Case Study: How One Firm Achieved Unprecedented Success In Mass Tort Cases
In the highly competitive field in mass tort lawsuits many law firms use similar guidelines — find an active litigation, recruit clients through digital ads or referrals to MDL leaders, and then seek the global settlement. This model performs, to different levels, for a variety of firms. However, it is not a model that produces exceptional outcomes.
The background of Harrison & Associates — an average-sized plaintiffs’ company with its headquarters within Atlanta, Georgia — is unique. In the span of seven years the firm transformed from a general practice in personal injury with a small mass tort component to one of the most popular and financially prosperous mass tort practices within the United States, achieving settlement results that were consistently higher than MDL averages, creating an impressive client list of more than 12,000 clients in six litigations currently pending, and establishing a name within the plaintiffs’ bar, which leads to referrals quicker than the firm is able to manage the referrals.
This is the exact story of what they did -the strategic choices as well as the operational investment as well as the commitments to culture and the tough lessons which created a remarkable mass tort system from ordinary beginnings.
Notice: Harrison & Associates is an unincorporated firm that was designed to demonstrate the real strategies and concepts employed in successful mass torts. All figures and information illustrate the documented business practices.
The Starting Point – Honest Assessment Of Where They Were
In 2016 Harrison & Associates was a twelve-attorney personal injury law firm with an impressive reputation throughout the region as well as a steady car crash and workers’ compensation cases and a modest participation in two mass tort litigations – the pharmaceutical case as well as an initial-stage medical device MDL.
The managing partner Robert Harrison — a veteran of personal injury for 22 years -was a shrewd observer of the mass tort industry from afar for a long time fascinated by its size but cautious about its complexity and costs. Two co-counsel arrangements with larger firms in the mass tort field were causing him to be frustrated. the clients he referred to were earning substantial fees for the firms receiving them, and his firm was receiving referral percentages that he felt were not sufficient when compared to the client acquisition expenses he had paid for.
“We were functioning as a feeder operation for other firms,” Harrison remembers. “We were doing the hard work of finding and signing clients, building the relationships, and then handing everything over. I decided we needed to either get serious about mass tort as a full practice area or get out of it entirely.”
The decision to make a serious move needed an honest assessment of the firm’s shortcomings such as financial resources, scientific and medical knowledge, the infrastructure for case management and MDL relationships. The results were humbling. However, it led to a strategic plan, which, when implemented over the next seven years, changed the company completely.
Year One And Two – Building The Foundation Before Building The Inventory
The first decision Harrison took — and which Harrison believes was the most significant of the whole transformation was to invest in infrastructure prior investing in acquisition of clients.
“Every firm I had watched struggle in mass tort had done it backwards,” he states. “They spent everything on marketing first, signed thousands of clients, and then discovered they didn’t have the systems, the staff, or the scientific foundation to handle what they had acquired. We deliberately did the opposite.”
scientific And Medical Investment: Harrison employed two medical professionals full-time -an experienced registered nurse who had experience in oncology relevant to the litigation that the firm was investigating and a pharmacologist who had knowledge of the literature on drug safety. The hires were costly and raised eyebrows for partners who were used to a strict legal-related staffing model.
“People thought I was crazy,” Harrison declares. “But our clients were dealing with cancer diagnoses and serious medical complications. If we couldn’t speak intelligently about their medical situation — not just their legal situation — we couldn’t fully serve them. And if we couldn’t evaluate the scientific literature ourselves, we were entirely dependent on what other people told us about the strength of our cases.”
The medical staff’s hiring paid off fast. The company’s ability to perform intake screening that was medically informed that distinguished strongly qualified claims from those that are not qualified by actual clinical knowledge resulted in a quality case inventory which was a significant improvement over companies that rely solely on legal standards.
The Case Management infrastructure: Simultaneously, Harrison invested in the most advanced case management software available and hired a case management director who had MDL experience, and created the standardised intake and documentation procedures which every client’s file had to satisfy before it could be considered active.
“A mass tort case file is only as good as its documentation,” says the director of case management Patricia Okafor, who joined the firm in the year that it was founded. “We built protocols that ensured every file contained complete medical records, detailed exposure history, signed authorisations, and thorough damages documentation from day one. When settlement time came, our files were ready. We weren’t scrambling to reconstruct documentation years after intake.”
Year Three – Entering MDL Leadership And Changing The Firm’s Standing
The pivotal moment for Harrison & Associates’ mass tort history occurred in year three, when Robert Harrison — leveraging the firm’s vast cases inventory and a growing reputation as a scientist had the ability to successfully request and secured a seat in the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee of the pharmaceutical MDL that is at the heart of the firm’s work.
MDL leadership posts can be among the top important strategic assets of mass tort law. They are directly involved in strategy for discovery as well as expert witness selection bellwether trial preparation, as well as global settlement negotiations – as opposed to the inactive waiting of a referrer firm and active participation in decision-making process that affects the outcomes of each claimant involved who is involved in litigation.
“The difference between being on the PSC and not being on the PSC is the difference between playing the game and watching it,” Harrison states. “We were now in the room where the decisions were made. We understood what was happening, why it was happening, and what it meant for our clients before anyone else did.”
PSC membership has also helped improve the reputation of the firm within the bar of plaintiffs. Collaboration agreements, referral arrangements and joint ventures that previously been unobtainable to mid-sized regional firms started to appear regularly. The firm’s case portfolio was increased from 2,400 cases to more than 7,000 cases within 18 months of being awarded its PSC post.
Year Four And Five – The Client Trust Differentiator
The firm’s inventory increased and the litigation progressed towards the resolution stage, Harrison made another unconventional decision — one which would turn out to be the most crucial trust-building move of the firm’s journey through mass tort.
He established an exclusive client communications team consisting of eight full-time employees — not paralegals who manage documents, but communications specialists with the sole purpose of maintaining real, lasting relations with clients of the firm throughout the course of litigation.
“We had clients who had been with us for four years by this point,” Harrison states. “Four years of waiting, of uncertainty, of managing serious health conditions while simultaneously trying to understand a legal process that moves at a pace that feels incomprehensible from the outside. If we had not invested in keeping those relationships alive and those clients genuinely informed, we would have lost hundreds of them to competing firms making more aggressive promises.”
The team of communication established a regular quarterly update schedule with personalised letters that explained the status of the case in plain language, and followed by telephone calls from team members who understood each client’s unique circumstances. The response rates to settlement messages from companies with similar models averaged at industry-standard levels. Harrison & Associates’ response rates were higher than 94 percentthis has directly translated into more efficient, smoother settlement distribution and drastically lower administrative expenses.
Year Six And Seven – The Settlement Phase And Its Outcomes
The pharmaceutical MDL which is at the heart of the firm’s business practice shifted to global settlement during the years 6 and 7, Harrison & Associates’ strategy produced results that dramatically beat industry benchmarks.
The quality of the medical documentation provided by the firm as a direct consequence of its year-one investment in medically informed intake, as well as rigorous procedures for managing cases — ensured that client’s dossiers were among the most complete and most favorably classified during the allocation of settlements. The placements of the injury tier to Harrison clients were generally over or even better than the rates attained by similar firmshaving significantly less claims and down-adjusting.
Harrison’s PSC membership meant Harrison’s lawyers were directly involved in the negotiation of the settlement matrix comprehending its structure, allocation rules, and valuation process in a degree of depth that enabled the firm to communicate it clearly and clearly to clients and advocate effectively for the proper tier allocations when disagreements were arose.
Settlements that were finalized for our pharmaceutical MDL inventory yielded average net recoveries per client that were about 23 percent higher than the MDL’s average across comparable injuries. For a company that had thousands of clients in one lawsuit, that difference represented thousands of dollars in additional settlements to the injured who required it.
The Numbers Behind The Transformation
Legal professionals who are evaluating this model Harrison & Associates model, the financials are useful:
- Mass tort revenues for 2016: Approximately $1.2 million (primarily referral fees)
- mass tort revenues: Approximately $34 million (primarily direct representation fees)
- Inventory of active clients: 12,400 claimants across six cases
- Active MDL leader posts: Three PSC memberships
- Retention rate of clients throughout the lifecycle of litigation: 91 percent
- Net client recovery against. MDL average: 18-24 percent more than benchmark in active litigations
- Staff expansion: From 12 attorneys and 18 support staff in 2016 to 31 attorneys and 67 support personnel in 2023.
The Lessons Every Mass Tort Practitioner Should Take From This Story
Infrastructure prior to inventory every time. The firms that battle in mass tort nearly all the time acquire cases quicker than their systems are able to manage the cases. Harrison’s deliberate reversal of this order — laying the foundation before constructing the inventory the only replicable example of their successful business.
Medical expertise isn’t an option. In pharmaceutical and medical device lawsuits, companies who lack a solid understanding of medical issues depend on other’s opinions of their cases. This dependence can impact the quality of cases and settlement results. In-house medical expertise — no matter how painful initially will pay dividends over the course of the duration of litigation.
MDL leadership is a game changer. The difference between active participation in the litigation strategy and waiting passively for settlement distributions isn’t small, it’s transformational. Firms that are serious about mass tort ought to be seeking PSC positions with aplomb and invest in building a case portfolio and reputation of the professional which will make these positions possible.
Communication with clients is an investment in strategic planning not a cost for overhead. Harrison’s communication team -which was widely thought was a waste of money has resulted in measurably better retention of clients, more smooth settlement distributions, as well as an referral pipeline that regularly beat paid advertisements in terms of volume and quality. The ROI on this investment was astonishment.
Reputation builds. Every superior settlement result and every client who is satisfied and every co-counseling relationship based upon a track record of excellence, resulted in an asset of reputation that became in value with each new year. The firm’s growth through referrals in its final years — which resulted in the creation of cases at only a fraction of the costs of digital advertisingis the result of a compounded return over a long period of steady, good practice.
Extraordinary Results Require Extraordinary Commitment
Harrison & Associates story is not a tale of luck. Harrison & Associates story is not one of luck, or of being in the right place at the right moment, or of the financial resources many firms can’t access. It’s a story of strategic decisions made with care and continuous efficiency, a true commitment to customer service and the ability to establish a solid foundation prior to seeking growth.
Each element of their success can be replicated not in a hurry and not in a hurry but attainable by any business willing to fulfill similar commitments and with the same rigor on a similar time frame.
Mass tort litigation gives lawyers the chance to perform meaningful, consequential work on a massive size. However, this opportunity is offered only for those who are prepared to tackle it with the seriousness in preparation, as well as the commitment to customer service that it requires.
