Most conversations about mass tort advertising focus on where you spend and how much. Firms debate channel mix, creative strategy, and market selection. Of course those decisions matter. But they are not what separates firms that build claimant volume efficiently from firms that spend more to get less. Timing is actually a variable that is critical but much less talked about.

When a major tort opens, there is a window. It doesn’t last long and rarely announces itself. During that window, first movers acquire claimants at a cost that may never exist again for that tort. Once advertising floods a market, that cost rises, sometimes dramatically, and it does not come back down.

The Camp Lejeune litigation is the clearest example of this on record.

When the Camp Lejeune Justice Act passed in 2022, it created a new litigation pathway overnight. Firms that recognized the opportunity early were acquiring claimants for roughly $1,000 per case. That number reflected the reality of a market where advertising competition was limited and the potential claimant population had not yet been reached at scale.

What followed was a surge. TV advertising spend for Camp Lejeune exceeded $111 million in 2022 alone, more than any single mass tort topic had generated in a single year. As more firms and aggregators entered the market, they competed for the same impressions, the same audiences, and the same finite pool of qualified claimants. Acquisition costs responded accordingly. By the time the market was fully saturated, firms were paying more than $5,000 per case, a more than fivefold increase driven not by any change in the underlying case value but by advertising competition alone.

The firms that moved early did not necessarily run better ads or have superior creative or more sophisticated media strategies. They had a timing advantage, and that advantage compounded into a meaningful cost difference over the life of the campaign.

Why this pattern repeats

Camp Lejeune is not a unique story. It is a particularly well-documented version of a pattern that plays out every time a major tort enters its growth phase.

The mechanism is straightforward. Mass tort claimant populations are finite. There are only so many people who took a specific medication, lived near a contaminated site, or had a particular medical device implanted. When advertising spend is low relative to the size of that population, firms can reach qualified claimants efficiently. When advertising spend grows faster than new claimants enter the market, the same population gets reached repeatedly by competing firms, costs per intake rise, and the window of efficient acquisition closes.

Early movers do not just save money. They capture a disproportionate share of available claimants before the market price reflects their true value.

What this looks like right now

The pattern is visible in current acquisition costs across active torts. Industry data published by Whitehardt in April 2026 shows qualified lead costs ranging from $11 for Suboxone to $3,050 for Depo-Provera. Suboxone still has relatively limited competition while Depo-Provera has reached multiples of its early-entry cost. Every tort sitting at the lower end of that range today is following the same trajectory Camp Lejeune followed in 2022.

The implication for how you plan

The question worth asking is not just which torts to advertise for, but when. A firm that enters a tort in its early growth phase and builds claimant volume efficiently is in a fundamentally different position than one that enters after competition has saturated the market.

That does not mean chasing every emerging tort. It means treating timing as a strategic variable rather than an afterthought, and building the infrastructure to move quickly when a meaningful opportunity opens.

The firms that consistently outperform on case acquisition cost are not always the biggest spenders. They are the ones who recognize the window and are ready when it opens.

Adduro works with mass tort firms on streaming advertising strategies built around qualified claimant populations. Want to talk through what an early-entry approach looks like for your active tort campaigns? Let’s talk strategy here.