Group litigation: how to manage the non-legal aspects of your case

Group litigation: how to manage the non-legal aspects of your case
Photo Taken In United States, Washington, D. C.

Group litigations are on the rise in England and Wales. This growth has occurred despite the absence of a generally applicable and transferable legal framework.

There is, however, a clear process that you can follow to run the non-legal aspects of a group litigation – from notification to book build – which will help drive participation and raise awareness. This approach is based on campaigning.

For a lawyer, the majority of a group litigation campaign is their legal work – with the judge as their audience.

When building a book, the audience is your class, and this audience needs special attention.

Turning group litigations into campaigns. 

Portland’s experience is grounded in political campaigning. We have developed a strategy that takes the best elements of this approach and applied it to group litigation.

A strong political campaign gathers facts about the audience, understands their environment, verifies this with data, and then deploys the most compelling argument to ensure awareness and drive voter participation.

In our experience, this approach – based on knowing your audience – works across all campaigns. It also works whether your audience is hundreds, thousands or millions.

Participation is crucial to the success of group litigations.

Without a class there is no group litigation. A campaigning approach ensures that your class is aware of your action. It also drives their participation in a focused and cost-effective way.

Understanding whether and why a class member is likely to sign up is a critical step in assessing whether a class action is viable. We are able to test the viability of the book build by considering the class demographics among other data points.

We can also analyse the most effective messaging strategy by understanding what makes the class members tick. The way these messages are delivered – for example, their tone or complexity – should be shaped by what your audience in the real world finds compelling. Not just what convinces the judge in a courtroom.

Using a data and digital-first approach, we can segment the class by characteristics such as location, age, interests and gender. We can then further message test to analyse what resonates best with each group. These arguments will still be based on the legal case – in litigation communications, the litigation comes first – but they will be uniquely designed to have the greatest impact

Through this, we are able to create tailored content that will cut through the noise and reach your audience. Employing a digital-first approach is often key, as driving the class to sign up online using social media provides an efficient user experience.

In short, in the same way that lawyers build a litigation campaign to convince a judge, we build a communications campaign to convince a class to become claimants.

Find out more about our group litigation offer: https://disputes.portland-communications.com/

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