Mike Papantonio:
I put together Mass Torts 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 woggs.
Chris Dreyer:
That's Mike Papantonio, a legal titan in practices helped secure more than $80 billion in verdicts and settlements. As one of the few living attorneys inducted in the National Trial Lawyer's Hall of Fame, Mike founded Mass Torts Made Perfect to flip the script on how attorneys approach complex litigation.
Mike Papantonio:
All they knew how to do was class action. Hell, they'd never taken a deposition for God's sakes. If they walked into a courtroom, have to try a case, they'd pass out. But those were the people running what was, you call it class action, mass torts, kind of a hybrid. And one time in Atlanta, one of them was on the stage, a 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 cadre of class action woggs, talking about how he's going to settle this, 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 Torts 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 Boothe:
I'm Sharon Boothe. I'm the Vice President of Mass Torts 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 the reason why those two projects were the opening sessions of MTMP is because we think those are really the biggest, most important cases going on right now.
Ava Cavaco:
I'm Ava Cavaco at Nigh Goldenberg Raso & Vaughn 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 take on a variety of mass tort 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 used 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 conglom 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 Leven Papantonio. He and I talk every day about the Depo Provera 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 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's Ashley Owens, and I'm the president of the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference. We're at Mass Torts Made Perfect for the spring session in Las Vegas, Nevada, and we are here promoting PIMCON, the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference in October in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the Phoenician. We decided to use MTMP as a place to launch tickets. 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 tiered 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 PIMCON.
Alex Parker:
Alex Parker. I'm an associate attorney at Flint Cooper Cohn Thompson & 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, 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 take five years at least to fully litigate. And so managing expectations, just talking to them about 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 when we receive their records, when their case is filed. And then once they're filed, unfortunately then we kind of sit in that limbo stage. We have thousands of cases right now 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 in settlement purposes when we do end up trying to settle 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, having 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 one bucket. I mean, specifically for mass torts, the two things that you typically look for is PID, which is product identification, and POI, which is proof of injury. And those generally speaking, you need those two things to file a case. When we're working on PID, we need to know, specifically for Suboxone, how many science clients do we have that we still need to make a pharmacy request on? How many clients have pharmacy requests outstanding that are still waiting to come back? How many have we gotten back in that are now ready for PID review? And then for the next bucket, how many do we have confirmed PID that we need to start working on 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 we have to review? So it's kind of like at least six buckets where you can, at a given time, just pull those buckets and say oh, we have 200 outstanding pharmacy requests, we have 50 pharmacy requests returned and 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. It absolutely helps with the velocity of the case in terms of where to focus your resources. One thing that's probably difficult between a single event and mass torts 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 ten paralegals working out these cases. And so managing a team in terms of, okay, we have a backlog in pharmacy requests that are outstanding. We've made 2,000 pharmacy requests, but we still have 1,500 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, then we can just keep our system moving and it also helps on the backend with client communication.
When they call in and want an update on their case, you can tell them where in the process they are. You can tell them, "Hey, we have made a pharmacy records request. We're still waiting for it to come in," or, "We've confirmed that you have PID," whatever mass tort you're working on, "And now we're working on providing injury records," everything like that. 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 at a glance where they are in the case order process.
For me, what I recommend is really finding a mentor, someone that you can have candid conversations with. Torts is 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 collaboration is key and finding a mentor is key. Those two biggest things.
I'm a young attorney in terms of my mass torts practice. I've been practicing for five years, and the first four years of my practice was doing single event work. I have really thrown myself out there, was recently appointed to the leadership development committee on the Suboxone litigation. Throw yourself out there, just kind of stick your neck out, but 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 and 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 are also 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 we're 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.
Chris Dreyer:
That's all 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. PIMCON 2025 will fundamentally change how you approach your practice. Early bird tickets are available now at pimcon.org. See you in Scottsdale.
