322. Grow Your Practice with Mass Torts: A Framework for Single Event Attorneys from MTMP

Summary

Personal Injury Mastermind Episode 322 Summary: Grow Your Practice with Mass Torts

Introduction

In Episode 322 of Personal Injury Mastermind titled "Grow Your Practice with Mass Torts: A Framework for Single Event Attorneys from MTMP", host Chris Dreyer delves into the strategic expansion of personal injury (PI) practices into the realm of mass torts. Released on April 17, 2025, this episode serves as a comprehensive guide for single event attorneys aiming to elevate their firms to market-leading positions through the integration of mass tort strategies.

Background on Mass Torts Made Perfect

The episode opens with insights from legal titan Mike Papantonio, who shares the inception and evolution of Mass Torts Made Perfect (MTMP). Mike recounts the challenges faced by attorneys who were predominantly experienced in class actions but lacked the expertise in complex litigation required for mass torts.

“...but those were the people running what was kind of, you call it class action, mass torts, kind of a hybrid. And one time in Atlanta, one of them was on the stage... I picked up a mic, I said, Mr. Chesley, you're not going to do anything with my cases. I've got more cases than you have got. I'm going to try my cases. And you know what? This is a new day where it comes to class action and mass tort.”
— Mike Papantonio [00:32]

This pivotal moment led to the foundation of MTMP, focusing on empowering attorneys to effectively manage and litigate mass tort cases, thereby transforming their practice dynamics.

Conference Highlights

Personal Injury Mastermind then transitions to highlights from the MTMP conference, offering listeners a crash course in mass tort litigation.

1. Sharon Booth on Synergy Between Single Event and Mass Torts

   Sharon Booth, Vice President of Mass Torts Made Perfect, emphasizes the natural synergy between single event PI lawyering and mass torts. She highlights the importance of leveraging existing personal injury practices to tap into mass tort opportunities.

   “Mass tort lawyers almost all do personal injury or single event also at their firms... you have a built-in audience right there in your Rolodex that you should be looking at.”
   — Sharon Booth [01:47]

   Sharon also introduces key projects like the Ultra Processed Food and Depo Provera cases, underscoring their significance as opening sessions at the conference due to their current prominence in mass tort litigation.

2. Eva Kovaco’s Strategic Advice for Mass Tort Attorneys

   Eva Kovaco from Nye Goldtenburg Raison Vaughan provides actionable advice for attorneys transitioning into mass torts. Her key recommendations include:

   • Mastering MDL Dockets: Understanding the complexities of Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) dockets is crucial for managing mass tort cases effectively.

     “Learn how to read an MDL docket... being able to read them, digest them and know what that means for your clients is so much more helpful.”
     — Eva Kovaco [03:23]

   • Managing Client Expectations: Unlike single event cases, mass torts involve numerous clients with varying degrees of case specifics and timelines.

     “Being able to manage client expectations that these cases do take a lot longer... understanding what a client goes through in a mass tort case is hugely helpful.”
     — Eva Kovaco [03:23]

   Eva also discusses the importance of collaboration among multiple law firms and the challenges of maintaining control over an attorney’s schedule within large-scale litigations.

3. Ashley Owens on Enhancing Conference Experience and Networking

   Ashley Owens, President of the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference, outlines the strategic initiatives taken to enhance their annual conference, PIMCON. Key points include:

   • Tiered Ticketing System: Introduction of a tiered pricing model to accommodate different attendee levels, including VIP packages that offer exclusive networking opportunities and complimentary accommodations.

     “We have the general admission which gets you pretty much everything. Our VIP tickets come with your entire stay complimentary... a chance to meet and greet with all our celebrity guests.”
     — Ashley Owens [05:22]

   • Selective Speaker Selection: Ensuring authenticity and value by handpicking speakers based on their expertise and success rather than pay-to-play arrangements.

     “We hand select all of our speakers based off of their background, their influence, their success... so that way it becomes more authentic, more real and more achievable.”
     — Ashley Owens [05:22]

   Ashley emphasizes the unique networking benefits and the high standards maintained for both sponsors and speakers, distinguishing PIMCON from other conferences.

4. Alex Parker’s Framework for Managing Mass Torts

   Alex Parker, an associate attorney at Flint Cooper, Khan Thompson and Miracle, provides an in-depth look at managing mass tort cases. His framework includes:

   • Client Communication: Balancing individualized communication with overarching case updates to manage client expectations effectively.

     “We do frequent updates with our clients every step of the way... Sometimes it's hard to break down their individual cases with each update, but we hope to let them know that this is how the whole case is progressing.”
     — Alex Parker [07:07]

   • Organizational Systems: Implementing a "bucket system" to track the progress of each case component, from product identification (PID) to proof of injury (POI).

     “We have at least six buckets where you can, at a given time, just pull those buckets... so you can kind of see the whole scale.”
     — Alex Parker [07:07]

   • Team Management: Scaling operations by expanding legal teams to handle the increased workload inherent in mass torts.

     “Sometimes that's hard to do, but also you don't know where to jump... collaboration is key and finding a mentor is key.”
     — Alex Parker [07:07]

   Alex underscores the importance of mentorship and strategic collaboration, especially for young attorneys transitioning from single event practices to mass torts.

Key Takeaways and Strategies

• Leverage Existing PI Practices: Utilize the existing client base and relationships in personal injury to identify and develop mass tort opportunities.

• Understand Complex Litigation Structures: Mastering MDL dockets and understanding case management orders are critical for effective mass tort litigation.

• Effective Client Management: Maintain transparent and frequent communication with clients to manage expectations and keep them informed about case progress.

• Implement Robust Organizational Systems: Adopt comprehensive tracking systems to manage the multitude of cases and ensure no client falls through the cracks.

• Invest in Team Expansion and Training: Scale legal teams appropriately to handle the increased workload and complexity of mass tort cases.

• Foster Collaboration and Mentorship: Engage with experienced attorneys and seek mentorship to navigate the nuances of mass tort litigation successfully.

Notable Quotes

• “We're all appointed to the same leadership... being able to collaborate and do teamwork with firms that aren't your own is probably the biggest adjustment.”
  — Eva Kovaco [05:22]

• “We hand select all of our speakers... so that way it becomes more authentic, more real and more achievable.”
  — Ashley Owens [05:22]

• “Collaboration is key and finding a mentor is key.”
  — Alex Parker [07:07]

Conclusion

Episode 322 of Personal Injury Mastermind provides a comprehensive exploration of integrating mass tort strategies into personal injury practices. Through insights from seasoned professionals like Mike Papantonio, Sharon Booth, Eva Kovaco, Ashley Owens, and Alex Parker, listeners gain valuable knowledge on expanding their firms, managing complex litigations, and fostering collaborative environments. The episode culminates with an invitation to attend PIMCON 2025 in Scottsdale, Arizona, promising transformative strategies and networking opportunities for personal injury attorneys looking to dominate their markets.

“For this special episode of Personal Injury Mastermind... PIMCON2025 will fundamentally change how you approach your practice.”
— Chris Dreyer [14:39]

For more information and to secure tickets, visit pimcon.org.

Transcript

[Mike Papantonio]

Put together Mass Towards Made Perfect. Because I thought in my mind that you had to create energy around this, because when we started, you had these characters that weren't even trial lawyers. They were class action wogs.

[Chris Dreyer]

That's Mike Papantonio, a legal titan in practice who's helped secure more than $80 billion in verdicts and settlements as one of the few living attorneys abducted a national trial lawyer's hall of fame. Mike founded massworks Made Perfect to flip the script on how attorneys approach complex litigation.

[Mike Papantonio]

All they knew how to do is class action. Hell, they'd never taken a deposition. For God's sakes, if they walked in a courtroom to have tried a case, they'd pass out. But those were the people running what was kind of, you call it class action, mass torts, kind of a hybrid. And one time in Atlanta, one of them was on the stage, guy named Stan Chesley. I had a consortium of lawyers that had sent me a lot of breast implant cases. And he was up on stage with his COD cadre of, you know, class action wogs talking about how he's going to settle this. And. And I picked up a mic, I said, Mr. Chesley, you're not going to do anything with my cases. I've got more cases than you have got. I'm going to try my cases. And you know what? This is a new day where it comes to class action and mass tort. Right after that is when we started Mass Torts Made Perfect. And it just continued to grow, man.

[Chris Dreyer]

This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO. Today we're doing something different. We're bringing you the highlights from Mass Towards Made Perfect conference. If you've been considering adding mass torts to your practice, this is your crash course. These experts will guide you through what you need to know to get started in this lucrative, impactful area of law. Let's dive in.

[Sharon Booth]

I'm Sharon Booth. I'm the vice president of Mass Sorts Made Perfect at the lovely Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. I think everybody should walk away with new connections and with having made new friends, new business contacts. If you're a single event lawyer or personal injury lawyer and you're here to check out what Mass Torts Made Perfect is all about and what the mass tort practice would be like, this is a great place for you. Because if you think about it, mass tort lawyers almost all do personal injury or single event also at their firms, or they themselves have done personal injury and single event. So there's a Real synergy there. Not all single event lawyers are mass tort lawyers, but I think all mass tort lawyers are single event and personal injury lawyers. So if you're a single event lawyer coming here, meeting people, the opportunity for you is you probably have mass tort clients in your Rolodex. If you have a car accident med mal practice and you're in your community and you've been serving people in that community, the people that you have been representing, they have relatives, friends themselves. And so you have a built in audience right there in your Rolodex that you should be looking at. We opened with the Ultra Processed Food project, which is a brand new, really, really interesting project, followed by the Depo Provera project, which is also the reason why those two projects were the opening sessions of MTMP is because we think those are the are really the biggest, most important cases going on right now.

[Eva Kovaco]

I'm Eva Kovaco at Nye Goldtenburg Raison Vaughan in our Minneapolis office. My two pieces of advice is one, to learn how to read an MDL docket. They are a lot different than a single event docket. A court will issue case management orders, pre trial orders, and being able to read them, digest them and know what that means for your clients is so much more helpful than flailing and wondering what to do. And then the second thing is to peek on a variety of mass torque clients just because the expectations are so much different than a motor vehicle accident client. A motor vehicle accident client knows when their accident happened. A lot of the times people who have product cases, they don't know if they use the right brands, they just know they had a port, they had a cpap. And being able to manage client expectations that these cases do take a lot longer. And so being able to understand what a client goes through in a mass tort case is hugely helpful when you then become a leader in the space on behalf of all the clients across the country. When I was a PI attorney, I felt like I could control my schedule a little bit more based on how many clients I took on and my litigation calendar. Where the biggest adjustment here is that a leadership slate, whether if put together by plaintiffs or a plaintiff by a judge, is like a conglomeram of 40 different law firms trying to be one law firm running a litigation. And so I think it's funny sometimes I talk to for example Chris Paulos who's a partner here at Love and Fair Antonio. He and I talk every day about the depo prepared litigation and telling my bosses I can't work on what they want me to work on because I have to work on something with another attorney at a firm that does not pay me. But we are all appointed to the same leadership is, is different. So being able to collaborate and do teamwork with firms that aren't your own is probably the biggest adjustment.

[Ashley Owens]

Hi, my name is Ashley Owens and I'm the president of the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference. We are at Math Towards Made Perfect for the spring session in Las Vegas, Nevada and we are here promoting pimcon, a personal injury mastermind conference in October in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Phoenician. We decided to use MTMP as a place to launch Tick. We're so excited to be here and to really solidify our standing in the event space around personal injury. So this year we're changing the game up a little bit when it comes to tickets. We decided to give a tier ticket system so we have a certain amount of tickets at one price and then once we hit that number, we increase the ticket price. Kind of like you see at a concert. We have the general admission which gets you pretty much everything. Our VIP tickets come with your entire stay there complimentary, meaning your hotel room. We also have a VIP concierge who's going to make sure you have the best experience while you're there. And then also you get a chance to meet and greet with all our celebrity guests. In addition, you also get a sit down dinner with all of our other VIPs. It allows you to have one on one conversations and you really get to generate the best kind of networking in a group full of powerful people. We limited the amount of sponsors that come and then increase the amount of attorneys that can attend. So that way it's favorable for both sides. We don't have anybody who's speaking at the conference who is a pay to play, which means nobody is paying to be on our stages. We hand select all of our speakers based off of their background, their influence, their success, their careers, their goals, everything. And they're able to be on stage providing that kind of content. And so that way it becomes more authentic, more real and more achievable. The last thing you want is to be sold to on every single stage. And so with our vendors and again with our speakers, we have a high standard for everyone. There's benefits to going to all of these conferences, but ours is different because we are different. And that is the benefit of coming to pimcom.

[Alex Parker]

Alex Parker, I'm an associate attorney at Flint Cooper, Khan Thompson and Miracle. It Is a very different style of communication when you're communicating individually with PI clients versus when you have thousands of clients involved in a massive mdl. One way to be effective but still be communicative is to speak with them, like break down their own individual case, but still explain the whole case at large and walk them through the whole process that is a mass tort or mdl. And so trying to break it down for them to say, this isn't a standard PI case where we file your lawsuit, then within a couple months it's often resolved. These cases often taking off five years at least to fully litigate and so managing expectations, just talking to them about how their individual case, but also the litigation as a whole. We do frequent updates with our clients every step of the way. There are certain thresholds that we will create just standard updates to clients in terms of like when we receive their records, when their case is filed, and then once they're filed, unfortunately, then they kind of sit in that limbo stage. We have thousands of cases right now that are, that we're working up to be filed and then that are already filed. And so we do send quarterly updates to all our filed clients, just giving them updates on the litigation as a whole. Sometimes it's hard to break down their individual cases with each update, but we hope to let them know that this is how the whole case is progressing. And if they do have individual questions or concerns, if they received additional specifically for Suboxone, additional dental work or in other litigations, if they've had other injuries related to this lawsuit, to just keep us updated on that. That way that will help them further down the road and settlement purposes. When we do end up trying to sell these cases, Having the most up to date medical records is always extremely important for that. When you're moving from single event case to where you have hundreds, if not thousands of clients, have a bucket system to where you can tell the exact number when you're working up a case, the exact number of each client in bucket. I mean, specifically for mass torts, the two things that you typically look for is pid, which is product identification in poi, which is proof of injury. And you need those, generally speaking, you need those two things to file a case. When we're working out pid, we need to know specifically for Suboxone, how many science clients do we have that you still need to make a pharmacy request on it? How many clients have pharmacy requests outstanding that are still waiting to come back? How many have we gotten back in there now ready for PID review, then how many. Then for the next bucket, how many do we have confirmed PID that we need to start working out poi? And then that is basically the same thing for poi. How many medical records requests do we need to make? How many records requests do we have outstanding? How many do you have to review? So it's kind of like at least six buckets where you can, at a given time, just pull those buckets, say, oh, you know, we have 200 outstanding pharmacy requests. We have 50 pharmacy requests return ready for review. And just so you can kind of see the whole scale. And hopefully as the case progresses, they trickle down so that you start off with thousands of people in the pharmacy request bucket. And then slowly, over time, those numbers start spreading into your POI buckets and then into your ready to file bucket. As absolutely helps with the philosophy of the case in terms of where to focus your resources. One thing that's probably difficult between a single event and mass source is that. And I have. And Sometimes in the PI world, there's one paralegal supporting three or four attorneys. We have three attorneys and 10 paralegals working out these cases and so managing a team in terms of, okay, we have, you know, a backlog in pharmacy requests that are outstanding. We've made 2000 pharmacy requests, but we still have 1500 that are out there that we need to follow up on grabbing a couple paralegals and start transitioning them to that sort of process too. That way you can just keep your system moving. And it also helps on the back end with client communication. When they call in and want to update on their case, you can tell them where in the process they are. You can tell them, hey, we've made a pharmacy records request. We're still waiting for it to come in. Or now we. We've confirmed that you have pid, that whatever mask you're working on. And now we're working on, you know, providing injury records, everything like that, so that you can. Even though it's harder to be more personal on these cases, you still need to be personal when they call in. And so you need to know kind of at a glance where they are in the case workup process. For, for me, what I recommend is really finding a mentor, someone that you can have candid conversations with. You know, so it's a completely different animal. However, it is extremely collaborative. People want you to do well, because the better that you do on a litigation, the better that whole entire litigation is. But if you are someone who's coming over from Doing more single event work and want to get more involved in mass torts. I would say, you know, collaboration is key and finding a mentor is key. Those those two biggest things. I'm a young attorney in terms of my masterworks practice. I've been practicing for five years. In the first four years of my practice was doing single event work. I have really thrown myself out there. Was recently pointing to the leadership development committee on Suboxone litigation. Throw yourself out there, just kind of stick your neck out. But some people, sometimes that's hard to do, but also you don't know where to jump. And so in terms of being a little more strategic about it, but it's still extremely collaborative because it's still essentially a group project in terms of leadership and moving the whole litigation across the finish line. If you're a young attorney, first step would probably be to make as many connections as you can with other associates that are working on that similar litigation and also start reaching out to the more experienced attorneys and leadership that's working on that litigation. See, in terms of either mentorship or how you can help with that as well, people really do want everyone to succeed in this in mass torts because the more attorneys that we have that are successful in this, the better the litigation will go as a whole. In terms of case acquisition, we're all referral based. And so we just have good relationships with a lot of various firms that send us cases, referral sources, or else for clients as well. So being communicative with them in terms of how many cases we've had referred by them, where each one of those cases are, how many were still working out, how many are filed, where they are in the process. So I'm constantly working on that too. But I think just maintain those relationships, that's all.

[Chris Dreyer]

For this special episode of Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO, and I want to see you at PIMCON this October in Scottsdale. PIMCON2025 will fundamentally change how you approach your practice. Early bird tickets are available now at pimcon. Org See in Scottsdale.