This draws on three matters. Two are unnamed to protect the clients.
Some lawyer ads work. The question is who you are trying to reach and where they get their information.
Ads reach people who watch television and listen to the radio. Some people get their information somewhere else, and an ad never reaches them.
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 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.
After the cases were filed, more people who had been hurt came forward.
In the Johns Hopkins case, the final count was 8,000 women.
Witnesses came forward too. They saw the coverage and contacted the lawyers.