In calendar 2024 we spent $3.8 million on paid acquisition for personal-injury and mass-tort firms across five platforms. Some of that produced retainers that closed in the same quarter. Some of it produced spreadsheets that taught us what not to do in 2025. This is the honest postmortem.
I run a media-buying agency for plaintiff law firms. We onboard firms who already have a settlement engine — the kind of operation where the bottleneck is not the lawyers, it's the front of the funnel. We spent the year doing that work at scale, and I kept a running log of every campaign that surprised me.
Here's the year by the numbers, the platforms that compounded, the platforms that broke, and what we're doing differently in 2026.
§ I · The splitWhere the $3.8M went.
Annual spend, by platform, for everything PI + mass tort:
| Platform | 2024 spend | % of total | Blended CPL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads (Search + LSA + PMax) | $1.62M | 42.5% | $288 |
| Meta (Advantage+ Sales) | $1.08M | 28.3% | $372 |
| CTV / OTT (Vibe, MNTN, NBCU) | $418K | 11.0% | $591 |
| Microsoft Ads + programmatic | $360K | 9.4% | $321 |
| TikTok | $282K | 7.4% | $214 |
| Total | $3.81M | 100% | $334 |
A few things in the table that don't get talked about enough in legal-marketing circles:
- TikTok had the lowest CPL of the year ($214) but also the lowest signed-case rate (4.1% on MVA inquiries). For mass-tort signups — Camp Lejeune in particular — TikTok was the single most efficient channel in the entire stack by cost per signed claimant.
- CTV is misleading on first read. $591 CPL looks ugly until you separate inbound calls (which carry our highest sign rates, 22–28%) from form fills. The branded-search lift from CTV is real but takes about 9 weeks to model.
- LSA is >50% of our Google spend now, not classic Search. That ratio was the inverse two years ago.
§ II · What workedThe three plays that compounded.
1. Google LSA for single-state PI firms
Local Services Ads on Google rebuilt their algorithm in March 2024 and quietly became the highest-converting acquisition surface in our stack for solo and 2–9 attorney firms. Average cost per signed MVA case for an LSA-driven inquiry: $1,820 across eleven firms we ran. The trick is the reviews flywheel — once a firm crosses 30 verified reviews, average position climbs and CPL drops about 18% over the following quarter.
2. Mass-tort TikTok creative bought on signed-case CPA
We started buying TikTok on a signed-case bid (not a lead bid) for Camp Lejeune in Q2 2024. The platform learned faster than I thought it would. By August we were at $1,140 per signed claimant on a tort with $25K–$110K average per-claimant fees. We backed off in Q4 when the JFK Act funding signals went soft and pre-trial counts capped.
3. Meta UGC creative shot on iPhone, not in studio
We A/B tested 38 ad sets in May. Polished broadcast-quality creative won on CTR; iPhone-shot UGC won on cost per signed case by 34%. We moved 80% of new creative production to UGC by August. The qualifier that mattered: the creator had to actually be in the affected demographic. Genuine-looking creative from a generic creator beat polished creative with no fit; only fit-matched creators broke through.
§ III · What brokeThe two failures we ate.
1. The September Meta privacy event
Apple shipped Link Tracking Protection in iOS 17 on September 18. Inside seven days our Meta CPMs were up 64% and our event match quality on Lead events fell from 8.4 to 5.6. We over-relied on the browser pixel for the first 72 hours, then scrambled to roll out Conversions API across every firm we ran. We were six weeks late.
Cost of that delay: roughly $84K in attribution we never recovered, plus three weeks of misallocated budget chasing ghosts. I wrote the full timeline in Field Note No. 02.
2. Programmatic display, again
I keep trying. For the third year running, broad programmatic display did not produce signed cases at a defensible CPA for any of our PI firms. We spent $148K across DV360 and StackAdapt exploring tighter contextual segments and retargeting pools. Net signed cases: 11. Cost per signed case: north of $13K on standard auto. I'm done. 2026 budget is reallocated.
§ IV · The compliance landscapeWhat the FCC almost did to us in January.
The FCC's one-to-one consent rule (FCC 23-107) was scheduled to take effect January 27, 2025. It would have ended shared lead generation as a category — every lead would have needed individual, named consent for each firm it could be sold to. The Eleventh Circuit vacated the rule on January 24th, three days before it went live.
We had spent the back half of 2024 rewriting every consent flow on our side to be 1:1 compliant. Most of that work I'd do again — the new flows produce higher consent rates and better lead quality even outside the regulatory pressure. But the lesson: plaintiff-side digital marketing now operates with the assumption that 1:1 consent is coming back, whether through the FCC, the state AGs (Florida and Oklahoma are most aggressive), or settlement law in TCPA cases. Build for it now.
§ V · What's changing in 2026Three operational shifts.
(1) MVA exclusivity gets its own brand. By far the most common conversation we had in 2024 was with a small or boutique PI firm who couldn't get exclusive supply because every vendor was gated to $30K validation trials. That gap is why I started MVA Leads — same campaigns we already run, sold one firm at a time, no enterprise minimums.
(2) Server-side everything. Every event we fire to Meta, Google, and TikTok now goes through a server-side conversion endpoint with first-party data. Browser pixels stay, but as backup. The match quality difference is roughly 30%.
(3) Signed-case CPA bidding is the only bid we make. By the end of Q1 2026 every active campaign in our stack bids on a signed-case CPA, not a CPL. The platforms will not optimize for revenue you don't tell them about. The plumbing to feed signed- case events back to the platform takes work, but the unit economics are not close.
§ VI · TakeawaysWhat I'd tell another media buyer at 7am on January 1, 2026.
- Take the LSA flywheel seriously. The first 30 verified reviews are worth more than the next 300.
- If you're buying any privacy-affected platform on a browser pixel only, you're missing 25–35% of your data. Server-side now.
- UGC creative shot by demographic-fit creators on a phone beats studio every time. Stop debating.
- Programmatic display is dead for plaintiff-side. Stop punishing yourself.
- 1:1 consent is coming back. Operate as if it lands in 2026 or 2027 and build the flows now.
- Bid on signed cases, not leads. The platforms reward whatever signal you feed them. Feed them the real one.
Figures reflect aggregate MassTortAgency.net campaign performance across personal-injury and mass-tort firms in calendar 2024. Per-firm and per-tort detail redacted under client confidentiality. The numbers in this article are the ones I would reference in a board update; the underlying client-level data is not publicly shared. Reach out if you want to discuss a specific campaign type in detail.
