Mass tort case selection sits at the intersection of legal merits and practice economics, and getting it wrong in either direction is expensive. Accepting weak cases floods the inventory with files that resolve for nothing or require motion-practice investment that exceeds the recovery. Declining strong cases because the screening protocol was too conservative means lost fees and a thinner caseload. Firms that build a sustainable mass tort practice develop intake protocols that apply consistent criteria before signing a retainer, then periodically audit the signed inventory for continued viability as science, settlement values, and plaintiff health evolve.
The principles below apply across tort categories, though the specific criteria vary by litigation type. Counsel handling product liability mass torts and pharmaceutical cases will need to adapt the framework to the specific injury, exposure, and causation requirements of each docket.
Build the Eligibility Grid Before Taking Cases
The intake screening grid is the written document that defines what the firm will and will not accept. A basic grid has four columns: the injury criteria (what diagnosed conditions qualify), the exposure criteria (what the plaintiff must be able to prove about product use, dose, or duration), the injury timeline (first exposure date relative to the statute of limitations and any claims facility deadline), and the current settlement value range (what the litigation has historically paid for the injury category the plaintiff presents with).
Every intake coordinator, paralegal, and attorney who screens cases should be working from the same grid. Undocumented discretionary intake decisions produce inconsistent inventory. When the settlement administrator or lead counsel's categorization committee later reviews the file, a case signed on undocumented criteria is difficult to defend to co-counsel and difficult to justify retaining in the inventory.
Medical Record Verification Before Retaining
The most common mass tort inventory problem is cases signed before diagnosis confirmation. The intake questionnaire may indicate that the client was diagnosed with a qualifying injury, but the retainer should not be finalized until the medical record confirming the diagnosis has been received and reviewed. In pharmaceutical cases, the qualifying diagnosis may require a pathology report, a specific diagnostic code, or a physician's note that identifies the product as causally related. An intake questionnaire response that says the client's doctor said it was related to the drug is not a medical record.
A two-stage retainer process addresses this: a limited-engagement retainer for the records collection phase, then a full retainer once the diagnosis is confirmed on paper. The firm bears the records retrieval cost regardless of whether the full retainer is signed, but the alternative is carrying unsigned cases with no fee protection while pursuing verification on hundreds of files simultaneously.
Exposure Documentation
In product cases, the plaintiff must be able to document that they used the specific product involved. Pharmacy records, purchase receipts, or treating physician prescription records are the primary exposure verification tools for pharmaceutical cases. For device cases, implant log numbers from the operative record confirm the specific manufacturer and model. For environmental or industrial exposure cases, employment records, contractor log entries, or union records establish the site and duration.
At intake, ask directly whether the client has any of these documents in hand. Clients who believe they took a drug but cannot name it, identify the prescriber, or provide a pharmacy from which it was dispensed are high-risk intake candidates in pharmaceutical cases. That uncertainty resurfaces during the settlement certification process, when the claims administrator requires documentation that was never obtained.
The Statute of Limitations as an Intake Gate
Mass tort statutes of limitations create a complex calendar. The discovery rule in each state determines when the cause of action accrued, and the answer is fact-specific for each plaintiff. The intake coordinator cannot apply a uniform date-based rule; instead, any plaintiff where the interval between diagnosis and first contact with the firm raises a limitation question must be escalated immediately for attorney review before any substantive work is done or retainer is signed.
In MDL proceedings, the applicable limitation period is often governed by state law for each individual plaintiff's file, meaning the same conduct by the same defendant may be time-barred for a Texas plaintiff but timely for a Florida plaintiff. The screening grid should include a per-state limitations summary for the current docket's major jurisdictions, updated whenever a relevant court issues a decision affecting the discovery rule for mass tort cases in that state.
Inventory Audit: Reviewing the Signed Caseload
Even firms with sound front-end screening accumulate cases that no longer belong in the inventory. Science changes: an exposure that was considered causally connected when the case was signed may be de-weighted or contradicted by subsequent meta-analyses. Plaintiff health changes: a plaintiff diagnosed with a qualifying condition may have received additional treatment that reveals an alternative causation source. Settlement tiers change: cases signed when average values were higher may not clear the costs of continued litigation at current resolution levels.
Quarterly inventory audits catch these problems before they compound. An audit assigns a current status tag to every case: active-viable, active-marginal, inactive-pending-records, or inactive-ineligible. Cases tagged inactive-ineligible trigger a withdrawal process if no corrective path exists. Document the audit methodology and the outcome for each case reviewed: the same co-counsel transparency obligations that required good front-end screening require equally good back-end records.
Vendor Relationships and Lead Quality
Mass tort inventory growth depends on lead generation vendors, and lead quality varies significantly across vendors and over the life of a docket. Early in a major litigation, leads tend to be stronger because plaintiffs with serious injuries self-identify first. As the docket matures, the pool of remaining unrepresented qualified plaintiffs shrinks and lead quality often declines. The screening protocol should flag when the conversion rate from lead to signed retainer drops materially, as that signal usually precedes a broader quality decline that requires a vendor-level conversation about lead sourcing criteria.
For mass tort practice operations generally, the intake screening grid, the records verification protocol, and the inventory audit methodology should all be written procedures rather than informal practices. Written protocols survive personnel turnover, are demonstrable to co-counsel and referral partners, and provide the basis for consistent staff training across the firm's intake operation.