Below is our LFJ Conversation with Ray DeLorenzi, founder of RebuttalPR.

RebuttalPR was founded by Ray DeLorenzi, who has counseled clients from the halls of Congress to the courtroom in a wide range of civil cases and adversarial regulatory enforcement actions. Ray’s groundbreaking communications campaigns have helped clients achieve verdicts and settlements totaling tens of billions of dollars.

Over the last 15 years, Ray has played a role in nearly every high-profile mass tort and class action. Whether working with disabled former athletes, sexual abuse survivors, or people injured by defective products, Ray has devised media strategies to help clients solve problems and obtain justice when facing the most difficult challenges and circumstances. For each of the past six years, he was honored by Lawdragon as a Global 100 Leader in Legal Strategy & Consulting. Ray and RebuttalPR have also been ranked by Chambers in their Litigation Support category.

Prior to founding RebuttalPR, Ray was a partner at a DC-based public affairs and communications firm. Before that, he was communications director at the American Association for Justice (AAJ), formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. At AAJ, Ray directed the association’s national media relations and grassroots efforts while serving as its on-the-record spokesperson. In addition to directing legislative and political issue campaigns, Ray also provided counsel to trial lawyers across the country on civil justice issues and cases from local courts to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also worked at AARP, providing media relations support on both legislation and the association’s line of products and services.

Ray is a graduate of The George Washington University and lives in the New York metro area.

To set the stage, give us a snapshot of Rebuttal PR. What does the firm do, who do you serve across the plaintiffs’ bar, funders and their counsel, and what did your years as communications director at the American Association for Justice teach you that shaped how the firm approaches litigation communications today?

RebuttalPR is a communications firm built specifically to serve the plaintiffs’ bar. When I was communications director at the American Association for Justice (AAJ), I saw firsthand how the corporate defense bar had built a sophisticated operation to undermine the civil justice system – whether through seeking to influence the courts, or to push legislators to pass tort reform that would eliminate people’s rights. I strongly believed then, as I do now, that the plaintiffs’ bar deserved to have the same communications firepower and expertise on their side, and that is why I founded RebuttalPR.

On a day-to-day basis, we provide public relations and communications counsel and support to plaintiffs’ law firms. We help our law firm clients tell their stories to the audiences they care about most: people in their communities, the media, legislators, and regulators. This could mean highlighting the complaints they file, the results they obtain, and the impact they have on the people they represent.

We are also frequently retained to provide communications counsel on behalf of lead plaintiffs’ counsel in class actions, multidistrict litigations, and major single event cases to counter the messaging apparatus that corporate defendants typically deploy in these high-stakes matters.

Lastly, we work with other stakeholders in the plaintiffs’ bar on their communications challenges and opportunities, whether that is trade associations that represent trial lawyers, or companies that support plaintiff firms, their clients, and the civil justice system at-large.

You have argued that narrative risk belongs in underwriting. Funders diligence merits, damages and duration, but rarely the media environment around a case. How does an adverse narrative actually move settlement timing and value, and what does diligencing that risk look like in practice before capital is committed?

Settlement timing and value are most strongly tied to litigation risk facing defendants based on the merits and procedural posture of a case. But the people involved in these cases don’t exist in a vacuum. They are at least as sensitive to the prevailing narrative, good or bad, as the wider public, and they make decisions accordingly.

For example, executives at companies who set reserves or who grant settlement authority read. In fact, oftentimes they receive curated daily news briefings highlighting exactly how their organization appears in mainstream, legal, and trade news outlets. They are also looking at social media and talking to colleagues and neighbors just like the rest of us. When negative news coverage builds, the internal memo arguing for a bigger number gets easier to write and the memo arguing to wait gets harder. The opposite is also true, which is why corporate defendants for decades have invested heavily in public relations campaigns to deflect liability.

The influence of news coverage goes beyond the initial headlines. Consider a publicly-traded defendant facing analyst questions on an earnings call about a litigation, or a regulator opening a probe after an investigative story runs. These events do not occur if the case is invisible.

Developing the scientific record is also incredibly important. Corporate defendants are notorious for generating “junk science” that they then claim supports their position. But one skeptical piece in a serious outlet can follow a litigation for years.

Risk is not one-sided. Corporate defendants of late have sought to paint every mass tort as a “lawsuit mill” story to undermine the integrity of the case and the legitimacy of the claims. This can decrease the value of a litigation if unanswered and add months if not years to its duration.

The diligence is not tremendously complicated. It should look like the media equivalent of a lien search. Get a baseline of what coverage already exists on the defendant, the product, the science, and the firms involved — volume and tone in particular. Check what search and AI answers surface, because that’s what a claimant, a reporter, an analyst, or a company executive sees. Profile the defense operation: who runs their communications, what they did in the last three analogous matters, whether they go quiet or go loud. Assess claim-integrity exposure honestly, especially where recruitment is ad-driven and high-volume. And find out whether anybody owns communications on the case at all (and it should never be a lawyer litigating the actual case).

An asset class this disciplined about duration cannot ignore one of its most important determinants.

Assume a funder buys the premise but wants to know what it costs and what it buys. What does communications support look like over the life of a funded case, from pre-filing through resolution, and how should a funder think about it as a line item: who owns it, when it should start, and what a realistic budget is relative to case size?

As it relates to a specific litigation (versus supporting a specific law firm), there are five phases, and each has a different cadence and strategy behind it. Note that none of these phases are asymmetrical; the best defense teams are counteracting at every stage, building their own relationships, etc.

Pre-filing is where the leverage is highest. Sixty to ninety days out you are deciding what the lawsuit is about in one sentence, modeling the defense response (as the defense is modeling their response), drafting messaging, and building relationships with the journalists who own the relevant beats to begin acclimating them to the case and key issues.

Filings are news moments that most firms unfortunately waste. This does not mean putting a press release on a news wire stating “we filed a lawsuit.” That is not news. What is news is the story behind the defendant’s misconduct – who was injured, what caused it, and what the case is all about – conveyed through direct engagement with reporters.

Discovery and motion practice is the long middle. Lower intensity, but this is where documents surface, where allies are identified, and where the key reporters are kept informed or forget you exist. It is also when a case can be tied into bigger stories already in the news.

Bellwether trials are full intensity, daily. A lot of different factors are at play here, such as geography, state or federal court, and what groundwork was laid in the first three phases.

Resolution is about settlement communications, claimant communications, and the record the litigation leaves behind, which determines how the next case in that space gets covered.

A budget structure varies depending on the current state of the litigation, but generally speaking, is tailored to the size of the case (from a time standpoint) as well as the communications challenges or opportunities it presents.

On ownership: lead counsel owns it. The communications strategy must always follow the litigation strategy, never lead it. Regular communication between lead counsel and the PR team helps ensure the right message reaches the right people at the right time. Those partnerships have been the most successful and fulfilling for us, and what we emphasize from day one.

You have said the plaintiffs’ bar is losing the messaging war on third-party litigation funding. The Chamber and ILR have spent a decade building the “foreign money in U.S. courts” frame while the funding industry and its law firm partners largely stayed quiet. Why did the industry cede that ground, what has it cost in the state disclosure bills and the federal rules debate, and what would a credible counter-narrative actually sound like?

To start, there is a real lack of understanding of what third-party litigation funding is, and groups like the U.S. Chamber have used that to their advantage. Is it a funder fronting case costs? Is it a line of credit? Do they have a stake in the outcome? What about funding provided to individual claimants?

There are a lot of wrinkles here, and as they say, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. The truth is that plaintiff lawyers for decades have been engaged in some form of litigation funding. There are countless stories of trial lawyers mortgaging their homes as they spend their last nickel on a case and cause they believe in.

Part of the issue is that funders are financial institutions run by people from finance and law. Traditionally, their instinct has been to hide from the press (too risky), stay silent, and hope the moment passes. This is not a long-term sustainable strategy, especially when the other side is actively attacking the legitimacy of litigation finance. What I found particularly interesting is that the financial sector, not so long ago, would work with the U.S. Chamber on key issues. You also have Big Law defense firms, which again, traditionally worked with the Chamber, now dipping their toes in the third-party funding waters and exploring contingency fee litigation and alternative fee arrangements. I would counsel the industry to embrace transparency, despite the industry’s reticence to go down that road. A strategy that focuses on transparency (and not just from plaintiffs) could be a way to counteract the Chamber’s narrative.

Your view is that ads buy attention while media earns it. The mass tort client-acquisition model runs on paid advertising that is expensive, increasingly regulated, and generates the exact optics the other side uses against the bar. Where does earned media do work that advertising cannot, and how should firms and their funders be reallocating between the two over the next 18 to 24 months?

Four things earned media does that no advertising budget can buy.

Third-party validation. An ad or claims on a firm’s own website are easy to discount or ignore, because they are obviously paid for. A reporter’s byline, or an endorsement from an outside group, carries different weight.

Spotlight on the defendant. No television ad has ever moved a reserve or prompted a question on an earnings call. News coverage and third party validation does both.

Referral and co-counsel flow. The most valuable case sources in this business are other lawyers, and other lawyers are not responding to your ad. They notice who is quoted on the litigation they’re watching and leading the biggest cases.

The regulatory environment. This is the one firms most consistently miss. Ad-driven acquisition is the single richest source of ammunition the other side has. Every “lawsuit mill” segment opens with a screenshot of somebody’s commercial. This is not to say advertising is all bad; it is important for people to know and understand their rights. But there are certainly tactful ways to do it.

The bigger shift is where discovery of lawyers is actually happening. We’ve spent much of this year researching how plaintiffs find law firms in the current age of AI, and the finding is consistent: when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude whether there’s a lawsuit about a product, the generated answer is assembled from news coverage, legal trade press, and ranking sites. Not from the firm’s landing page, and not from paid search, which does not appear in a generated answer at all (although OpenAI is dabbling in this area). A decade of SEO and PPC spend was buying position on a search results page whose importance is eroding. Earned coverage is one of the few inputs generative AI systems actually read.

On reallocation, I would not tell anyone to blow up their acquisition model. But a firm spending $500,000 a month on acquisition can take a couple percentage points off that to fund an earned program and still leave the machine running.

One warning: earned media does not scale on demand. No amount of capital can buy news coverage the moment you need it. That is exactly why the reallocation has to start now. Earned media build trust, reputation, and credibility in a way that paid media cannot.