The Cash Trap Nobody Warns You About
Before You Take Your First Mass Tort Case

Right now the federal system is carrying 158 active MDL dockets with nearly 200,000 pending actions. The scale looks enormous — until you look closer. The 25 biggest MDLs account for 95% of all pending cases. If you are not in one of those top-tier dockets, you are competing for scraps. And new filings dropped 50% between 2024 and 2025 — from 75,000 down to 38,000. The era of easier mass tort case acquisition is over. Firms that loaded up expecting that pace to continue are now sitting on bloated inventories with no way to move them, hemorrhaging carrying costs on cases that won’t pay out for years. A single stubborn lien holder or a missing medical record can hold up a $2 million settlement for months while your firm keeps paying to carry it.

This video covers the infrastructure every mid-market firm needs to have locked in before they take their first MDL case — a litigation finance partner they trust (average single-matter deal: $6.6M, portfolio deals: $16.5M), a lien resolution operation that doesn’t bottleneck every settlement, and a realistic picture of actual carrying costs over a multi-year timeline. Hugo Gomez has worked with over 500 law firms nationwide and driven more than $4 billion in settlement fees — including in mass torts. This video is the honest breakdown that most attorneys never hear before they sign the first referral agreement.