Buyer’s guide · Procurement resource

Mass Tort Marketing Buyer’s Guide: Cost, Compliance, Lead Quality & Vendor Scorecard

A working reference for managing partners, mass-tort practice leaders, marketing directors, and intake directors who need to evaluate, procure, and manage a mass tort acquisition program. It gives you the arithmetic to set a spending ceiling, a scoring tool to run diligence on vendors, definitions to write into a contract, and the compliance questions to put in front of counsel before anything launches.

Last reviewed August 4, 2026Methodology and sources Jump to the tools

A brass balance scale and a closed ledger on a dark desk lit by a single warm light — an abstract illustration of neutral vendor evaluation.

Publisher disclosure

This guide is published by Mass Tort Marketing Agency, which sells the services it describes. That makes us a potential vendor, and you should read this accordingly. To keep the guide usable anyway, it names no vendors, ranks no agencies, and makes no claim that any provider — including us — is the right choice. The scorecard in section 4 is written to be run against any vendor you are considering. Run it against us too.

Not legal advice

This is an educational resource, not legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Advertising rules, TCPA obligations, privacy statutes, and recording laws vary by jurisdiction and change. Obtain advice from counsel qualified in every state where your campaign will run before you advertise, call, text, record, or sign a vendor agreement.

How figures are labeled

Verified: Traceable to a primary source listed in sources.
Industry range: A figure that varies widely by tort, docket, and firm. This guide deliberately publishes no cost, conversion, or performance ranges — circulated benchmarks in this category are not comparable across firms, and quoting them would invite you to budget from someone else’s fee splits and conversion rates instead of your own.
Illustrative: Invented numbers used to demonstrate a calculation. Not benchmarks. Do not budget from them.

Section 1

Executive summary

Mass tort marketing is the acquisition of claimants who fit a specific litigation’s eligibility criteria. Buy it on cost per signed retainer against a ceiling you calculated yourself — not on cost per lead, and never on a vendor’s volume forecast.

What mass tort marketing is

Mass tort marketing is the practice of finding people who may have been injured by a specific product, drug, device, or exposure, screening them against that litigation’s eligibility criteria, and converting the ones who qualify into represented claimants. It spans media buying, creative, landing-page and form infrastructure, intake operations, document capture, and the reporting that connects all of it back to signed retainers.

The category is concentrated. As of the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation’s report dated August 3, 2026, 21 MDLs held 1,000 or more pending actions each and accounted for 94.19% of all pending MDL actions, out of 162 active dockets in total Verified. Most advertising demand, most competitive pressure, and most vendor specialization sit inside that small set of dockets.

Why cost per signed retainer is the right unit

Cost per lead measures what you paid for a record. It says nothing about whether the person is reachable, eligible, documentable, or within your venue. Two vendors can quote the same cost per lead and differ by an order of magnitude in what it actually costs you to produce one signed retainer — because the difference shows up in contact rate, qualification rate, and how much of your intake team’s time is consumed disqualifying people.

Cost per signed retainer (CPSR) is the first metric in the chain that is denominated in something your firm can bank. For torts where signed claimants routinely fail records review, the more honest unit is cost per qualified filed case — the same arithmetic, carried one stage further. Both take longer to measure than cost per lead, which is precisely why cost per lead remains the industry’s default and why buying on it selects for the wrong vendor behavior.

Why exclusivity, consent, speed, and criteria beat volume

Four variables move signed-retainer economics more than headline lead volume does. Exclusivity determines whether your intake team is the first call or the fourth. Consent evidence determines whether you can lawfully work the record and whether you can prove it later — the firm placing the calls carries that exposure, not the vendor. Speed to first contact determines how much of what you bought you ever actually reach. And qualification criteria determine whether a signed retainer becomes a filed case or an expensive file that quietly closes.

Volume is the one input a vendor can always increase on demand. It is therefore the least informative thing they can promise.

Three things to do before you buy leads or launch ads

Calculate your acquisition ceiling. Work backwards from the net fee your firm retains per compensable case to a maximum allowable cost per signed retainer. Until that number exists, you have no basis to accept or reject any price. Section 3 gives you the formula and a worksheet.
Get eligibility criteria in writing from litigation counsel. Dated, versioned, and specific about which facts must be documented rather than merely claimed. Criteria that live only in a call script cannot be enforced against a vendor and cannot be updated reliably when the docket moves.
Confirm intake can absorb the volume at the response time you intend to hold. Marketing performance is capped by intake capacity. A campaign that outruns intake converts a shrinking share of what it buys while the invoice stays flat. Section 8 has the checklist.

Quick decision checklist

We have a written maximum allowable cost per signed retainer, built with finance and litigation counsel.
We have dated, versioned eligibility criteria, and we know which facts must be documented.
We know which states we will accept claimants from, and on what licensure or co-counsel basis.
Intake is staffed for the projected volume, with a written contact cadence and a response-time target measured at the 90th percentile.
Our CRM carries acquisition source through to signed and filed status, so CPSR is computable.
Every billable event is defined in writing, with its disqualifying conditions.
Consent evidence arrives with every lead in a form we can audit and export.
Counsel has reviewed creative, disclosures, recording practice, and the vendor fee structure.
We know the budget we are prepared to lose entirely if the tort does not develop.

Any unchecked line is a launch risk. More than three unchecked is a reason to delay the launch rather than accelerate the diligence.

Section 2

What makes mass tort marketing different from ordinary personal injury marketing?

The difference is not the media. It is that eligibility is narrow, documented, and unstable — which turns marketing into a criteria-management problem with an advertising component, rather than an advertising problem.

A general personal injury campaign is looking for people who were recently hurt in a way the firm handles. The qualifying facts are broad and stable, the claimant usually knows something happened to them, and the path from inquiry to representation is measured in days.

A mass tort campaign is looking for people who used a specific product or were exposed to a specific substance, developed a specific condition, inside a specific window, and can produce or obtain records proving it. Many of them do not connect their condition to the product at all until an advertisement tells them the connection is alleged. That single difference cascades through every operational decision below.

Scroll table horizontally →

Factor	General PI marketing	Mass tort marketing	Operational implication
Qualifying facts	Accident occurred, injury sustained, liability and coverage exist.	A specific product, drug, device, or exposure, tied to a specific diagnosis, within a specific use or exposure window.	Screening logic is written per tort and versioned. A generic PI intake script cannot qualify a mass tort claimant.
Eligibility stability	Stable. The elements of a negligence claim do not change mid-campaign.	Unstable. Court orders, science-day rulings, registry or census deadlines, and settlement structures can narrow or widen criteria.	Someone must own docket monitoring and push criteria changes into intake within days, not quarters.
Documentation burden	Police report, medical records, insurance information.	Proof of product use or exposure, pharmacy or purchase records, diagnosis records, and often employment or residency history.	Records retrieval is a real cost line in the acquisition model, not an afterthought absorbed by the case team.
Geography	Local or regional. Advertising follows the firm's licensure footprint.	National or multi-state, with claimants routed by venue, licensure, and co-counsel agreements.	Advertising compliance must be evaluated against the rules of every state the ad reaches, not just the firm's home state.
Competitive dynamics	Steady auction pressure across a broad, continuously replenished claimant pool.	Bursty. Costs spike when a docket makes news and can collapse when a tort matures or a deadline passes.	Budgets need a stop-loss and a re-forecast trigger, not a fixed monthly line item.
Attribution window	Days to weeks from inquiry to signed representation.	Weeks to months from inquiry to retainer, then months to years to a filed and compensable case.	In-campaign optimization runs on leading indicators; the true economics only resolve long after the spend.
Unit of performance	Cost per case, usually computable within a quarter.	Cost per signed retainer, then cost per qualified filed case once workup completes.	Cost per lead is a monitoring metric only. Buying on cost per lead alone selects for the wrong vendor behavior.
Fee structure	Typically a single firm's contingency fee.	Contingency fee net of referral or co-counsel splits and, in an MDL, potential common-benefit assessments.	The acquisition ceiling must be built on the fee your firm actually retains, not the gross contingency.

National advertising, fifty sets of rules

The compliance consequence of running nationally is that the advertising rules of every state your ad reaches may apply to the firm named in it. Requirements are not uniform. New York requires copies of advertisements to be retained — three years generally, one year for computer-accessed communications — under 22 NYCRR § 1200.7.1 Verified. Texas requires non-exempt advertisements and solicitation communications to be filed with the State Bar’s Advertising Review Committee under Rule 7.04, with exemptions set out in Rule 7.05 Verified. A vendor who cannot say which state’s rules govern a given placement is not managing that risk; your firm is, whether or not it knows.

Longer attribution, harder economics

In general PI, the loop from spend to case closes fast enough that a quarter of data tells you something. In mass tort, a claimant signed in March may not file until autumn and may not resolve for years, if at all. You are therefore forced to optimize on leading indicators — contact rate, qualification rate, documentation-completion rate, speed to contact — while the metric that actually matters resolves long after the money is spent. Build the reporting to carry acquisition source all the way through, or you will never be able to look back and learn which sources were worth buying.

Section 3

Start with the economics: calculate a viable acquisition ceiling

Your maximum allowable cost per signed retainer is the expected net fee per signed retainer, less your margin reserve, less your non-media costs. Calculate it before you take a single vendor call — it is the only number that lets you evaluate a price at all.

Work backwards, not forwards. The temptation is to start from a budget and ask what it buys. The disciplined approach starts from what a case is worth to your firm and derives what you can pay to acquire one.

Abstract descending tiers of warm light on a dark field, one tier brighter than the rest — an illustration of a spending ceiling in an acquisition model. — The ceiling is a constraint you impose, not a price a vendor quotes.

The formula

Net fee retained per compensable case
  × P(signed → filed) × P(filed → compensable)
  = expected net fee per signed retainer

Maximum allowable CPSR
  = ( expected net fee per signed retainer × (1 − margin reserve) )
    − intake, workup, and technology cost per signed retainer

“Net fee retained” means after referral or co-counsel splits and after any common-benefit assessment — not the gross contingency. Firms that skip this step routinely overstate their ceiling by a third or more.

A worked example Illustrative

Every number below is invented to demonstrate the arithmetic. They are not benchmarks, not typical, and not drawn from any real tort. Substitute your own.

Gross recovery per compensable case → $90,000
Contingency fee 33% → gross fee $29,700
Co-counsel share 40% → $17,820
Common-benefit assessment 8% → net fee retained $16,394
P(signed → filed) = 0.70
P(filed → compensable) = 0.55
Combined = 0.385 → expected net fee per signed retainer $6,312
Margin and risk reserve 40% → $3,787
Less workup, intake, and technology cost of $1,100
Maximum allowable CPSR → $2,687

Notice what this exercise exposes. The gross case value looked like $90,000 and the ceiling came out under $2,700 — because two fee splits and two probabilities sit between the two figures. Notice also how sensitive the result is: if P(filed → compensable) is 0.40 rather than 0.55, the ceiling falls to roughly $1,650. Run the model at least three ways, and budget against the pessimistic column.

A warning worth taking seriously. Tort economics vary enormously by docket, injury tier, venue, fee agreement, and co-counsel structure, and they change as a litigation matures. Every input above is an estimate about a future that is genuinely uncertain, and the two probability terms are the least knowable and most consequential. Validate them with litigation counsel and your finance lead, revisit them as the docket develops, and never treat another firm’s benchmark as a substitute for your own model.

Worksheet

Copy this into a spreadsheet, or take the CSV version, which adds a sensitivity block and a campaign-tracking table.

Scroll table horizontally →

Line	Input	Your figure	Note
A	Expected gross recovery per compensable case	________	Conservative central estimate — not a best case.
B	Contingency fee rate	________	As written in your fee agreement.
C	Referral or co-counsel share of the fee	________	Zero if your firm holds the whole fee.
D	Common-benefit assessment	________	If the MDL has one. Zero otherwise.
E	Gross attorney fee per compensable case = A × B	—	Formula.
F	Net fee your firm retains = E × (1 − C) × (1 − D)	—	Formula.
G	Probability a signed retainer becomes a filed case	________	Signed claimants who wash out at records review never file.
H	Probability a filed case becomes compensable	________	Depends on tier, docket outcome, and settlement structure.
I	Retainer-to-compensable conversion = G × H	—	Formula.
J	Expected net fee per signed retainer = F × I	—	Formula.
K	Case-workup cost per signed retainer	________	Records retrieval, medical review, expert, filing, census.
L	Intake and case-management cost per signed retainer	________	Loaded staff cost allocated per retainer.
M	Technology cost per signed retainer	________	CRM, telephony, consent verification, e-signature.
N	Total non-media cost = K + L + M	—	Formula.
O	Target margin and risk reserve	________	The share held back against adverse docket outcomes.
P	Maximum allowable CPSR = ( J × (1 − O) ) − N	—	Your acquisition ceiling.

Section 4

The mass tort marketing vendor scorecard

Score evidence produced, not assertions made. Ten categories, zero to five each. A vendor who cannot produce a consent record for a lead you pick at random has answered the question regardless of what they say next.

Use the same scale across every vendor so the totals are comparable: 0 no answer or a “proprietary” deflection; 1 verbal claim only; 2 partial documentation with material gaps; 3 documented but not independently verifiable; 4 documented and verifiable by you; 5 documented, verifiable, and contractually committed.

Expand a category for the questions to ask, the evidence to request, and the red flags.

Ten identical brass tokens in a grid on dark slate, some catching light brightly and others falling into shadow — an illustration of uneven scoring across diligence categories.

Demonstrated mass-tort specialization

___/5

Why it matters

Mass tort acquisition fails on eligibility detail, not on advertising craft. A vendor who cannot recite the current criteria for the tort you are buying will not catch it when those criteria move.

Questions to ask

Which torts are you actively running this month, and for how long have you run each?
What are the current eligibility criteria for our tort, and when did they last change?
What docket or regulatory event would most likely change those criteria in the next 90 days?
Which of your law-firm clients run this tort, and will any speak with us?

Evidence to request

A dated criteria document for the tort in question.
Two or three references from plaintiff firms, at least one in a comparable tort.
Their internal process for monitoring the docket and pushing criteria changes to intake.

Red flags

A general personal-injury portfolio presented as mass-tort experience.
No awareness of the current procedural posture of the docket.
Criteria that exist only inside a call script.

What a strong answer looks like

They describe the tort's eligibility rules without preparation, name the last change and its date, and explain the mechanism by which the change reached their intake floor.

Lead exclusivity and resale policy

___/5

Why it matters

Exclusivity is the single most commonly asserted and least commonly defined term in this market. A claimant contacted by four firms in an hour converts differently than one contacted by yours alone.

Questions to ask

Define exclusive precisely: exclusive to our firm, for this tort, in which states, for how long?
Will this claimant record ever reach another firm, an aggregator, a co-counsel network, or a data buyer?
What happens to a lead we decline or disqualify?
Do you sell aged leads, and is our declined volume part of that inventory?

Evidence to request

The contract clause, not the pitch-deck slide.
A written list of downstream partners in the lead path.
Their duplicate-detection method and matching keys.

Red flags

"Exclusive" with no duration, scope, or resale prohibition attached.
Silence on what happens to rejected leads.
Exclusivity that lapses in days and converts to shared inventory.

What a strong answer looks like

Exclusivity is defined in the contract by firm, tort, state, and duration; resale is prohibited outright; and declined leads have a stated disposition.

TCPA consent documentation and audit trail

___/5

Why it matters

Telephone Consumer Protection Act exposure is statutory and per call or text. If a vendor cannot produce, for one specific lead, the disclosure the claimant actually saw and when they saw it, the firm making the calls carries the risk.

Questions to ask

What consent evidence arrives with every lead? List every field.
Can you reproduce the consent page as rendered, with timestamp and IP, for a lead we pick at random?
How are revocation requests captured and propagated across your campaigns and partners?
Do these records survive termination, and can we export them?

Evidence to request

A live audit: name three delivered leads and ask for the full consent record on each.
The exact disclosure language, with the list of entities named in it.
Their revocation-handling procedure in writing.

Red flags

Consent "on file" that cannot be produced per lead.
No record of the disclosure text as displayed.
No mechanism to propagate a revocation back through the source.

What a strong answer looks like

Every lead carries a verification record with timestamp, IP, capture URL, and the rendered disclosure — and they let you spot-audit records without notice.

State-bar advertising and disclosure controls

___/5

Why it matters

Advertising rules bind the lawyer, not the vendor. When a national campaign runs in thirty states, the firm named in the ad answers for it in each of them — including jurisdictions with filing and retention duties.

Questions to ask

Who reviews creative against advertising rules, and which states' rules do you apply?
Will anything naming our firm go live without our written approval?
Do you archive every ad, landing page, and script version with dates?
Who handles jurisdiction-specific filing and retention duties — you or us?

Evidence to request

The approval workflow, with the named reviewer.
A sample of the ad archive, showing versions and dates.
A written allocation of filing and retention responsibility.

Red flags

Creative naming your firm produced without your review.
No archive, or an archive that lives in an ad platform you do not control.
Nobody who can say which state's rules govern a given placement.

What a strong answer looks like

A named reviewer approves creative pre-launch, every version is archived with dates, and the contract states which party carries each jurisdiction's filing and retention duty.

Qualification criteria and medical/exposure screening

___/5

Why it matters

The gap between a claimant who says they qualify and one whose records show it is where acquisition economics are won or lost. That gap is invisible in cost-per-lead reporting.

Questions to ask

Show us the written screening criteria and its version history.
Which facts are claimant-reported and which are verified against records?
How is the statute of limitations checked, and against what date?
What is your change-control process when criteria move?

Evidence to request

The criteria document, dated and versioned.
Ten redacted qualified records so you can see the fact pattern actually captured.
Their disqualification-reason taxonomy and current distribution.

Red flags

No distinction between claimed and documented facts.
Statute-of-limitations screening that ignores state variation.
Criteria that cannot be produced as a document.

What a strong answer looks like

Criteria are documented and versioned, claimed facts are visibly separated from verified ones, and disqualification reasons are tracked and reported back to media buying.

Intake coverage, speed-to-lead, and bilingual capacity

___/5

Why it matters

Acquisition cost is set by media, but conversion is set by intake. A campaign that outruns intake capacity converts a shrinking share of what it buys while the invoice stays flat.

Questions to ask

What are your staffed hours, and what happens after hours?
Report median and 90th-percentile time-to-first-contact for the last 90 days.
What is your contact-attempt cadence before a lead is closed out?
What Spanish-language capacity do you have — staffed hours and headcount?

Evidence to request

A raw report, not a dashboard screenshot, with percentiles.
The written cadence policy.
Call recordings or live monitoring, subject to consent rules.

Red flags

Averages reported instead of percentiles — averages hide the tail where leads die.
"24/7" coverage that resolves to voicemail.
Machine-translated Spanish scripts.

What a strong answer looks like

They volunteer the 90th percentile, publish a cadence policy, and can state the daily volume at which their response time degrades.

CRM integration, source tracking, and data ownership

___/5

Why it matters

If acquisition source does not persist onto the record through signed and filed status, cost per signed retainer cannot be computed — and every optimization decision afterwards is guesswork.

Questions to ask

How do leads reach our CRM, and which fields carry source, campaign, and creative?
Who owns the ad accounts, pixels, domains, creative, call recordings, and consent records?
What is the export format and timeline if we terminate?
Who holds admin access to each system?

Evidence to request

A field-mapping document.
A live test lead flowing end to end into your CRM.
The contract clause on ownership and export.

Red flags

Delivery by email or spreadsheet.
Attribution that exists only in the vendor's dashboard.
Ad accounts and pixels owned by the vendor with no transfer path.

What a strong answer looks like

Integration is direct, source data persists to signed and filed status, and the contract says the firm owns the accounts, data, and consent records with a defined export process.

Pricing transparency and performance definitions

___/5

Why it matters

Most pricing disputes are definitional. If "qualified" is not defined with its disqualifying conditions, the vendor's incentive is to widen the definition and the firm's is to narrow it.

Questions to ask

Define every billable event and the conditions that disqualify it.
How much of our spend is working media versus your fee? Will we see platform invoices?
Is there any markup on media, data, or subcontracted intake?
Who arbitrates a disagreement about whether a lead met the definition?

Evidence to request

A written definitions schedule attached to the contract.
Platform invoices, or read access to the ad accounts.
The dispute and appeal process in writing.

Red flags

A single blended rate with no media visibility.
Definitions the vendor can revise unilaterally.
Refusal to separate media spend from fee.

What a strong answer looks like

Media and fee are separated and verifiable, every billable event has a written definition with disqualifiers, and there is a named arbitration path.

Tort-specific channel strategy

___/5

Why it matters

Claimant populations differ by age, language, geography, and platform. A channel plan that would work identically for two unrelated torts is a template, not a strategy — and several major platforms restrict exactly the targeting and messaging this category needs.

Questions to ask

Which channels for this tort, why those, and what share of budget at launch?
Which platform policies constrain targeting or copy for this claimant population?
What are you testing, over what period, at what budget?
How will you detect and cut an underperforming source?

Evidence to request

A written channel plan with budget allocation and a test schedule.
Their read on the platform policy constraints, in their own words.
The kill criteria for a failing source.

Red flags

The same plan you have seen for an unrelated tort.
Performance promised for a specific channel.
No awareness that health-adjacent targeting and second-person health copy are restricted.

What a strong answer looks like

The plan is specific to the claimant population, names the policy constraints it is working within, and states in advance what would cause them to shut a source off.

Reporting, replacement policy, and contract terms

___/5

Why it matters

Reporting that stops at delivered leads cannot answer the only question that matters. Contract terms determine whether you can act on what the reporting tells you.

Questions to ask

Does reporting extend to signed retainer and filed case, and how does it reconcile to our CRM?
What is the replacement or credit policy, with what dispute window and cure period?
Do you use subcontractors, and are they bound to these same terms?
What are the cancellation, transition, and data-export rights?

Evidence to request

A sample report at record level, not a summary dashboard.
The credit policy clause with its stated windows.
The subcontractor list.

Red flags

No dispute window, or a window shorter than your intake cycle.
Auto-renewal with a long notice period.
Undisclosed subcontractors in the lead path.

What a strong answer looks like

Record-level reporting reconciles to your CRM, credits have a defined window and cure period, subcontractors are disclosed and bound, and exit terms are explicit.

Interpreting the total

40–50

Strong diligence posture

Proceed to reference checks and legal review. A strong score means the vendor documented its practices, not that the campaign will perform.

25–39

Proceed only after closing material gaps

Identify every category you scored below 3, get the gap closed in writing, and re-score before you sign. Do not accept a promise to fix it after launch.

Below 25

High risk

Do not launch without remediation. A total this low usually means consent evidence, exclusivity, or data ownership is undocumented — the three areas where the firm, not the vendor, absorbs the consequence.

The score is a procurement aid. It measures how well a vendor can evidence its practices under questioning. It is not a prediction of campaign performance, lead volume, retainer rates, or return on spend, and no score should be treated as one.

Download the vendor scorecard →

Section 5

Lead quality: define it before the campaign starts

“Lead” is seven different things. Write down which one you are buying, who decides whether a record met the definition, and what happens when you disagree — before any money moves.

Most disputes between firms and vendors are definitional rather than adversarial. Both sides genuinely believe they agreed to something, and both are describing a different stage of the same funnel. Here is the funnel, stated plainly.

┌──────────────────────────────┐
│           INQUIRY            │  form, call, click-to-call  ← what vendors count
└──────────────────────────────┘
                ↓  contact rate
 ┌────────────────────────────┐
 │      CONTACTABLE LEAD      │  a real human, actually reached
 └────────────────────────────┘
                ↓  qualification rate
  ┌──────────────────────────┐
  │      QUALIFIED LEAD      │  meets the written criteria
  └──────────────────────────┘
                ↓  documentation rate
   ┌────────────────────────┐
   │    INTAKE-COMPLETE     │  records authorization secured
   └────────────────────────┘
                ↓  signature rate
    ┌──────────────────────┐
    │   SIGNED RETAINER    │  after conflict check + review  ← CPSR is measured here
    └──────────────────────┘
                ↓  filing rate
     ┌────────────────────┐
     │     FILED CASE     │  complaint, registry, or census
     └────────────────────┘
                ↓  litigation outcome
      ┌──────────────────┐
      │ COMPENSABLE CASE │  resolves with a recovery  ← where the fee arises
      └──────────────────┘

Scroll table horizontally →

Stage	Definition	Primarily owned by	Where it fails
Inquiry	Any submitted form, call, or click-to-call. No verification of identity, reachability, or eligibility.	Media	Counted as a "lead" in vendor reporting even when the record is incomplete or fabricated.
Contactable lead	A human being reached at the phone number or email supplied, confirming they made the inquiry.	Media + intake	Wrong numbers, disconnected lines, and recycled records collapse the contact rate without changing the invoice.
Qualified lead	The claimant's self-reported facts satisfy the written eligibility criteria — injury, exposure window, statute of limitations, and venue.	Intake	Criteria applied loosely, or applied to a stale version of the criteria after the docket moved.
Intake-complete claimant	All required documentation captured or authorized: records release signed, product or exposure proof identified, dates confirmed.	Intake	Records authorization never obtained, so the claim cannot be worked up and quietly dies after the retainer.
Signed retainer	An executed representation agreement, after conflict check and attorney review.	Firm	Retainers sent and never followed up; conflicts discovered after signature.
Filed case	A complaint filed, or a claim submitted into the applicable MDL, registry, or census.	Firm	Records review shows the underlying facts do not hold, and the signed claimant never files.
Compensable case	A case that resolves with a recovery under the applicable settlement structure or judgment.	Litigation outcome	Tier assignment lower than modeled, or the docket resolves adversely. Outside anyone's marketing control.

A long narrowing funnel of light particles over a dark field, dense at the wide end and reduced to a few bright points at the narrow end — an illustration of lead-quality attrition. — Cost per lead is measured at the top of this diagram. The economics live at the bottom.

How a cheap cost per lead produces an uneconomic cost per signed retainer

A vendor optimizing for cost per lead is optimizing the top of that diagram. Every mechanism below reduces the price of an inquiry while increasing what it costs you to produce a signed retainer — and none of them are visible in a cost-per-lead report.

Duplicates and recycled records

The same claimant sold across a campaign, or re-submitted months later through a different publisher. Detect duplicates on your side using phone, email, and name-plus-date-of-birth — do not rely on the vendor's own dedupe.

Shared leads sold as exclusive

A claimant contacted by several firms within the hour converts at a materially different rate than one contacted only by yours. Ask what happens to declined volume, which is where resale usually hides.

Invalid or incomplete contact data

A cheap cost per lead is easy to produce when a share of the records cannot be reached at all. Measure contact rate as a first-class metric, not qualification rate alone.

Poor claimant fit

The claimant is real and reachable but does not have the diagnosis, the exposure window, or the venue. This is the largest and most expensive category, and it is invisible until intake works the record.

Insufficient consent documentation

The lead is qualified but arrives without a reproducible consent record. The commercial value is real; the compliance exposure sits with whoever places the call.

Missing medical or exposure facts

Screening captured the claim but not the proof path. The retainer signs, records review fails, and the case never files — after the acquisition cost is already sunk.

Slow follow-up

Speed-to-contact is the one variable a firm controls entirely. A lead that sits overnight in a queue is a lead the firm paid for and did not work.

Out-of-scope leads

Claimants outside your licensed states, outside the docket's eligible population, or subject to a co-counsel arrangement you do not have. These are billable to you and worthless to you at the same time.

The defensive measure is simple to state and unpopular to implement: instrument the funnel yourself. Measure contact rate, qualification rate, and documentation rate by source, inside your own CRM, using your own duplicate detection. A vendor dashboard is a useful cross-check and a poor system of record.

Section 6

Compliance and data-handling checklist

The vendor generates the exposure; the firm named in the ad and placing the calls generally carries it. Treat each item below as a question for counsel and a question for the vendor — not as a conclusion.

What follows is a survey of the areas that most often surface in mass tort acquisition, with primary sources cited so you and your counsel can read the underlying authority rather than a summary of it. It is not a compliance program, and none of it is a legal conclusion about your firm’s obligations. Several of these rules have been in active flux — the TCPA consent landscape in particular has changed materially through court decisions and repeated agency extensions — so confirm the position on the date you launch, not the position described in any guide.

A dark archival drawer of upright document dividers under a narrow warm spotlight, one divider pulled forward — an illustration of retained records and audit trails. — Most compliance failures in this category are records failures, discovered late.

TCPA consent

The FCC adopted a rule that would have required consumer consent to be given to one seller at a time, but the Eleventh Circuit vacated that rule in January 2025, holding that it exceeded the agency's statutory authority. The underlying statutory prior-express-written-consent requirement is unchanged, and consent must still be documented per contact.

What to confirm with counsel: What standard of consent applies to the calls and texts your firm or its vendor will place, and how the vacatur changed — or did not change — your consent-capture requirements.
What evidence to retain: Per-lead consent records: timestamp, IP address, capture URL, the disclosure text as rendered, and the entities named in it.
What to ask the vendor: Produce the full consent record for three leads we choose at random, including the page as the claimant saw it.

Consent revocation

The FCC's consent-revocation rules require that a consumer may revoke consent by any reasonable means. One narrow provision — applying a revocation on one subject to unrelated future messages from the same caller — has had its effective date extended repeatedly by the Commission's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau.

What to confirm with counsel: Which revocation obligations are in force on the date you launch, and how they apply across your firm's separate campaigns.
What evidence to retain: Revocation and do-not-call logs, with the timestamp received and the timestamp suppressed across every list.
What to ask the vendor: How a revocation captured by your intake propagates back to the source, and how quickly.

Telemarketing Sales Rule recordkeeping

The FTC's 2024 amendments to the Telemarketing Sales Rule extended the record-retention period from two years to five and added call-detail and caller-ID recordkeeping obligations, with the call-record provisions applying from October 15, 2024.

What to confirm with counsel: Whether and how the TSR applies to your acquisition program and to each vendor in the lead path.
What evidence to retain: Call detail records, caller-ID authorization records, and do-not-call compliance records for the full retention period.
What to ask the vendor: Your retention schedule for call records, and confirmation those records transfer to us on termination.

Attorney advertising rules

ABA Model Rule 7.1 prohibits false or misleading communications about a lawyer's services; Rule 7.2 governs advertising and payments for recommendations; Rule 7.3 governs solicitation. States adopt variants — New York requires copies of advertisements to be retained (three years generally, one year for computer-accessed communications), and Texas requires non-exempt advertisements and solicitations to be filed with the State Bar's Advertising Review Committee.

What to confirm with counsel: Which states' rules apply to a national campaign, what disclaimers and firm identification each requires, and which filings and retention periods bind your firm.
What evidence to retain: A dated archive of every advertisement, landing page, and intake script version, plus proof of any required filing.
What to ask the vendor: Your creative approval workflow, and a sample of the ad archive with version dates.

Paying for leads vs. paying for referrals

Model Rule 7.2(b) restricts giving anything of value for recommending a lawyer's services, subject to exceptions including the reasonable cost of advertisements. ABA Formal Opinion 465 addresses paying lead generators, and Rule 5.4 protects a lawyer's professional independence and limits fee sharing with non-lawyers.

What to confirm with counsel: Whether your intended fee structure — particularly any per-signed-retainer or revenue-linked fee — is permissible in every jurisdiction where you will operate.
What evidence to retain: The fee schedule, the vendor's public-facing claims about how it matches claimants to firms, and your counsel's written analysis.
What to ask the vendor: Exact copy of every consumer-facing statement describing how claimants are matched to law firms.

Claims substantiation

Advertising claims must be substantiated and not misleading. In lead generation specifically, the FTC has brought enforcement against a lead generator whose sites promised to match consumers with the best-matched partners while in practice selling applications to the first willing buyer.

What to confirm with counsel: That every claim in creative — about eligibility, compensation, timelines, or the matching process — is substantiated and appropriately qualified.
What evidence to retain: The substantiation file for each claim, tied to the creative version that made it.
What to ask the vendor: The substantiation behind any eligibility or compensation claim appearing in creative that names our firm.

Health information

HIPAA applies to covered entities and their business associates; a plaintiff firm's marketing funnel is usually outside that framework. That does not make the data unregulated — screening data is health information under other regimes and under contract.

What to confirm with counsel: Whether any part of your data flow implicates HIPAA through a covered-entity relationship, and what contractual and security obligations apply to screening data regardless.
What evidence to retain: Data-flow documentation, access logs, records authorizations, and your retention and deletion schedule.
What to ask the vendor: Where screening data is stored, who can access it, how long it is kept, and whether it is used for any purpose beyond our engagement.

State privacy law

The CCPA as amended treats information concerning health as sensitive personal information and gives consumers a right to limit its use, alongside opt-out rights for sale and sharing. Washington's My Health My Data Act regulates consumer health data broadly and is enforceable through a private right of action; it took effect March 31, 2024.

What to confirm with counsel: Which state privacy statutes reach your acquisition program given the states you advertise in, and what notices, consents, and opt-out mechanisms each requires.
What evidence to retain: Privacy notices as published with version dates, consent and opt-out records, and your data inventory.
What to ask the vendor: Which state privacy laws you have assessed against this lead flow, and what consents you obtain.

Call recording

Recording consent is set by state law. Roughly a dozen states require all parties to consent; California's Invasion of Privacy Act is the most frequently litigated example.

What to confirm with counsel: Your recording policy state by state, and the notice language used at the start of a recorded call.
What evidence to retain: Recordings with the consent notice captured in the recording itself, plus your retention schedule.
What to ask the vendor: Which states you record in, what notice is given, and who holds the recordings.

Platform advertising policy

Platform policy is an operational constraint, not a legal one, but it determines what can actually run. Google restricts targeting on sensitive interest categories including health. Meta prohibits ads that assert or imply personal attributes including physical or mental health. TikTok's policy restricts advertising for legal services in sensitive practice areas.

What to confirm with counsel: Nothing legal — but confirm with your vendor which platforms can carry this campaign at all before budget is allocated.
What evidence to retain: Policy screenshots with dates, ad account disapproval notices, and appeal outcomes.
What to ask the vendor: Which platform policies constrain this tort, and what happens to our budget if a channel becomes unavailable mid-campaign.

Nothing in this section is a legal conclusion, and the summaries are deliberately high level. Applicability turns on facts specific to your firm, your vendor relationships, your data flows, and the states you operate in. Brief your compliance counsel with the specifics before launch — the questions above are a starting agenda for that conversation, not a substitute for it.

Section 7

Channel-fit matrix

Channel choice is downstream of two things: where your claimant population actually is, and what the platforms will let you say to them. Confirm the second before you budget the first.

No channel is inherently better for mass tort. What follows describes typical roles and constraints, not performance expectations — any efficiency figure you see quoted for a channel is a campaign-specific outcome that will not transfer to yours. Treat every entry below as a hypothesis to test at a budget you can afford to lose.

One structural point deserves emphasis. The platforms most capable of reaching people by health condition are the same ones that most restrict doing so. Google restricts targeting on sensitive interest categories including health, and on hardship categories such as abuse and trauma Verified. Meta prohibits ads that assert or imply personal attributes including physical or mental health Verified, which rules out most second-person symptom copy. TikTok’s policy restricts legal-services advertising in sensitive practice areas Verified. These are not edge-case rules; they shape what creative is even possible.

Nine ribbons of warm light entering a dark frame at different widths and angles, converging loosely toward one bright region — an illustration of an uneven channel mix.

Google Search

Demand capture — claimants already searching the tort by name.

Strengths: Highest declared intent. Query-level control. Fast read on message-market fit.
Limitations: Volume is capped by existing search demand and rises only when the tort is in the news. Auction pressure concentrates on a narrow keyword set.
Best-fit conditions: Torts with public name recognition, and any tort where a competitor's broadcast campaign is creating searches you can intercept.
Measurement requirement: Query-level reporting through to signed retainer. Without that, spend concentrates on high-volume, low-fit queries.
Common compliance risk: Personalized-advertising restrictions apply to sensitive interest categories including health, which limits remarketing and audience targeting.

YouTube

Demand creation and mid-funnel education.

Strengths: Explains a complex eligibility standard in a way a text ad cannot. Reaches claimants who do not know the tort exists.
Limitations: Longer path to conversion and noisier attribution. Production cost is real.
Best-fit conditions: Torts where eligibility requires explanation — a specific diagnosis, a date window, a device model.
Measurement requirement: Hold-out or geo-based testing rather than last-click. Last-click will systematically undervalue it.
Common compliance risk: Same sensitive-category targeting restrictions as Search, plus creative review for outcome implications.

Meta (Facebook and Instagram)

Demand creation at scale.

Strengths: Large reach across older demographics relevant to many pharmaceutical and device torts. Fast creative iteration.
Limitations: Interest targeting for health conditions is constrained, so targeting leans on creative and broad audiences.
Best-fit conditions: Torts with a broad, identifiable population where the injury is recognizable from a description.
Measurement requirement: Platform-reported conversions overstate; reconcile against CRM-side signed retainers before reallocating.
Common compliance risk: Ads must not assert or imply personal attributes including physical or mental health — which rules out most second-person symptom copy.

TikTok

Limited. Awareness at best.

Strengths: Low-cost reach among younger audiences.
Limitations: TikTok's advertising policy restricts legal-services advertising in sensitive practice areas, including personal injury. Availability should be confirmed against current policy before budgeting.
Best-fit conditions: Torts whose claimant population skews young — and only after confirming the campaign can run at all.
Measurement requirement: Treat as an experiment with a fixed, small budget and a defined kill date.
Common compliance risk: Category eligibility itself. Confirm policy before committing budget, not after.

OTT / CTV

Broad demand creation with television-style reach.

Strengths: Reaches older claimant populations that under-index on social. More addressable than linear TV.
Limitations: No direct response mechanism. Requires a search or phone path to capture the response it generates.
Best-fit conditions: Torts with large, older, geographically dispersed populations.
Measurement requirement: Incrementality testing — matched-market or hold-out. Anything else credits the click that followed the impression.
Common compliance risk: Placement adjacency and creative that implies outcomes. Disclaimers must remain legible on a television screen.

Programmatic display

Reach extension and retargeting where permitted.

Strengths: Cheap reach. Fine-grained frequency control.
Limitations: Low intent, high fraud surface, and inventory quality varies enormously by supply path.
Best-fit conditions: Supporting a channel that is already working, rarely as a primary source.
Measurement requirement: Viewability and invalid-traffic reporting alongside conversion. Insist on supply-path transparency.
Common compliance risk: Health-adjacent retargeting is restricted, and adjacency control is weaker than on walled-garden platforms.

Linear TV

Mass demand creation.

Strengths: Proven for this category over decades. Reaches populations that are hard to address digitally.
Limitations: High minimum commitment, slow creative cycles, coarse targeting.
Best-fit conditions: Large, mature torts with sustained budgets and an intake operation that can absorb bursty inbound volume.
Measurement requirement: Unique inbound numbers per market and creative, plus matched-market testing.
Common compliance risk: State-by-state advertising rules across every market the signal reaches, including required disclaimers.

Radio and audio

Frequency and local reinforcement.

Strengths: Low production cost. Strong for repetition. Effective in commuter markets.
Limitations: No visual, so complex eligibility criteria do not survive the format.
Best-fit conditions: Simple eligibility stories with a memorable phone number.
Measurement requirement: Dedicated numbers per station and daypart.
Common compliance risk: Spoken disclaimers are easy to compress into unintelligibility — a common rule violation.

SEO and content

Durable capture and credibility.

Strengths: Compounds over time. Serves claimants researching before they call. Cost does not scale with volume.
Limitations: Slow. Will not deliver claimants in a 30-day window. Requires sustained investment through periods with no measurable return.
Best-fit conditions: Firms committed to a tort for a year or more, or building a durable practice-area presence.
Measurement requirement: Assisted conversions and organic-source retainers, tracked over quarters rather than weeks.
Common compliance risk: Content that reads as a claim about outcomes or eligibility, unreviewed against advertising rules.

Referral and co-counsel relationships

Case flow without media spend.

Strengths: Claimants arrive pre-screened by another lawyer. No advertising compliance surface.
Limitations: Volume is not controllable, and fee splits reduce the net fee available per case.
Best-fit conditions: Firms with litigation capability and reputation that other firms want to route into.
Measurement requirement: Net fee per referred case after the split, compared against your paid-acquisition cost per signed retainer.
Common compliance risk: Fee-division rules require client consent and a writing; referral fees are governed by different rules than advertising payments.

Platform policies change without notice and vary by country and by advertiser status. Verify current policy directly with each platform before allocating budget, and ask your vendor what happens to committed spend if a channel becomes unavailable mid-campaign.

Section 8

Intake is the conversion system

Marketing and intake cannot be evaluated separately. The same media, routed into a slower or thinner intake operation, produces a materially worse cost per signed retainer — and the invoice does not change.

Firms routinely diagnose a lead-quality problem when they have a capacity problem. The tell is a qualification rate that degrades as volume rises: if the leads were genuinely worse, the rate would fall independently of volume. Instrument both, or you will keep replacing vendors to fix an intake constraint.

A sleek desk telephone handset in warm rim light on a dark surface with a faint streak of motion light beside it — an illustration of speed to first contact.

Response-time targets

Set a target and measure it as a median and a 90th percentile. Averages are actively misleading here: a handful of same-minute contacts will mask a long tail of leads that sat overnight, and the tail is where the losses concentrate. Speed matters most in this category because claimants who respond to mass tort advertising are frequently responding to several ads at once.

Contact-attempt cadence

Write the cadence down: how many attempts, over how many days, across which channels, at what times of day, before a lead is closed out as unreachable. An undocumented cadence means every agent invents their own, and the leads worked hardest are the ones that happened to arrive on a quiet afternoon. Whatever cadence you choose must be reconciled with your consent and do-not-call obligations.

Script quality and escalation

Order the screening sequence so disqualifiers surface early — asking the exposure-window question first saves the eight minutes that a full intake would have consumed. Scripts must avoid implying case value, outcome, or settlement amount, and must include an explicit instruction to stop and route when a caller asks for legal advice or discloses existing representation. Score calls against a rubric on a fixed cadence; unreviewed intake drifts within weeks.

Bilingual coverage

If your media reaches Spanish-speaking claimants, staffed Spanish-language intake is a conversion requirement, not an accommodation. Machine-translated scripts fail on exactly the medical and temporal precision this screening depends on. Confirm staffed hours and headcount, not merely “capability.”

Documentation capture and e-sign

Define which fields are mandatory before a handoff, and record which facts are claimant-reported versus verified against records. Obtain the records authorization during the same contact if you can — the single most common quiet failure in mass tort intake is a signed retainer with no executed authorization, which produces a file that cannot be worked up. Test the e-signature path end to end before launch, and set a follow-up cadence for retainers sent and unsigned.

Attorney review and conflict checks

Place the conflict check before the retainer goes out, not after it returns. Define who reviews, what they review, and their turnaround, and make the review a gate in the workflow rather than an informal habit. This is also the control that keeps a performance-fee arrangement from exerting pressure on the signing decision.

Closed-loop reporting

Acquisition source, campaign, and creative must persist on the claimant record through signed and filed status. Without that, cost per signed retainer is not computable by source, and every budget reallocation is a guess. This single requirement does more to improve acquisition economics than any change to media strategy.

Intake readiness — complete before launch

Eligibility criteria written, dated, and version-controlled, with a named owner for changes.
Staffed hours defined, including weekends and holidays, with a real after-hours path.
Response-time target set and instrumented at median and 90th percentile.
Contact-attempt cadence documented and reconciled with consent obligations.
Spanish-language coverage staffed, with professionally translated scripts.
Scripts reviewed for outcome-implication language and escalation rules.
Mandatory documentation fields defined; claimed facts separated from verified facts.
Records authorization workflow tested, with a named owner for retrieval.
Call-recording decision made state by state, with notice language reviewed by counsel.
E-signature path tested end to end; follow-up cadence set for unsigned retainers.
Conflict check and attorney review placed as gates in the workflow.
CRM configured with mass-tort stages; source persists to signed and filed status.
Duplicate detection running independently of the vendor.
Headcount matched to projected volume at the target response time, with backup coverage.

Run the intake-readiness checklist →

Section 9

Pricing models and contract terms

Every pricing model can be gamed, and each is gamed differently. Choose the model whose failure mode you can actually detect with the reporting you will actually have.

Before comparing models, note one threshold issue. Fee structures tied to signed retainers or to case revenue can raise questions under the professional-conduct rules — Model Rule 7.2(b) restricts giving anything of value for recommending a lawyer’s services, subject to exceptions including the reasonable cost of advertisements, and Model Rule 5.4 protects professional independence and limits fee sharing with non-lawyers Verified. Whether a particular structure is permissible depends on your jurisdiction’s version of those rules and on how the vendor describes itself to consumers. Put the proposed fee structure in front of counsel before you negotiate it, not after.

Cost per lead (CPL)

Appropriate use case: Testing a new source quickly, or buying volume you intend to screen entirely in-house.
Must be defined in writing: What constitutes a deliverable lead, which fields are mandatory, and the duplicate window.
Risk to the law firm: The vendor is paid whether or not the claimant qualifies. All qualification risk sits with the firm.
What gets gamed: Volume at the expense of fit; incomplete records; recycled contacts; loose duplicate windows.
Contract protection: A short duplicate window, mandatory-field rejection, a credit policy with a defined dispute window, and a volume cap.

Cost per qualified lead (CPQL)

Appropriate use case: Ongoing programs where criteria are stable enough to define in writing.
Must be defined in writing: The full qualification standard with disqualifiers, who applies it, and how disagreements are resolved.
Risk to the law firm: Definitional drift. The word "qualified" carries the entire commercial weight of the contract.
What gets gamed: Coaching claimants to fit criteria; applying a stale version of criteria; disputing every rejection.
Contract protection: A versioned criteria schedule attached to the contract, recorded screening calls, and a named arbiter for disputes.

Cost per signed retainer (CPSR)

Appropriate use case: Mature programs where the firm wants acquisition cost aligned to case count.
Must be defined in writing: What counts as signed — executed, countersigned, past a cancellation window, and surviving conflict check.
Risk to the law firm: Pressure on the signing step, and fee-structure questions under the professional-conduct rules.
What gets gamed: Pushing claimants to sign before eligibility is documented; retainers that cancel after billing.
Contract protection: A clawback for retainers that cancel or fail records review, attorney review before signature, and written counsel review of the fee structure.

Flat-fee media management

Appropriate use case: Firms that own their ad accounts and want operational capability rather than leads.
Must be defined in writing: Scope of work, deliverables, reporting cadence, account ownership, and what is out of scope.
Risk to the law firm: The fee is unrelated to results, so the vendor bears no acquisition risk.
What gets gamed: Activity reporting — impressions, optimizations made — substituted for outcome reporting.
Contract protection: Firm owns all accounts and data, reporting extends to signed retainers, and there is a short notice period.

Percentage of media spend

Appropriate use case: Larger programs where the vendor is genuinely managing significant media.
Must be defined in writing: The percentage, what spend it applies to, and whether any media markup exists on top.
Risk to the law firm: The incentive is to increase spend, which is not always the same as increasing signed retainers.
What gets gamed: Budget growth recommendations unsupported by CPSR trend; hidden markup inside the media rate.
Contract protection: Direct access to platform invoices, a declining percentage at higher tiers, and a spend cap requiring written approval to exceed.

Hybrid retainer plus performance fee

Appropriate use case: Aligning incentives while giving the vendor enough base revenue to staff the account.
Must be defined in writing: Both components separately, the performance trigger, and whether the retainer is credited against performance fees.
Risk to the law firm: Complexity obscures the true blended cost per signed retainer.
What gets gamed: Performance triggers set at levels that were going to be met anyway.
Contract protection: Compute and report blended CPSR monthly, and set the trigger against a baseline agreed in writing before launch.

Shared leads

Appropriate use case: Rarely appropriate for mass tort. Occasionally used to test a source cheaply.
Must be defined in writing: How many firms receive the record, in what order, and within what time window.
Risk to the law firm: Claimant experience degrades under multiple simultaneous calls, and conversion is structurally lower.
What gets gamed: Undisclosed share counts; "exclusive" leads that were shared before you received them.
Contract protection: Explicit disclosure of share count and delivery order, priced accordingly — or simply do not buy shared inventory.

Exclusive leads

Appropriate use case: The default expectation for mass tort acquisition.
Must be defined in writing: Exclusive to whom, for which tort, in which states, for how long, and with what resale prohibition.
Risk to the law firm: The term is asserted far more often than it is defined. Undefined exclusivity is not exclusivity.
What gets gamed: Exclusivity that expires quickly; declined leads resold; the same claimant reappearing through another publisher.
Contract protection: A contract clause with scope and duration, an outright resale prohibition, and independent duplicate detection on your side.

The questions that belong in every RFP

These eight areas produce more disputes than everything else combined. Get written answers before you sign, not after a disagreement.

Ownership. Who owns the data, domains, landing pages, creative, ad accounts, tracking pixels, call recordings, and consent records? Who holds admin access to each, and what is the transfer process?
Exclusivity. Is the lead exclusive — to whom, for which tort, in which states, for how long, and with what resale prohibition? What happens to leads we decline?
Duplicates. How are duplicates detected, on what matching keys, within what window, and are they credited automatically or must we dispute them?
Replacement policy. What is the credit or replacement standard, the dispute window, the documentation we must provide, and the cure period?
Definitions. What exactly counts as a qualified lead or a signed retainer, including disqualifying conditions? Who decides, and how are disagreements resolved?
Reporting. What is available, at what frequency, at record level or summary only, and how does it reconcile against our CRM?
Subcontractors. Are publishers, affiliates, co-registration partners, or outsourced intake used anywhere in the lead path? Name them and describe how they are audited and bound.
Exit. What are the cancellation terms, notice period, auto-renewal provisions, transition process, data-export format and timeline, and any associated fee?

Download the full 48-question RFP template →

Section 10

A 30-day launch plan

Two weeks of preparation, one week of controlled testing, one week of reading the signal. The sequence exists so that the first dollar of media lands in a system that can convert it and measure it.

Four successive luminous archways receding into dark haze, each narrower than the last with the final one brightest — an illustration of sequential weekly gates in a launch sequence.

Week 1

Select the tort and establish the economics

Confirm the tort, your firm's role (filing, co-counsel, referral), and the states you will accept.
Obtain written, dated eligibility criteria from litigation counsel.
Check the docket for any registry, census, or filing deadline inside your campaign window.
Build the acquisition ceiling with finance and litigation counsel using the CPSR worksheet.
Open the compliance review: advertising rules, TCPA posture, privacy, recording, and fee structure.

Do not proceed without a written acquisition ceiling and an engaged compliance reviewer.

Week 2

Build the conversion system before the traffic

Finalize intake criteria, scripts, escalation rules, and the disqualification taxonomy.
Complete the intake-readiness checklist and staff to the projected volume.
Configure the CRM so source, campaign, and creative persist through signed and filed status.
Stand up duplicate detection on your side, independent of the vendor.
Approve creative and disclosures for every state the campaign will reach; start the ad archive.
Agree written definitions of every billable event, plus the credit policy and dispute window.

Do not proceed if consent evidence, source persistence, or attorney review is unresolved.

Week 3

Controlled launch on one or two channels

Launch a single primary channel at a budget you are prepared to lose entirely.
Send live test leads through the full path before opening spend.
Review daily: contact rate, time-to-first-contact, and disqualification reasons.
Audit consent records on a random sample of leads within the first 72 hours.
Log every criteria question intake could not answer, and resolve it same-week.

Any consent-evidence gap or attribution break pauses spend until it is fixed.

Week 4

Read the signal and decide

Review qualification rate by source over the full period, not week over week.
Check whether the 90th-percentile response time degraded as volume rose.
Compute trailing cost per signed retainer and compare it against the ceiling.
Reconcile vendor reporting against your CRM record by record.
Pause or cut any source failing on quality, consent, or duplicate rate.

Scale only against the go/no-go criteria below. Absent a clear signal, hold spend flat and extend the test.

Go / no-go criteria for scaling

Increase spend only if every line holds. If any line fails, hold spend flat and fix that line first — scaling a campaign with an unresolved failure multiplies the failure, it does not dilute it.

Qualification rate is stable or improving across at least two full weeks of delivery.
Median time-to-first-contact is inside target and the 90th percentile is not degrading as volume rises.
Consent evidence passes a random audit with no gaps.
Duplicate rate is inside the agreed tolerance, measured by your own detection, not the vendor's.
Trailing cost per signed retainer is at or below your ceiling, on enough retainers that the figure is not driven by one or two cases.
Intake has headcount for the next volume tier at the same response time.
No open compliance issue on creative, disclosures, consent, or recording.

A note on sample size: cost per signed retainer computed on a handful of retainers is noise. Decide in advance how many retainers you need before you will treat the figure as a signal, and do not move budget on less.

Section 11

Final checklist and downloadable tools

Every tool below is the working version of a section above. They are plain text and spreadsheet files, ungated and free to reuse, adapt, and circulate inside your firm. Nothing here asks for your email address.

One-page buyer checklist

Everything to settle before you talk to a vendor, before you launch, and before you scale.

Download →

10-category vendor scorecard

The scoring tool from section 4, with the evidence requests and a blank score sheet.

Download →

RFP question template

48 questions across data ownership, exclusivity, definitions, compliance, intake, and exit rights.

Download →

CPSR worksheet

The acquisition-ceiling model as a spreadsheet, with a sensitivity block and a tracking table.

Download →

Intake-readiness checklist

Nine sections to complete before the first dollar of media spend, with go/no-go criteria.

Download →

Brief your compliance counsel before launch

The single highest-value hour in this process is the one where counsel reviews your creative, your disclosures, your consent capture, your recording practice, and your vendor fee structure together, against the rules of every state your campaign will reach. Section 6 is written to be used as the agenda for that meeting. Take the “what to confirm with counsel” lines verbatim.

Frequently asked

Mass tort marketing: common buyer questions

There is no single answer, and any vendor quoting one without knowing your tort should be treated with caution. Cost varies by tort, docket stage, channel mix, claimant population, and competitive pressure — and it moves sharply when a docket makes news. The useful question is not what a lead costs but whether your cost per signed retainer sits below the ceiling your own economics support. Build that ceiling first, from your expected net fee per compensable case, your retainer-to-filed and filed-to-compensable conversion rates, your workup and intake costs, and your margin reserve. Then evaluate any price against it.

Only if the contract defines exclusivity and prohibits resale. "Exclusive" is asserted far more often than it is defined. Get four things in writing: exclusive to whom (your firm, or a firm in your co-counsel group), for which tort, in which states, and for how long. Then ask separately what happens to leads you decline — resale of declined volume is the most common place exclusivity quietly ends. Finally, run duplicate detection on your own side rather than relying on the vendor's, since a duplicate arriving through a different publisher is the practical test of whether exclusivity held.

Score evidence, not assertions, across ten areas: mass-tort specialization, lead exclusivity and resale policy, TCPA consent documentation, state-bar advertising controls, qualification and medical or exposure screening, intake coverage and speed-to-lead, CRM integration and data ownership, pricing transparency and performance definitions, tort-specific channel strategy, and reporting, replacement policy, and contract terms. For each, ask for a document, a sample record, or a live systems demonstration rather than a description. A vendor who cannot produce a consent record for a lead you pick at random, or a dated criteria document, has answered the question regardless of what they say next.

A good cost per signed retainer is any figure comfortably below your own acquisition ceiling — the maximum you can pay and still hold your target margin after workup, intake, and technology costs, given the probability that a signed retainer becomes a filed and then a compensable case. That ceiling is firm-specific and tort-specific. Benchmarks from other firms are close to meaningless because they embed different fee splits, different conversion rates, and different cost structures. Compute your own number, track trailing cost per signed retainer against it, and treat a figure computed on a handful of retainers as noise rather than signal.

At minimum: per-lead consent records including timestamp, IP address, capture URL, and the disclosure text as rendered; revocation and do-not-call logs with suppression timestamps; call detail records where telemarketing rules apply, for the applicable retention period; a dated archive of every advertisement, landing page, and intake script version, plus proof of any state-required filing; substantiation files for advertising claims tied to the creative version that made them; call recordings with the consent notice captured in the recording; privacy notices as published with version dates; and the vendor contract with its definitions schedule. Confirm the specific retention periods that bind your firm with counsel, since they vary by jurisdiction and by which rules apply to your program.

Methodology

Sources, methodology, and review date

Last reviewed: August 4, 2026. This page is reviewed on a quarterly cycle and whenever a cited authority changes materially.

How this guide was built

Regulatory and ethics statements are drawn from primary sources only — federal agency documents, published court decisions, the ABA Model Rules, state bar rules, and platform policy pages. Each is linked below so you can read the authority rather than our summary of it.
No vendor is named, ranked, reviewed, or recommended anywhere on this page, and no commercial relationship influenced any statement in it.
No performance, volume, cost, conversion, or return figure is presented as a benchmark. Where a calculation needs numbers, they are invented, labeled illustrative, and accompanied by an explicit instruction not to budget from them.
Operational guidance — funnel definitions, scorecard categories, intake practices, contract protections — reflects standard procurement and revenue-operations practice applied to this category. It is offered as a framework to test against your own data, not as an empirical finding.
Nothing here is legal advice, and no summary of a rule is a conclusion about how that rule applies to your firm.

Known limitations

The TCPA consent landscape has been unusually unstable, moving through a vacated rule and repeated agency extensions of a separate revocation provision. Platform advertising policies change without notice and differ by country and advertiser status. State bar rules vary in ways this page does not attempt to catalogue. Confirm the current position on the date you act, and treat any date-stamped statement here as a starting point for that check.

Primary sources

01
Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC, No. 24-10277 (11th Cir. Jan. 24, 2025)
Vacated the FCC's one-to-one consent rule as exceeding the Commission's statutory authority under the TCPA.
02
FCC — Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau order extending the TCPA consent-revocation effective date
Extends the effective date of 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(a)(10) only; the balance of the revocation rules remain in force.
03
FTC — Telemarketing Sales Rule final amendments, 89 Fed. Reg. (Apr. 16, 2024)
Extends record retention from two years to five and adds call-detail and caller-ID recordkeeping obligations.
04
FTC — press release, lead generator that shared and sold consumers' sensitive data (July 2017)
Enforcement action over lead-generation sites whose matching claims did not reflect how applications were actually sold.
05
FTC — business guidance: "Lead generation: When the 'product' is personal data"
The Commission's own summary of what it expects from lead-generation disclosures and data handling.
06
ABA Model Rule 7.1 — Communications Concerning a Lawyer's Services
Prohibits false or misleading communications. States adopt variants — check your own.
07
ABA Model Rule 7.2 — Communications Concerning a Lawyer's Services: Specific Rules, and Comment
Governs advertising and payments for recommending a lawyer's services; the Comment addresses lead generators.
08
ABA Model Rule 5.4 — Professional Independence of a Lawyer
Limits fee sharing with non-lawyers; relevant to any performance-linked vendor fee.
09
New York — 22 NYCRR § 1200.7.1 (Rule 7.1), advertising and retention
Requires retention of advertisement copies — three years generally, one year for computer-accessed communications.
10
State Bar of Texas — Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, Part VII
Rule 7.04 filing requirements for advertisements and solicitation communications; Rule 7.05 exemptions.
11
California Attorney General — California Consumer Privacy Act
Defines sensitive personal information to include information concerning health, with a right to limit its use.
12
Washington Attorney General — My Health My Data Act
Consumer health data statute enforceable through a private right of action; effective March 31, 2024.
13
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — HIPAA covered entities and business associates
Determines whether HIPAA reaches a given data flow at all.
14
California Penal Code § 632 — Invasion of Privacy Act
All-party consent for recording confidential communications; the most frequently litigated recording statute.
15
Google Ads — restricted targeting in personalized advertising
Lists sensitive interest categories including health, and hardship categories such as abuse and trauma.
16
Meta — Advertising Standards: privacy violations and personal attributes
Prohibits ads that assert or imply personal attributes including physical or mental health.
17
TikTok — Advertising Policies: other products and services
Sets out the restrictions on legal-services advertising, including sensitive practice areas.
18
U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation — pending MDL statistics reports
Monthly reports on pending actions and dockets. Figures cited on this page are from the report dated August 3, 2026.

Related reading on this site: mass tort lead generation, mass tort intake, mass tort advertising, cost of mass tort lead generation, and the glossary.

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