Mass Tort Advertising: $220M Spent, Who's Buying

Follow the Money

There’s a legal ad running on television right now. Actually, there are about 45,000 of them airing today. One every two seconds. A good portion of those ads aren’t from law firms at all. They’re from companies you’ve never heard of, buying claims like inventory and reselling them to attorneys who’ll never appear in the commercial.

Mass tort advertising hit $220 million in TV spend in 2022. That’s nearly double the $115 million spent the year before. Most of that surge came from a single litigation: Camp Lejeune.

But the dollar figure isn’t the story. The story is who’s spending it. And why a third of the biggest players in mass tort advertising don’t practice law.

The Camp Lejeune Inflection Point

Before August 2022, Camp Lejeune was a slow-building environmental contamination case. Marines and their families had been exposed to toxic water at the North Carolina base for decades. Lawsuits had stalled for years.

Then the PACT Act passed. It opened a direct path for claims, and the advertising machine turned on overnight.

Camp Lejeune TV ads accounted for $111 million in 2022. Add social media spend and the total climbs to $145 million. One company, Lacuna Ventures, spent $17 million on Camp Lejeune social media ads alone. That’s a single entity spending more on Facebook and Instagram ads for one litigation than most law firms spend on all advertising in a year.

Before the PACT Act, Camp Lejeune leads could be bought for around $1,000 each. After the advertising surge, that price jumped to $5,000 or more. The economics shifted within months. Early movers bought cheap leads. Latecomers paid five times as much for the same type of claim.

That pricing dynamic tells you everything about how mass tort advertising actually works. Understanding the mass tort advertising lifecycle is essential. It’s about market timing, capital deployment, and lead arbitrage.

The Lead Generation Shadow Industry

Here’s where the structure gets interesting. Only about 15 advertisers account for more than half of all mass tort ad spending. That kind of concentration isn’t unusual in advertising. What’s unusual is the composition.

A third of those top 15 spenders aren’t law firms. They’re for-profit lead generation companies.

Names like Guardian Legal Network, Knightline Legal, Victims Justice Group, Gold Shield Group, and Relion Group. These companies buy television airtime, run ads that look like they’re from a law firm, collect caller information, and sell those leads to actual attorneys.

The viewer sees a concerned narrator asking if they’ve been harmed by a product. They call a toll-free number. They think they’re reaching a lawyer. Instead, their information enters a pipeline. Their claim gets packaged, priced, and sold. Sometimes to one firm. Sometimes to multiple firms competing for the same lead.

Over 2,000 mass tort ad sponsors have been active since 2012. Most are small operations running ads in specific markets for specific torts. But the concentration at the top, where a handful of lead generators outspend most law firms, reveals the real economics of the industry.

What a Lead Actually Costs

Lead pricing varies enormously by tort type, and those prices reflect how the advertising market values different claims.

Tort	Cost Per Lead	What It Tells You
Ozempic	$35-$65	High volume, early-stage, unproven liability
Roundup	$265-$375	Established litigation, proven settlements
Talcum Powder	$360-$440	Mature cases, higher claim values
NEC Baby Formula	$550-$650	Smaller pool of eligible claimants, high damages

A $35 Ozempic lead reflects a massive potential claimant pool with uncertain legal outcomes. A $600 NEC lead reflects a small, specific population with severe injuries and strong liability arguments. The market prices these leads based on expected case value, conversion probability, and competition among buyers. For firms considering CTV as a mass tort channel, the mass tort CTV advertising strategies guide covers targeting by pharmacy data and condition.

For the lead generators running those TV ads, the math is straightforward. If an ad campaign generates leads at $200 each and those leads sell for $350 each, the margin funds the next campaign. Scale that across $220 million in annual TV spend and you can see why hedge funds got interested.

Wall Street Enters the Chat

Mass tort advertising isn’t just funded by law firms and lead generators. It’s funded by Wall Street.

Gerchen Keller Capital, a litigation finance firm, loaned $100 million at 16% interest to AkinMears for surgical mesh lawsuits. That’s a hedge fund betting on the outcome of personal injury litigation, using advertising spend as the acquisition mechanism. The loan funded the ad campaigns that generated the leads that became the cases that (hopefully) produced the settlements that repaid the loan at 16%.

This is the full picture. A viewer sees a medical alert-style ad on daytime television. That ad was funded by a litigation finance company. The lead it generates gets sold to a law firm that borrowed money from a hedge fund. The claim gets filed in an MDL alongside thousands of others. If it settles, the law firm gets its fee, the hedge fund gets its 16%, and the lead generator has already been paid.

The injured person is in there somewhere.

Active multidistrict litigations, the federal mechanism for consolidating mass tort cases, grew from 73 in 2013 to roughly 300 in recent years. Each new MDL creates a new advertising opportunity. Each advertising opportunity attracts capital. Each round of capital pushes lead prices higher and ad spending further up.

The Asbestos Benchmark

Not every mass tort follows Camp Lejeune’s overnight surge. Asbestos and mesothelioma advertising has been the largest consistent mass tort ad category for over a decade.

Mesothelioma ads accounted for $50.6 million in 2023 and roughly $580 million over the past 10 years. Unlike Camp Lejeune, which spiked and is now declining, mesothelioma represents a steady, predictable advertising category. New diagnoses continue every year. Case values remain high. The lead generation infrastructure around asbestos litigation is mature and entrenched.

This is the model that newer torts try to replicate. Roundup followed a similar trajectory. Talcum powder did the same. Camp Lejeune compressed a decade’s worth of advertising growth into 18 months. Ozempic is the current early-stage play, with low lead costs signaling that the market hasn’t fully priced the litigation yet.

Regulators Notice. Barely.

In 2019, the FTC sent warning letters to seven practitioners about deceptive mass tort advertisements. The ads in question used “medical alert” formatting to imply government endorsement or urgent health warnings. They weren’t health alerts. They were lead generation ads designed to look like them.

Tennessee and Texas both passed laws restricting this style of advertising. Tennessee requires tort ads to clearly identify the advertiser. Texas prohibits ads that mimic public service announcements or government communications.

These are state-level responses to a national industry. Seven warning letters across an ecosystem spending $220 million annually isn’t enforcement. It’s acknowledgment.

The public perception data is telling. Ninety percent of jurors surveyed expressed concern when they see lawsuit advertisements. At the same time, 72% agreed that “if there are lawsuits about something, there’s probably truth to the claims.” The ads work on two levels. They generate leads directly from potential claimants. And they shape jury pools by establishing the premise that a product is dangerous before trial begins.

Where the $220 Million Actually Goes

Breaking down the spending by category helps clarify the scale of each tort’s advertising footprint.

Category	Annual TV Spend	Share of Total
Camp Lejeune	$111M (2022 peak)	Declining post-surge
Asbestos/Mesothelioma	$50.6M	Steady, decade-long category
Roundup/Glyphosate	$25-35M (est.)	Mature, post-settlement
Talcum Powder	$15-25M (est.)	Active litigation
Ozempic/GLP-1	Growing rapidly	Early-stage, low lead costs
Other torts	Remainder	Hundreds of smaller campaigns

The top three categories alone account for the majority of mass tort TV spend. Camp Lejeune distorted the 2022 numbers, making the total look like a permanent shift. In reality, the baseline is closer to $120-140 million annually, with periodic surges when new litigation opens.

What doesn’t show up in TV spend data is the social media component. Camp Lejeune’s $34 million in social spend suggests that total mass tort advertising across all channels likely exceeds $300 million annually. That figure gets almost no reporting.

What This Means for Law Firms

If you’re a law firm considering mass tort advertising, the data points to several realities you can’t ignore.

You’re not competing with other law firms. You’re competing with lead generators backed by litigation finance capital. Understanding how to set your advertising budget against this competition is critical. They don’t need cases to settle before reinvesting in ads. They sell leads immediately. Their cash cycle is weeks, not years. Competing on ad spend alone is a losing strategy unless you have similar capital backing.

Lead quality degrades as spend increases. When Camp Lejeune leads went from $1,000 to $5,000, the additional cost didn’t buy better claims. It bought access to the same pool of claimants that more advertisers were now chasing. Early movers got the strongest cases. Late movers paid premium prices for marginal claims.

The regulators aren’t going to fix this. Seven FTC warning letters and two state laws haven’t changed the fundamental economics. Lead generators will continue to run ads that look like they come from law firms. The burden of differentiation falls on actual law firms to distinguish their advertising from the noise.

Timing matters more than budget. The firms that profited most from Camp Lejeune weren’t the ones who spent the most. They were the ones who started advertising before the PACT Act passed, when leads were cheap and competition was thin. The same pattern is playing out now with Ozempic at $35-$65 per lead. By the time lead costs reach $300 or more, the opportunity window has narrowed considerably.

Mass tort advertising isn’t a marketing channel. It’s a financial market. Firms looking beyond lead buying are exploring CTV and streaming as alternatives with more predictable economics. And like any financial market, the participants who understand the structure, the capital flows, and the timing are the ones who profit. Everyone else is buying leads at the top.

References

Mass tort TV advertising hit $220 million in 2022, nearly doubling from $115 million the year before. Camp Lejeune alone drove $145 million in ads. A third of the top 15 mass tort advertisers aren't law firms at all. They're for-profit lead generators selling claims to attorneys. Asbestos/mesothelioma remains the largest category at $50.6M annually.