This draws on three matters. Two are unnamed to protect the clients.
Advertising has its place. It does not always bring forward the people a case most needs to reach. There are two reasons.
The ads talk about money. A person who was hurt is not thinking about money first. They want to know what happened and whether it happened to them.
The ads are everywhere. After the hundredth one, people stop seeing them.
So people ignore them, including the people the ads were meant to reach.
On one matter, people in one state had used a common weed killer and later developed one specific kind of cancer. Most did not know a case existed.
On another, the downwinders, people who had lived near above-ground nuclear testing decades earlier, did not know their illness could be connected to it.
In the Johns Hopkins case, thousands of women had been patients of one doctor over 25 years. Each of them had to learn what happened and decide whether to come forward.
I used news stories, not ads. A story told people what happened and who it happened to. It did not ask them for anything.
I went where people were already talking. People with the same illness find each other in online groups. I wrote in those groups myself, within the ethics rules that bind the lawyers. I said who I was and that I was working with them. The lawyers approved every post in writing. I shared what was known and where to learn more. The decision to call was theirs.
I wrote every message the way Dr. Vincent Covello taught me. I trained with him for two years in risk communication. His work shows that people who are frightened or sick take in very little, and they decide whether they trust you before they hear your facts. So the messages were short. They led with care. They gave one clear next step.
On the weed killer and downwinder matters, the lawyers had the people they needed to file. After the cases were filed, more people who had been hurt came forward.
In the Johns Hopkins case, the final count was 9,000 women.
Witnesses came forward too. They saw the coverage and contacted the lawyers.