An LFJ Conversation with Michael Kelley, Partner, Parker Poe

Steve Nober, the founder and CEO of Consumer Attorney Marketing Group (CAMG), has been a significant force and innovator in the legal marketing industry for over 15 years. Often hailed as the Mass Tort Whisperer℠, Nober earned his reputation through over a decade of spearheading successful mass tort campaigns and fostering close relationships with top handling firms, showcasing unparalleled expertise in the mass tort arena. He is a sought-after speaker, presenting at over 40 conferences annually, across the United States and globally, covering a range of topics, including best marketing practices, ethics in advertising, and litigation funding. Under Nober’s leadership, CAMG has grown into the largest fully integrated legal marketing agency in the United States, steadfastly committed to its core values of ethics first, transparency, innovation, and efficiency. With a remarkable career spanning over 30 years, Steve Nober has demonstrated executive leadership and innovation in marketing, media management, and digital and computer technologies. His experience includes managing mergers and acquisitions, corporate turnarounds, and startups. In the advertising sector, his specialties include direct response marketing, digital and offline advertising, and lead generation strategies, as well as media buying and analysis, particularly focused on the legal sector. Below is our LFJ Conversation with Steve Nober: CAMG breaks down mass tort claims into early, mid and late stage. These are segmented by expected time to settlement, with early being 30-48 months, mid being 18-30 months, and late being 6-18 months.  How does the value-add of CAMG change as cases make their way from early to mid to late stage?   The value CAMG brings to each stage is a bit different and I will explain. The first value proposition CAMG bring to clients for early-stage cases is similar to the answer to your question 3 below in regards the modeling, leveraging historical data, targeting and projecting what the origination costs will look like is key to being ready to jump into a new and early tort. Also, understanding criteria that leadership handling law firms would like to see used to qualify an injured victim is critical to have knowledge before starting.  Also, in this early stage knowing who the key handling law firms that are going to make a move to be in leadership for the various torts is a key decision that needs to be made as all things are set up to begin.   These are all part of the CAMG process to help our clients begin deploying capital into the early stage torts.

I am often referred to as “The Mass Tort Whisperer®” which really means we are usually very early in hearing about early new torts, late-stage torts that may be settling soon, etc.

This information can be traded on so it’s quite valuable as we can help our clients use much of this information to make capital deployment decisions. The value for mid stage is a combination of value we bring for early and some of the value propositions mentioned in late stage. Knowing the handling firms that have been really serious about the tort and in leadership is key.  The modeling financials can get more detailed with projections and less guessing since the tort will have moved from early to mid-stage.  Following the tort activity in the litigation is key to understanding the direction that leadership sees for each tort and how bullish they are is key to an investor deciding to deploy capital for the tort.    Our value for the mid stage is key being the tort is mid-way thru the life cycle and so many variables need to be considered prior to investing. The value of late stage is knowing which law firms would be considered the best handling firm to work with that can maximize settlement values or which firms are in settlement negotiations and can still take more cases would be two good examples. Also, having the data to model out what fallout/attrition looks like with late-stage cases is key since it may be higher than the earlier stages.   The late-stage torts are a great opportunity but financial modeling and picking the right partners are key.  Also, the marketing/origination of cases needs to be handled very precise and almost scientific like to make sure cases can still be acquired at costs that make sense taking the criteria in mind of the possible handling firms.  There’s quite a bit of value we bring to these late-stage campaigns for our clients. At which stage of the case life are you currently finding the most attention from litigation funders?  Where is there the most room for growth?  The most attention goes to late-stage torts due to the projected shorter time to settlement vs. the early and mid-stage torts.  If there’s more capital to spend annually, we see more diversification with the heavy weight still on late stage and smaller percentages of total capital going to the mid and early stages. We educate our clients on costs and risk for each stage tort.  The late stage is typically higher, but risk of a settlement is much lower since it’s a mature tort, there’s more history and analysis that can be done on how the tort has progressed.   The early torts are just emerging or will have recently passed Daubert so being early the costs are much lower and risk a bit higher since the litigation will be early in starting.  Mid stage gives you a bit of all with costs not as high as late stage and risks a bit lower than the torts just starting out.

There are a limited number of injured victims in each tort, and we always need to be careful not to put more capital than we project we can spend, or costs of a case will drive higher pretty fast.

With larger capital clients we are moving into other torts whether late stage as well or mid and early stages to help diversify. One interesting note as we diversify clients is deploying capital into some torts that are closer to personal injury cases vs. traditional mass torts like Asbestos and Sex Abuse as two examples.  The time to settlement in these are closer to what we see in auto accidents being around 18 months, these are interesting torts to diversity capital and see shorter settlement times that some of the longer mass torts. The answer to the question about where room for growth is would be from the early-stage torts in being that there typically has not been a large amount of marketing yet to acquire cases so the possible total cases available would be quite high and with costs being fairly low.   This is usually where we can deploy the most capital vs. the other stages. When it comes to modeling out the expected costs, timeline and return, you look at a variety of factors here.  Can you explain what those factors are, and how do you weight each of those from case to case (is there a standard algorithm, or is the weighting bespoke to each case?)  When modeling out the expected costs, timeline, attrition and projected return, we consider a variety of factors to ensure a comprehensive analysis. These factors can include:

1. Historical Data: Past performance and outcomes of similar cases provide a baseline for expectations.
2. Targeting Data: We subscribe to very sophisticated targeting and demographic syndicated services such as Kantar and Neilson.  Once we have targeting details on who the injured victims are, these targeting services help is see which advertising mediums and channels index the highest to reach them.
3. Active Campaigns: We are typically running active campaigns for most of the more popular mass torts so building up recent cost details is something we are looking at every day to optimize the performance response data which keeps costs of origination lower by being very quick to move capital where response and quality of cases are best and stop the capital spend in areas that are not showing a response that makes sense to continue.  This is Moneyball for Marketing, and I speak about this often at conferences.
4. Market Conditions: Current trends in the legal market and any external factors that might affect the case.
5. Attrition or Fallout: This is key with modeling out costs of originating a real quality case.  We watch very close as the tort matures from early to mid to late stage how the fallout or attrition of the new signed case is trending.  Once a claimant is signed with a law firm, some of these will not turn into a case as all of things are verified.  Medical records for example will always have a percentage of cases where there are no medical records or the records show a different injury, etc.  These need to be projected into the modeling at the very beginning and they vary from tort to tort.
6. Intel from Leadership Firms: Our relationship with firms in leadership allow us to receive regular updates on the estimated timeline and estimated settlement values.

As for the weighting of these factors, it tends to be bespoke rather than algorithmic. Each case is unique, and while we do use historical data and standard metrics as a starting point, the specific circumstances of each case require a tailored approach.  The key metrics are seeing where the full costs are to originate compensable case and what the projected settlement range looks like so the various torts can be compared from an ROI analysis. You provide a wealth of intelligence through your Legal Marketing Index.  What can law firms and litigation funders expect to find there, and how is this intelligence useful?  We publish what we call the Legal Marketing Index or LMI for short and this is what we use to provide some of the data we collect that we share with the industry.  This data is broken down by each mass tort and includes extensive details that we have aggregated from large case volume so the data tends to be spot on as a baseline on what we see and can be expected if a law firm or fund wants to move to be active in a particular tort.  We are publishing date on topics such as injury details, demographics, geographics, case concentration in cities around the country, media details, call details, etc. Some of the intelligence is useful and some just interesting to review.  An example of how the data is critical to know before moving into acquiring cases for a tort would be the following:  If you wanted to acquire hernia mesh cases but knew that only a few manufactures are defendants and the rest of the hernia mesh devices do not make sense hold onto as a case, knowing what percentage of cases of every 1,000 are which manufacturer’s would be key to calculating the real costs of finding the right hernia mesh cases with the right manuf. Product vs. all others not making sense to keep.    People who have had hernia mesh surgeries usually have no idea which manufacture mesh device was used so when signing these cases there is no way to know how many are actually going to be what you were looking for until medical records are pulled which can me many months down the line.  So, being able to predict before starting what those percentages will be is critical to calculating costs on cases and to see if the ROI is enough to move ahead or not. One more example would be Talc cases which cause ovarian cancer and defendant is Johnson & Johnson.  This litigation has gone on for quite a while so now many of the cases signed end up not being a good case to keep so there’s fallout or what we call attrition after medical records are pulled.  Having this recent fallout data from the medical records with a sampling of a large pool of records is key to the modeling ahead of time and again, to see if ROI makes sense to move ahead given the fallout may be quite high. A third example would be for the litigation PFAS and the leadership handling firms have set a fixed criteria on which cancers they would accept and sign a claimant vs. others they would not sign.  We collect the data on “type of cancer” for thousands of calls and have published the breakdown of each cancer callers have in descending order.  A review of this data would help see for every 10 or 100 calls from victims who may qualify, how many from the total would have a qualifying cancer.  Again, this helps project out costs of a case to sign using the data to help model correctly. These are just a few quick examples of how some of the data we publish is quite valuable to firms looking to move into the various mass torts. What are some of the main questions / concerns you receive from litigation funders, and how do you address these?  Here are a few of the more common questions we get from litigation funders: What are your investment minimums? While we have no minimums, we don’t think the funding program makes sense for less than $2m-$3M as a minimum if that helps the fund with getting started.  Averages tend to be more like $5m-$10M as first run and many come to us with $20M+ as first year to start.   How long does it take for you to deploy capital? That depends on market conditions and performance of each tort but typically we are starting and originating cases within a week of receiving capital so it’s usually quite fast to start.   We have weekly meetings with our clients to discuss the most intelligent deployment strategy taking all things into consideration at that time. We are always sensitive to scaling while keeping acquisition costs within the forecasted range What is your primary role? The primary role is to manage the curated program which includes many pieces.  I would say the actual origination of cases which includes the marketing, call center screening & case signing is primary.   Not to take away from how critical the financial modeling, handling firm choices and leveraging our relationships with these handling firms is key.  There are many key value pieces we bring to a client of ours so tough to answer since we think all are so important. Does a funder client of CAMG have to use a handling law firm CAMG introduces or can we they use their own existing relationships?

We are happy to collaborate with your existing law firm relationships, but we really try to stick to the requirements we think make for a great handling firm and we would want to see if the law firm you may want to use meets the standard.

The key things we look for are the following:

• Are they in leadership in the MDL for the tort being discussed.
• Are they a real trial firm with a rich history of litigating cases and a threat to the defendants?
• Do they have the infrastructure to take on more cases from this program
• Will they agree to an equity split on the partnership that we think makes sense
• Are they good people to work with in general

Choosing the right handling firm has never been more important considering how many of the settlements have been structured the last few years.