• What happened: X Ante, a firm that specializes in research on mass tort advertising, reports more than $160 million worth of mass tort TV ads—or nearly 800,000 spots—ran in 2023.
• Zoom in: This corresponds with a 24% increase in federal civil cases in 2023, many of them mass tort. 
• Go further: Third-party investors are playing an increasingly frequent role in mass litigation funding, allowing law firms to take on riskier or more resource-intensive cases.
  • Plaintiffs’ firms, which are usually compensated with contingency fees after the litigation resolves, can access significant financial support to launch the lawsuit, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in loans from investors like private-equity firms or hedge funds.
• What about Texas: In 2019, the Legislature passed a bill increasing transparency in ads for legal services, including requiring language telling people to seek medical advice before stopping use of a drug, and prohibiting the use of government agency logos or phrases like “medical alert” to imply a drug has been recalled when it hasn’t. 
• TLR Thoughts: Litigation funding opens the door to new client generation tactics, including aggressive national advertising campaigns, lead generating firms and more. We recently saw one of those deals go bad, when a Houston-area law firm defaulted on millions in litigation loans that were used, in part, to generate clients after a hurricane.

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