Mass tort call buying goes wrong in predictable ways. A firm signs for volume, calls arrive, intake burns three weeks sorting them, and the argument that follows is about a qualification standard nobody ever wrote down. Most of that is avoidable in the first meeting.
Your intake criteria become the screening questions
The screening script is your intake script, shortened. That is the whole design.
Write it with the vendor rather than accepting theirs. Which diagnoses count. Which exposure settings. What presence window. Which relationships qualify, and whether a surviving family member does. What the screener does when a caller is unsure of their dates. A vendor who hands you a finished script has written the questions to be easy to pass, because a caller who passes is a caller who bills.
Lock the script before launch, date every revision, and keep the dated versions. Six weeks in, when you want to know what a specific call was screened against, the answer should be a document rather than somebody's memory.
Exclusivity, in writing, at a defined level
Ask what exclusivity means in the contract, because it means three different things to three different vendors.
- The call is not resold after it reaches you. This is the floor, and most vendors offer it.
- Market exclusivity. No other firm buys the same criteria in your geography while your campaign runs. Define that geography as counties or media markets, not as a vague region.
- Docket exclusivity. No other firm buys this claim from this vendor at all. Rare and expensive, and worth asking about so you know what you are not getting.
Get whichever one you are paying for into the agreement. A verbal assurance about exclusivity is the assurance most likely to be forgotten when the firm two towns over calls the same vendor.
Recordings settle everything
Every call recorded, stored with its source, its timestamp, and the screening answers the caller gave.
That record does three jobs. It settles billing disagreements, because both sides listen to the same file instead of arguing from impressions. It documents the intake conversation for co-counsel when a case moves, which referral partners increasingly expect to see. And it is how you audit the screener: pull a sample every week and listen, and you will learn more about your vendor in an hour than a monthly report tells you in a year.
Agree the retention period at the start. Storage costs almost nothing next to needing a file that was already deleted.
Docket timing and budget pacing
Early in a claim, the audience does not know it has a claim. Advertising that opens with a call to action reaches people who cannot connect their own diagnosis to their own exposure, and the calls that come back are unqualified. Education has to come first: content that explains the exposure, the conditions, and who was affected, with the phone number after the explanation rather than in front of it.
Later, once the claim is in the news, awareness stops being the problem and competition for the same audience starts being one. Costs move accordingly, and so should the pacing. Budget that was earning at a steady rate in month two will not behave the same way in month eight.
Deadlines shape all of this, and the firm owns them. Your counsel tracks the controlling dates and tells the media buyer which ones matter and when. We build creative to the dates you give us and pull anything referencing a date once it passes. Nobody on a media team should be interpreting a docket.
Five questions before you sign
- Who actually generates the traffic? Name the sources, or name the partner network and explain how it gets monitored.
- Can I hear the calls? All of them, on demand, not a curated sample chosen by the vendor.
- What happens to callers who do not qualify? They should be told plainly, thanked, and let go. Never transferred, never billed.
- Who else buys in my market? And is that answer in the contract or only on the phone?
- What does the qualification definition say, word for word? If it has not been written yet, that is your answer.
How we run this sits on the legal and mass tort page, and the mechanics of the buy are under pay per call. None of this is legal advice, and your firm's advertising obligations stay with your firm and its counsel.