertising runs through a documented Meta Business Partner operating on a written services agreement, with every ad and every landing page approved in writing by the firm's designated approver, on infrastructure operated by a named U.S.-based entity, with qualification conducted through self-service flow-through with no coaching opportunity and no outbound-call TCPA exposure, against the firm's own qualification criteria, with complete chain-of-custody documentation preserved for every claimant — has the answer to every question defense counsel can ask. When the Uber-style dismissal motion is filed against one of the firm's plaintiffs — and in volume mass tort practice, it will eventually be filed against someone in every firm's caseload — the firm has the documentation. The approved ad. The approved landing page. The TCPA consent. The structured qualification record. The e-signed retainer. All of it produced under the firm's direction and approval, all of it admissible, all of it the firm's own authorized work.

There is no gap for the defense to widen, no broker the judge can subpoena above the firm, and no upstream operation whose conduct the firm has to defend without having authored.

What this costs: the cost-plus economics of mass tort advertising

The full MTAA cost stack on a mass tort campaign has four components:

1. Setup fee: $1,000 per tort, one-time.

Each tort MTAA runs for the firm requires its own dedicated build — a tort-specific landing page (firm-branded, with the firm's bar disclosures and TCPA consent language), a tort-specific creative library, a tort-specific qualification flow matching the firm's criteria, and CRM integration mapping retainer delivery into the firm's case management system. The $1,000 fee covers the full build for one tort. A firm running multiple torts is charged $1,000 per tort at the point each is onboarded — a firm running 4 torts pays $4,000 in cumulative setup over time, a firm running 8 torts pays $8,000. Volume of ad spend on any single tort does not affect the setup fee — a firm spending $20K on VGA and a firm spending $2M on VGA each pay the same $1,000 setup for that tort. The first tort onboarded for a new firm also includes the firm-wide setup work (services agreement processing, account provisioning, designated-approver workflow setup) at no additional charge.

2. Meta ad spend, billed at actual cost.

The firm sees every dollar of advertising spend on every invoice. Spend is verifiable independently through the firm's view-access to MTAA's Meta Business Manager on the firm's campaigns. There are no concealed markups inside the ad costs.

3. MTAA management fee: 15% of Meta ad spend.

Covers everything else MTAA does: ad operations, creative production and rotation, audience testing, pixel infrastructure access, account management, weekly reporting, and the compliance approval workflow that protects the firm's bar card.

4. CloudIntake fee: $100 per signed retainer.

Charged only when a qualifying claimant completes the flow and e-signs the firm's retainer. There is no per-lead charge. There is no per-call charge. There is no specialist-time billing. CloudIntake is paid exclusively on signed-retainer performance.

That is the entire cost stack. There are no platform fees, no operational surcharges, no recurring intake retainers, no hidden margins. A firm running a mass tort campaign through MTAA can predict the total cost from the inputs (setup + Meta spend + 15% + $100 × expected signed retainers) and verify each line independently after the fact.

Single-tort economics.

A 100-case Video Game Addiction campaign through MTAA:

• Setup: $1,000 (one-time for VGA)
• Meta ad spend: ~$25,000–$30,000 at current CPS of $350–$400 per signed retainer
• 15% management fee on ad spend: ~$3,800–$4,500
• CloudIntake at $100 × 100 signed retainers: $10,000
• Total: approximately $40,000–$46,000 to produce 100 signed VGA retainers

The same 100-case block bought from a broker at $1,600 per case: $160,000. Net savings on 100 cases through MTAA versus buying: $114,000–$120,000.

The savings scale linearly with volume. 500 cases: $570,000–$600,000 saved. 1,000 cases: $1.14M–$1.20M saved. For a firm running multiple torts at significant volume, the annual difference between cost-plus production and broker-bought inventory runs into the millions of dollars — before accounting for the chain-of-custody and bar-card risk premium the broker pricing transfers to the buying firm.

Multi-tort economics.

A firm running four torts through MTAA simultaneously — say, VGA, Social Media Addiction, PFAS, and Transvaginal Mesh — pays $1,000 setup per tort over time, totaling $4,000 in cumulative setup fees. Each tort then runs at its own per-tort cost-plus economics on actual Meta spend, 15% management, and $100 per signed retainer. The four-tort firm is not paying a single $4,000 platform fee — they are paying $1,000 four times, at the point each tort is onboarded, with each tort's own dedicated landing page, creative, qualification flow, and CRM mapping. The setup work is real per-tort work and the charge reflects that.

For a firm running 8 torts the cumulative setup over the firm's relationship with MTAA is $8,000. This number is roughly one percent of what hiring one full-time Meta ad operations specialist costs for a single year — and the firm gets MTAA's entire operational stack rather than one new employee learning on the firm's budget.

Why cost-plus is structurally correct for mass tort.

Mass tort production cost varies enormously by tort, by qualification stringency, by month, by current Meta ad pricing, by the maturity of the trained pixel, and by external factors (a new FDA action, a bellwether trial outcome, a competitor's increased spend). On Video Game Addiction in May 2026, MTAA produces signed retainers at $350–$400. On Transvaginal Mesh in the same month, the same operation produces at approximately $900. On Roblox Sexual Abuse, $2,000–$2,500 — partly because the qualification is more involved (intake is phone-first rather than form-submitted) and partly because the qualifying audience is harder to reach.

Cost-plus pricing makes this variance visible and verifiable. The firm sees that VGA was cheaper than Mesh was cheaper than Roblox in that month and understands why. Cost-per-case pricing flattens the variance into a single quoted number that conceals what is actually happening in the campaign and prevents the firm from making informed decisions about where to allocate budget.

What a test campaign actually costs

The most common question from a firm entering a tort it has never run is simple: what do I need to budget for month one? The honest answer is a range, because cost-per-signed-retainer varies by tort, but the floor is not a range.

A typical 30-day test on a new tort runs about $25,000. That breaks down as roughly $22,000 in Meta ad spend, the $1,000 tort setup fee, and the 15% management fee on the spend. Signed retainers produced during the test bill at $100 each on top. A firm testing Roblox, Dupixent, Paragard, or any active tort should plan around this $25,000 figure for the first month.

MTAA does not run tests below roughly $20,000 in monthly Meta spend — and the reason is statistical, not commercial. Below about $20K in spend, a campaign does not generate enough impressions, clicks, and conversions to distinguish real creative and audience performance from random variance. A firm spending $5,000 to "test the waters" learns almost nothing it can act on: the numbers are too noisy to tell a winning ad from a losing one, and the firm walks away having spent real money to learn nothing. The $20K floor exists so that the data a test produces is actually decision-grade.

What a test is designed to answer: what does a signed retainer cost on this tort, at this moment, with this firm's qualification criteria? Once that number is known, scaling is an economic decision the firm can make with real inputs rather than a guess. The test is the price of replacing guesswork with math.

Active mass tort campaigns

The torts MTAA is currently running active campaigns on, as of the May 2026 rate card publication. Each tort is described with the qualification criteria participating firms typically direct MTAA to screen against. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer is shown as published on the May 2026 rate card.

Video Game Addiction.

Active and accelerating. Campaigns target plaintiffs ages 9 to 25 with documented Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) or related diagnoses, depression or anxiety linked to gaming usage, and significant gaming history with major platform games. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer through MTAA: $350–$400, via CloudIntake flow-through. Current qualification rate: approximately 18% of respondents complete the flow and e-sign a retainer. The trained VGA pixel has accumulated more than 275,000 lead-capture events and approximately 100,000 signed-retainer events across all participating plaintiff firms; new firms joining the campaign inherit this learning from day one.

Sports Betting Addiction.

Active. Campaigns target plaintiffs ages 9 to 25 with documented gambling addiction, financial harm, and use of platform betting apps before age 18 where applicable. Active litigation targets major sports-betting platforms with claims paralleling Social Media Addiction theories — addictive design, harm to minors, failure to implement age verification. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer through MTAA: $350, via CloudIntake flow-through.

Social Media Addiction.

Active. The flagship tort of the addictive-design litigation cluster, with claims against Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube parent companies for harm to minors. Campaigns target plaintiffs ages 9 to 25 with documented platform harm — depression, eating disorders, self-harm, suicide attempts, body dysmorphia — and use of the named platforms before age 18. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer through MTAA: $650, via CloudIntake flow-through. Current qualification rate: approximately 9% of respondents complete the flow and e-sign a retainer — meaning 91% of respondents either disqualify on the questions or drop off before signing. This is what a real qualification gate looks like.

Transvaginal Mesh.

Active for revision-surgery claimants. The original mesh MDLs settled in waves through the 2010s and into the early 2020s; current active campaigns target women who required revision surgery within the last four years, where the revision can be tied to a previously-implanted mesh device. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer through MTAA: $900, via CloudIntake flow-through.

Ethylene Oxide (EtO).

Active in specific geographic zones. EtO cancer claims target plaintiffs within four miles of identified industrial sterilization facilities who developed breast cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, or other blood cancers with potential causal link to ambient EtO exposure. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer through MTAA: $700–$1,800 depending on the facility's surrounding population density, via CloudIntake flow-through.

PFAS / Contaminated Water.

Active. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances ("forever chemicals") claims target plaintiffs with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, or liver cancer who lived in geographic areas with documented PFAS contamination. The active MDLs against multiple defendants (3M, DuPont, Chemours, and others) are at varying procedural stages. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer through MTAA: $1,200–$1,800, via CloudIntake flow-through.

Roblox and Discord Sexual Abuse.

Active. Recently emerging litigation against platform operators (Roblox Corporation, Discord) and related parties for sexual abuse and exploitation of minors enabled by platform design choices, inadequate moderation, and predator-enabling user-experience patterns. The qualification is conducted phone-first for sensitive trauma-informed cases. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer through MTAA: $2,000–$2,500, via phone-first intake.

Church and Institutional Sexual Abuse.

Active. Civil claims against religious institutions and other institutional contexts (schools, youth organizations, residential care facilities) where adult perpetrators in positions of trust sexually abused minors. Phone-first intake for the same sensitivity reasons as the Roblox/Discord category. Current 30-day cost per signed retainer through MTAA: $2,000–$3,000, via phone-first intake.

MTAA publishes the cost-per-signed-retainer rate card monthly. Active tort list and current pricing are always available through direct conversation with the MTAA team.

For smaller plaintiff firms entering mass torts

A common path into mass torts for smaller plaintiff firms — firms with five to twenty attorneys, strong personal injury or general litigation practice, and ambition to scale into mass tort work — begins when a partner attends a mass tort conference (MTMP, the Mass Torts Made Perfect events, similar gatherings) and concludes that the firm should be in a particular tort. The question is how.

The available paths, with honest assessments:

Run advertising in-house. Hire one or two people to learn Meta Business Manager, build a pixel, write creative, run campaigns. This is the path most smaller firms imagine first. It is also the path with the lowest probability of success in the first 12 to 18 months. A fresh pixel on a competitive tort takes time to train, the firm absorbs the learning-curve spend, and the firm's name is on every ad and landing page mistake the in-house team makes during the learning period.

Buy signed cases from a broker. Skip the operations entirely, pay the 3x to 4x risk premium, accept the chain-of-custody exposure described above. This is the path most associated with bar-card risk and the path the Buzzell and Uber MDL cases warn against. It also has the worst per-case economics — a 100-case VGA block costs $160,000 in broker pricing versus $40,000–$46,000 through MTAA's cost-plus model.

Take cases as co-counsel from established mass tort firms. A firm partners with a more experienced mass tort firm, takes a share of fees on cases the lead firm sources, and avoids the advertising question entirely. This is a legitimate path. The trade-off is that the smaller firm is dependent on the lead firm for case flow, has limited influence over litigation strategy, and shares a percentage of every fee.

Hire MTAA and run the firm's own campaigns at the firm's own scale. This is the path that lets a smaller firm enter mass torts on their own retainers, with their own client relationships, on the firm's own name in the MDL. The firm provides MTAA with a retainer template, qualification criteria, and a budget. MTAA produces signed claimants. The firm scales budget as confidence builds.

For a smaller firm choosing among these paths, the economics of the fourth path are significantly better than the firm typically assumes. The setup is $1,000 per tort — a firm entering with two or three torts pays $2,000 to $3,000 in cumulative onboarding. Each tort then runs at cost-plus economics with the pixel network advantage from day one. The 15% management fee plus actual ad cost plus $100 per signed retainer is far below the cost of hiring even one full-time Meta operations person in-house, and the firm gets the entire MTAA operation rather than one new employee learning on the firm's budget.

The honest constraint on this path for smaller firms is the compliance discipline. The approval workflow — every ad and every landing page approved in writing by the firm's designated approver before going live — requires someone with bar-card-aware judgment reviewing creative on a rolling basis. For a firm with one or two attorneys, this is a small additional load.

For larger plaintiff firms operating at scale

Larger firms — firms with significant mass tort dockets, multiple partners running specific torts, and established relationships with the mass tort bar — face a different set of operational questions. The advertising decision is not "should we enter mass torts" but "how do we run the torts we are already running at the highest operational quality and the best per-case economics."

Build a full in-house Meta operation. Some larger firms have done this. The investment is meaningful: a dedicated Meta ad operations team, in-house creative production, an in-house intake operation, a landing-page engineering function, a compliance team managing approvals against multiple state-bar regimes. The firms that have built this successfully tend to be among the largest mass tort firms in the country, running ten or more torts simultaneously at significant monthly spend.

The structural disadvantage of full in-house at any scale is the pixel network effect. A firm running VGA campaigns in-house on their own pixel sees only their own conversions. MTAA's VGA pixel sees every participating firm's conversions. The in-house firm's pixel will never match MTAA's pixel's accumulated training, even at the largest in-house firm's volume — because the network effect is asymmetric.

Hire MTAA at scale. The firm runs multiple torts simultaneously through MTAA, with dedicated MTAA account leads on the firm's specific torts, integrated reporting across the firm's mass tort portfolio, and access to the full trained-pixel network on every active tort. The setup fee structure — $1,000 per tort — scales linearly with the firm's tort portfolio rather than imposing a platform tax. A firm running eight torts pays $8,000 in cumulative setup over time and operates at cost-plus economics on each tort thereafter.

For larger firms specifically, MTAA can provide multi-tort portfolio reporting (combined visibility across the firm's full mass tort book of business), co-counsel campaign integration (when the firm shares a mass tort with co-counsel firms), and MDL leadership-specific reporting (for firms in MDL leadership positions with reporting obligations to the plaintiff steering committee).

For litigation funders deploying capital into mass tort

Litigation funders deploying capital into mass tort campaigns face a different problem than plaintiff law firms running cases. The funder's question is not "how do we acquire claimants" but "how do we protect capital that is being deployed by a law firm into claimant acquisition we have only partial visibility into."

The principal funder concern is reporting integrity and operational verifiability. A funder financing a $5M tranche for a plaintiff firm's mass tort campaign needs to know, with documentation, that the capital is being deployed against actual Meta advertising, producing actual qualified claimants, signed onto actual retainers, with chain-of-custody documentation that will survive any downstream scrutiny.

MTAA's cost-plus model produces funder-grade reporting natively. Every dollar of Meta ad spend is verifiable through Meta Business Manager — the funder can be granted view access to the firm's MTAA-operated ad account and see actual spend in real time. The 15% management fee is a stated, predictable, fixed-rate cost on top of verifiable spend. The $100 per-signed-retainer CloudIntake fee is performance-based, paid only when retainers actually sign.

MTAA does not provide litigation funding directly. The agency operates the campaigns; funders deploy capital into the firms running the campaigns. The operational structure makes funder due diligence cleaner.

The founder: Jacob Malherbe

Mass Tort Ad Agency was founded in 2015 by Jacob Malherbe, who serves as CEO. The agency originally operated as X Social Media LLC; it rebranded to Mass Tort Ad Agency (MTAA) in September 2025 following a trademark settlement with X Corp. The operations, ownership, leadership, client relationships, and historical campaign performance are continuous across the rebrand — the legal entity and the brand changed; the firm did not.

Jacob is not a lawyer. He is the founder and operator of a plaintiff-side mass tort advertising agency that has, over fifteen years, become one of the most established operations in the field. The path to MTAA's current scale included building the early operational practices around Meta advertising for plaintiff law firms, scaling through the major mass tort cycles of the mid-2010s through 2020s (transvaginal mesh, talc, opioids, Roundup, hernia mesh, Camp Lejeune, the social media addiction cluster, the addictive design cluster, and many others), and continuing to operate the agency on the cost-plus principal-agent model that defines the firm's market position.

Jacob is the author of two books on mass tort advertising for the plaintiff bar: A Lawyer's Guide to Mass Torts (a practitioner's guide to entering and operating in mass tort practice) and The Facebook Effect for Lawyers (covering the principles of Meta advertising for plaintiff law firms). Both books are referenced in the MTAA training corpus and shape AI Jacob's responses on mtaa.ai.

Jacob is based in Winter Garden, Florida, where MTAA is headquartered.

Reviews and named-attorney testimonials

A selection of named plaintiff attorneys who have published reviews of working with MTAA: Glen Lerner (Lerner & Rowe), Martin Levin (Levin Papantonio Rafferty), Harlan Schillinger (recognized authority in plaintiff law firm marketing), Paul Danziger, Anne Andrews (Andrews & Thornton), Connor Sheehan, and Stephen Dampier (The Dampier Law Firm). Each of these testimonials is published under the attorney's own name. Each named attorney has chosen to put their name on a review of MTAA's operational work. Full review text is available on the MTAA Results page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Glossary

Champerty

The legal doctrine prohibiting third parties from financing litigation in exchange for a share of the proceeds when the financing party has no legitimate interest in the underlying dispute. Enforced by every state bar.

Chain of custody

In the context of mass tort claimant acquisition, the documented trail of how a specific claimant became a client of the firm of record: the originating advertisement, the targeting parameters, the landing page presented, the qualification answers, the TCPA consent capture, and the retainer execution. Defensible chain of custody is auditable from first ad impression through retainer signature.

CloudIntake

MTAA's claimant qualification operation. Flow-through self-service qualification with no outbound calls during qualification, no specialist coaching opportunity, and no outbound-call TCPA exposure. Charges $100 per signed retainer, paid exclusively on performance.

Cost-per-case (CPC) pricing

A pricing model in which the advertising agency or broker charges a fixed price per signed retainer delivered, with the underlying advertising and intake costs concealed from the buying firm. Associated with broker resale and chain-of-custody risk.

Cost-per-lead (CPL) pricing

A pricing model in which the agency charges a fixed price per form completion regardless of whether the lead qualifies or signs. Rewards the agency for generating volume rather than for producing qualified claimants.

Cost-plus pricing

A pricing model in which the advertising operation charges actual Meta ad spend (verifiable through Meta Business Manager) plus a stated management fee. The principal-agent commercial structure required under common law for marketing agencies acting on behalf of clients. MTAA's pricing model: cost plus 15% management fee on Meta spend, plus $100 per signed retainer to CloudIntake, plus $1,000 per-tort setup.

Cost per signed retainer (CPS)

The primary unit-economics metric for mass tort advertising. Total advertising and intake cost required to produce one signed claimant retainer agreement, divided by the number of signed retainers a campaign produced. Published monthly on MTAA's rate card.

Flow-through qualification

A self-service intake architecture in which the claimant answers a structured sequence of qualifying questions on their own, in order, with no human prompting. Either qualifies or disqualifies based on the claimant's own self-reported answers. Structurally cleaner than call-center intake on coaching risk and outbound-call TCPA exposure.

Maintenance

The legal doctrine prohibiting officious intermeddling in litigation by parties without legitimate interest. Companion doctrine to champerty.

Mass tort

Civil litigation involving large numbers of plaintiffs with similar claims against one or more defendants, typically arising from harm caused by a product, drug, medical device, environmental contamination, or institutional conduct. Often coordinated through Multi-District Litigation (MDL).

MDL (Multi-District Litigation)

Federal procedural mechanism for coordinating large numbers of related civil cases filed in multiple federal districts. Cases are transferred to a single federal court for coordinated pretrial proceedings, then returned to the originating courts for trial (with most cases resolved through global settlement in the MDL).

Meta Business Partner

A status granted by Meta to advertising agencies and operations that meet operational, policy compliance, and account-standing requirements. Maintained through ongoing compliance and verifiable through Meta's directory. MTAA holds Meta Business Partner status.

Pixel

Meta's tracking and optimization infrastructure that captures conversion events on advertisers' campaigns and uses the accumulated event data to refine targeting. A trained pixel — one with many qualified conversion events — outperforms a fresh pixel by a significant margin. MTAA operates tort-specific trained pixels shared across all participating plaintiff firms running each active tort.

Plaintiff bar

The community of attorneys who represent plaintiffs (the parties bringing claims) in civil litigation, particularly in mass torts. Distinguished from defense bar (attorneys representing defendants). MTAA exclusively serves the plaintiff bar.

Principal-agent relationship

A commercial structure in which one party (the agent) acts on behalf of another (the principal), under the principal's direction, with fiduciary duties to the principal. The legal structure that defines how a marketing agency operates on behalf of a client. Cost-plus pricing is the principal-agent commercial structure.

Qualification criteria

The specific requirements a claimant must meet to qualify for a mass tort claim: typically including the qualifying injury, the time window of exposure or harm, the jurisdictional requirements, and the documentation a qualifying claimant must be able to provide. Set by the law firm, often derived from the active MDL's eligibility requirements.

Qualification rate

The percentage of claimants entering a qualification flow who complete the flow and e-sign a retainer. Real qualification gates produce meaningful drop-off — MTAA campaigns currently see approximately 9% qualification rate on Social Media Addiction and approximately 18% on Video Game Addiction. Qualification rates of 80%+ indicate paper-checking rather than real qualification.

Retainer

The contractual agreement by which a claimant engages a law firm to represent them in litigation. In mass tort, the retainer typically specifies the contingent-fee arrangement, the scope of representation, and the jurisdictional terms. The signed retainer is the outcome of the advertising-to-qualification funnel.

Solicitation

Direct contact (in-person or by phone) with a prospective client, prohibited under ABA Model Rule 7.3 and most state-bar rules in most circumstances. Plaintiff lawyers and operations acting on plaintiff lawyers' behalf are subject to solicitation rules even when the actual contact is conducted by a vendor.

TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act)

Federal statute regulating telemarketing, automated dialing, and unsolicited text messaging. TCPA class actions against law firms for unauthorized outbound calls or texts to claimants have been a recurring source of liability in mass tort. CloudIntake's flow-through qualification eliminates outbound-call TCPA exposure for the firm; follow-up communication operates under explicit TCPA consent captured on the landing page.

Book a strategy call with MTAA

30-minute call covering the firm's current tort interest, qualification criteria, budget, and operational fit. Book the call →

Last reviewed 2026-05-28 by Jacob Malherbe.