How Class Action Settlements Actually Reach People

What We Need to Grow, Episode 025: Increase Access to Justice. A Founder Talk conversation with Scott Hardy, Founder and CEO of Top Class Actions. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

Caleb Pedosiuk: Scott Hardy, you have built a very interesting business, from what I can see. You deal with class action lawsuits specifically, and help me make sure I get this right. I think it's something like 95 percent of class action lawsuits actually don't have people claiming it. A lot of that, I'm assuming, is because they're not aware of it, or they don't realize that some of these things have held people accountable. One of the things I find really interesting is that class action lawsuits can actually be more of a decentralized or collective way of keeping certain parties in check. There's a checks and balances aspect of this specific aspect of law and society that seems really important. And if the average person is not aware of some of these things, that can be a real problem. So Scott, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about what it is that you've been building and where it's at, that'd be awesome.

Scott Hardy: Sure. Eighteen years ago I started TopClassActions.com, and that was because I ran across a class action settlement regarding Airborne, which were little fizzy tablets you dropped into water so you didn't get a cold. That was the one that was designed by a teacher, and everybody I knew had taken Airborne at that point. With this one class action settlement, if you spent about 60 seconds online, you could get a check for 63 dollars. And I thought, everybody I know qualifies. So let me ask my friends. I said, have you heard about the settlement? And no one had heard about it.

So I thought, there's got to be a website which tracks these easy to claim class action settlements. And there wasn't. So I built it. Back then class action settlements like that would have less than a one percent take rate, because all they had to do was run an ad in USA Today. And most people don't read USA Today, unless back then you were a business traveler. So it was such a low claim rate.

I built Top Class Actions, and I just focused on connecting consumers to these lawsuits and settlements they could claim. I thought that we would be an online repository for class action settlements, that settlement administrators would be bashing down our door to pay us to advertise. I had no idea the politics of class actions. I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a tech guy. And that first year we sold one advertisement. I'm like, man, what am I going to do? But it was my side project. I still had my day job in cloud computing sales, so I could keep iterating until I found a viable business model. It took a couple of years. It took me four years until I was forced to go full time, but it took me about a year and a half to figure out how to make money and make it profitable. Since I bootstrapped the whole thing, it wasn't like I had this pressure. It was just internal pressure to figure it out.

Caleb: What was the aha moment for customers, or for these firms? When did the lights turn on for them and they understood how important the piece of the puzzle was that you were bringing to the table?

Scott: It was immediate for consumers, because I always focused on SEO, search engine optimization, organic customer reach, because I couldn't compete with the lawyers who are spending money on advertising. So I just had to write great content that connects with consumers. And people liked it right away, because I'm giving them free money, right? This is, hey, you qualify. If you qualify for this settlement, submit your claim, and in six months to a year you'll get a check. Who doesn't like that?

So consumers liked it right away, but I still wasn't making any money. I put Google AdSense on the website so I could start bringing in some dollars. It was tens of dollars, to hundreds of dollars, to thousands of dollars from Google ads. But then I was at a class action conference. Like lots of entrepreneurs, at first I maxed out my credit cards, then I got a home equity line of credit, and I was going to these conferences on my paid time off from my day job.

At a conference I had all these banners saying, help us find you claimants for your settlements. And an attorney walked up and said, Scott, that's great, you can find me claimants, but I need plaintiffs. Can you find me a plaintiff for a class action? And the entrepreneur me went, yes, absolutely, no problem. And then I turned around and went, crap, how am I going to do that? But we figured it out.

We launched class action investigations, where an attorney would say, I want to sue Apple because it's got a defective antenna in the iPhone. Thankfully they don't anymore, but that was an actual investigation years ago. So we put up the investigation, people say, yes, I bought this product and I had that problem, and then one of those folks becomes the lead plaintiff, they get some backup plaintiffs, and they file the case.

But the problem with that business model is that you as a class action attorney come to me, we get your case filed, and then you're gone for three to six months, maybe more, until you want to file your next case. So my revenue just did this. By the time I went full time on it, we had gone from generating thousands of dollars in the first year, to tens of thousands in the second year, to hundreds of thousands in the third year. It was paying for a company car, nice vacations. But I wasn't able to make that big jump.

And then I got fired from my day job for being a prima donna sales guy. It took me like five years to understand I would have fired me too. But all of a sudden I was forced to go full time on Top Class Actions, because we were making hundreds of thousands a year at that point. Still, as a top tier sales guy in a technology company, that's less than I was making. So it was, am I going to take this plunge? And thankfully, if I hadn't been fired, I wouldn't have been forced into the corner and pivoted the company again.

That's when I pivoted the company into mass torts. Those are what you see in Canada, which are, were you exposed to Roundup and developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma or Parkinson's disease, or were you exposed to asbestos and developed mesothelioma. A big one in the States was Camp Lejeune a few years ago. Now our biggest cases are video game addiction and social media harm. I've got tens of thousands of clients now signed for those.

Pivoting into mass torts was massive for me, because the average consumer would see these. Back then, thirteen years ago, they'd be watching TV, they would see an ad, and then they would search for Actos bladder cancer class action, or asbestos class action, and they'd come to my website. Those cases are similar to class actions. A class action is one case filed by one person as a plaintiff, and then when it's settled, all of the potential claimants out there can submit a claim, but they're typically smaller dollar amounts. Tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars, in rare cases thousands of dollars per person.

While a mass tort is the same case filed individually by many thousands of people. Everyone was exposed to this product and was hospitalized. Depo-Provera is a big case. We just had that settlement with Pfizer announced, that's going to have the full term announced by the end of this year. If you took Depo-Provera and you got a meningioma in your brain, then you're affected by that lawsuit. Those cases affect many thousands of people and they run for years. So then I was able to sell to that same attorney for years instead of once. And that's what made my revenue go like that.

So the first aha moment was finding plaintiffs for class action attorneys, and the second one was finding plaintiffs for mass tort attorneys, while continuing to build the audience on Top Class Actions. Because when we made that pivot to mass torts, we were getting 40, 50,000 people a month on the website.

Caleb: I'm old enough to know the Yellow Pages from back in the day, and I'm sort of wondering, is the positioning, the territory online, the real estate that you have carved out or are looking to continue to build on, is it to be a sort of Yellow Pages? That's not the best term, but a current directory for all of the potential cases?

Scott: Directory is a good word. We just created this long vision document with my team, reiterating the point that we want to connect with consumers and intelligently tell them of every lawsuit or settlement they qualify for. Because if you submit claims for every lawsuit or settlement you're going to qualify for, you're going to get thousands of dollars back a year. But you have to do it.

So a huge focus for my team at Top Class Actions is to be able to get the data. We now have more than a million people in our database. We now get two to three million people a month organically. We don't spend any money on outside advertising. And to be able to tell them, hey, this is a new case, you might qualify for this, click here and read through it. And if you do, eventually you'll be able to click that button and submit your claim, or sign up with the lawyer that's running the case. And then you'll be able to track it all through Top Class Actions, so you'll know exactly where you stand on all of these cases long term.

Caleb: How does revenue work? Is it strictly on the side of the firm that is representing?

Scott: It used to be we would charge attorneys to advertise. We'd get paid up front and then they would get their clients. But then Arizona changed the rules to allow non-attorney shareholders to own a law firm about five years ago. Naturally I was one of the first in line, and we were like the 12th approved. I moved 80 percent of the campaigns from charging attorneys to advertise, to co-counseling with them. So that way my law firm now co-counsels with the top litigators in the country, and we just send all those signed clients. We do all the marketing through Top Class Actions, sign the client, it goes to our litigating firm, and we act as a liaison for that client. We make sure we're still talking to them, we're informing them of how their case is progressing, because these cases can take years. Four years on the low end, to a dozen years if you're one of the early talcum powder ovarian cancer cases. And that settlement was just announced.

That's what's going to really help my overall business go from like five, six million a year to over ten million this year, to tens of millions next year, and eventually nine figures. When I was just Top Class Actions, before I had the law firm element, we were plateauing at five, six million a year, and no matter what we were doing we just weren't able to go past it. We tried briefly to be like a PPC marketer, but I don't like that model, simply because then what am I charging, five percent, ten percent of whatever you're giving me? It's not what I want. I want to build.

And that's what we built Top Class Actions into, a community of viewers. We get two to three million people a month. Half of those are new and the other half are from our social. We've got 700,000 followers on social, a million people on our newsletter. So we've built this moat around things, even with AI taking a lot of the traffic. We still have this moat of our core viewers and audience that trust us, because we built this trust over the last 18 years.

Caleb: What have you seen change with the tools changing over the last couple of years? You mentioned AI. Certainly search has changed. You're deep in the SEO game, you're strictly organic in what you're doing, which I think is amazing. You've built a high level of trust, you have a strong organic base of followers, you have really valuable content and information that people want. I know last click attribution can be really deceiving, especially where things are right now. But have you found a lot of people are finding you through just conversing with these AI tools, where they're asking, hey, I just got this diagnosis, are there more people in my line of work or other things that are having it? Are you finding more of it coming that direction?

Scott: Yeah. We've gone to optimizing for AI as well as regular search engine optimization. We did that a couple of years ago. And the nice thing about our business is that you can go to AI for answers about what's affecting you and how you can get justice, but you have to click through to finish it. You're not just asking the question and going, ah. You are high intent on how do I fix it, how do I get somebody to represent me in my case, what are the next steps. And that's what gets you, like you said, being able to click through onto Top Class Actions or my law firm, LegaFi Law, and have that high intent of taking that next step.

That is, until one of the AI engines decides to start bringing it all on site. But with attorney advertising, there are still major things that you'd have to do to make sure that everything is ethically acceptable. If OpenAI or Anthropic says, well, Scott created a law firm, now we're going to make OpenAI Law and allow people to sign up through us, absolutely possible. But they'd have to acquire somebody like us to be able to make that big move, so that we could strategically do it. The interesting thing is, if that did happen, we'd be able to do that globally, because I speak about class actions in Canada, the UK, the EU. They're massive now in India, Mexico, across Latin America. So there's the potential for massive disruption within the litigation space by AI models, if they want to go that route.

But if you're a large corporation, you hate mass litigation. That was one of the big roadblocks I came up against when I was trying to get funding, doing my pitch to these venture capitalists. And they're like, class actions? I hate class actions. I'm like, well, just back up. And I still get that disparagement. When I was trying to change CEO peer groups with Vistage, the CEOs of the peer group were like, that's a class action guy, I hate them. I'm like, I'm a really nice guy, and I can help make sure that your corporations don't get hit with class actions. I think that's something that would stop us from being rolled up into an Anthropic or into an OpenAI.

But we're rolling out our own AI models throughout Top Class Actions itself. So now the content's written by AI and edited by a human. Our search is all AI powered now, how we're working all of the data, all the consumer data. About half of the investigations that we run are completely confidential now. We just go to our existing users and say, did this happen to you? There are all these behind the scenes things that are happening, because we've got this massive audience, because we have this massive amount of data that we can do it with. So it's going to be very interesting to see how things continue to progress. But we're trying to really strengthen the moat on Top Class Actions, so that we still are strong.

And then we still screw up. I found out that somehow, out of one of the dashboards for my IT team, site speed had been removed from it. I'm like, what happened? And then we got crushed by Google for a month, right? All of a sudden our click throughs dropped, and I'm like, is this AI? That's the CEO response, right? No. Our site speed just sucked. And how did this get removed from a dashboard on our IT team? They're like, oh, we know that won't happen again. So you fix all the technical stuff on the SEO side and poof, we're back up. But it's crazy, those little mistakes that cost you a lot. But you know that.

Caleb: Yes. It's interesting. I know with HIPAA compliance, we've worked with a few clients in the healthcare space in the US, and HIPAA is such an important part of it. A lot of those safeguards, I think, are valid and for good reason. You want to have those up. And then at the same time, sometimes you're trying to get a good product or service into the hands of someone that could really use it, and it can be a bit frustrating, because in a way you're like, we just want to find the person. That's not a knock against it, but I know that we had to become a lot more intentional. You need to have people come to you. So the center of gravity. You mentioned this moat, but essentially you want to create such a center of gravity with your brand that you have that authority, and people can find you. So you're sending out those waves, that signal that goes out there, almost like a sonar, to be able to have people who are in the vicinity find it.

Scott: It's hugely important to do that, because we've got Top Class Actions which acts as a center of the universe that people trust. So they come to Top Class Actions to ask these questions now. Top Class Actions is not a law firm, but LegaFi is. If they need a lawyer, I want them to come to Top Class Actions and search for it, because either we're running an investigation that probably covers it, or LegaFi Law knows somebody who's working those cases. So that way we can help them.

I've had friends that are, oh my gosh, trial lawyers are terrible, this is so bad, you're ruining America, Scott. And then that same guy came to me a year later when his grandfather was diagnosed with mesothelioma. What do I do? I'm like, hey, I thought you said trial lawyers were the devil. Are we helpful or not? And he said, Scott, come on, we know each other. I said, no, I know. We'll do everything we can to help you and your family and take care of it. We did. We got one of the best law firms in the country for asbestos, and they flew somebody out to see them the very next day to talk to the family.

Because that's the thing on these cases. You don't want to wait, and you want to act early. Get signed up, give the attorneys and their team all of the time they can to research the case and give you the very best representation possible. Don't wait and say, oh, I want to see what happens with this case. You want to sign up. Especially with some of the cases that I can't talk about that are already in early settlement talks. If you wait until a settlement is announced, that's going to cost your family literal years before they're going to get paid.

So it's so important that if you think you might be impacted, sign up and then we'll notify you. Social media harm, big case right now against TikTok, Meta, Snapchat and Instagram. With that case we had 20,000 leads that came in, and we signed up about 900 people off of those. Now the criteria has changed, and so a good subset of those 19,000 people that didn't qualify before do qualify. So now we're reaching out to all of those folks again saying, hey, you might have been turned down, but the age has increased, so now if you're up to 25 years old, we can represent you. Now we're able to retarget all those folks and say, please take another look to see if you qualify, so you don't miss out.

Caleb: Has this also impacted financial services? I've heard the argument made that showing up on college campuses, setting up a booth, offering free credit cards to a lot of teenagers who really don't have the financial capability or understanding, they're ignorant. And that's not in a rude way, they're just ignorant financially. And they're at a time where there's so many things in flux. Their energy, it's a whole new environment. There's so many ways that money can easily be spent, to then give somebody essentially, I've heard it likened to your financial dealer, dealing something and saying, hey, don't worry about it, you can pay me back later. I'm curious to know if this is an area that people have said, hey, hold on a second, downstream of getting hooked on high interest credit cards and you come out of school. Is there an aspect of that that you've seen in class action?

Scott: Yeah, there have been class actions connected to predatory lending exactly for those kinds of things. And then when you couple that with current problems like internet gambling and being able to make a bet through an app, that's a big case for us right now. People who get the credit card and they're young and they're like, I'm a genius, because we're all geniuses when we're 18, 19, 20.

Back when I went to my community college I got a $750 line of credit, thirty years ago. But now you can walk up as a student and get thousands of dollars, and they believe what they see on Twitter and X and the internets, and maybe they put that all in crypto and they get crushed from buying meme coins, or they start using that credit on their betting app. And all of a sudden they become internet gambling addicts, and they blow that entire amount of money.

Because with the gambling apps, what they do now, allegedly, not allegedly, I know, I've seen them do it, you'll see them in the cases that are filed, is that if you keep losing on your bets, they offer you a free or very low dollar high return bet that they know you're going to win. So that way you lose, lose, lose, and then you win, and you're still net negative. But poof, you get that shot of adrenaline, endorphins, to go, see, it was just a bad spot. I'm back in it, baby. And then they hook you that way. All of that is coupled to being able to get access to credit, and it just brings them down.

So now we file cases for crypto fraud and crypto theft. We're filing cases against internet gambling. There's internet casino style gambling now, slot machines, same thing. They know exactly how much you're winning, and then if you're losing it, oh, we can give you that shot, and poof, you're back up and winning again. There are all these cases getting filed that are going to settle.

Social media harm and addiction feeds you exactly what you want to see to keep you on that app. And the first case that was won, that got a young woman six million dollars. These settlements are happening now, where you've got TikTok that's already settled before their next trial, Snapchat has already settled before the next trial, because they know what's coming. Meta is fighting it tooth and nail. But I think once we get a couple more wins in the courtroom against Meta, they'll go ahead and settle the whole thing, because they got crushed with damages in New Mexico alone by the state attorney general. And you can't keep losing those cases.

The problem Meta has is that nobody likes Mark Zuckerberg. So Mark Zuckerberg goes before a jury and they already don't like him. It's hard to win a case when you've got a CEO that isn't well liked, that can't connect with the jury, even though he spent a lot of money on jury consultants trying to.

Caleb: Wasn't his manifesto, or his paper that came out, I think this week, wasn't he moving the approval of some of these advanced AI models to a board, essentially saying a governing board should now be the deciding partner, to move it off the shoulders of the CEO?

Scott: Yeah. I think he's got to make these changes, because he is so doggone smart and he's so doggone talented and he's built something incredible, right? Facebook is incredible, and then he continued to build technologies around it. I'm not trying to bash Mark. I've got a lot of respect for the guy and what he's built, and he is really, really brilliant. But you've got to do that, where it's going to a board, where it's off your shoulders, where it's not you making the decision for everything.

I mean, I'm a small company, and most of the decisions, the day to day stuff, I don't have any say over now. I drive the high level vision, but that's it. I'm the big relationship guy. I'm trying to make sure that our co-counsels are happy with us, and I'm the face of the company for consumers. But I don't want to be driving the day to day stuff. I want to be able to be up here in the mountains and enjoy my time here, and not have the high stress that you get when every decision has to roll through you as the CEO. That, man, it sucks.

Caleb: It sounds like you've built something with momentum, and really found an important aspect in the market that needs attention. Trial lawyers, sure, maybe some of that reputation comes from some grounded perspective. But without checks and balances, specifically without being able to have a group respond to a corporate entity, it seems like we would be missing a really important piece of the puzzle.

Scott: I reach out to CEOs and say, you've got this massive network and massive amounts of eyeballs. I reached out to the CEO of Bending Spoons. Haven't heard back, shocker. But you have this mass amount of eyeballs, and we could help all these consumers and get them justice. And by the way, we can also educate all of your subsidiaries to make sure they don't get hit with things like class actions, not just in the US but globally. So why don't we work together on trying to build this smart way to help your viewers? That's what we want.

And that's what Mark Zuckerberg, I hope, wants. He wants to help every viewer of Instagram and every viewer of Facebook. If that's your core passion, or if you're Google, do no harm, you want to help everybody that comes to Google, then let's do it. Let's help every person that comes there submit a claim. Let's help put cash in the pockets of those folks that are affected by lawsuits and settlements. This is good for the average person. Why not try to bridge that gap and make sure they can submit claims?

That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure that every person that comes to Top Class Actions is alerted and told and is aware of every case that they qualify for. And eventually that's going to be in the US, Canada, UK, across Europe, India. Even China has class actions. So there's just a massive opportunity for global growth within the space, as long as you are focused on helping that average person, the consumer, put money in their pocket and submit claims and get them justice. Let's increase access to justice. That's not a bad thing.

Caleb: Last question. If you had to put your finger on one thing right now that would be the most important thing for driving growth for your team, what would you say that is?

Scott: I'm very lucky in that my leadership team at Top Class Actions, and all of our team around the world who support all of our viewers, we've been pushing AI and forward thinking about what's best for our consumers and our viewers for the last number of years. What I've got is great leaders in each seat, challenging their teams on a weekly basis through their Level 10 leadership calls and their weekly meetings, to say, how can we improve things for our viewers of Top Class Actions?

It's doubly hard for our IT team, because it's how can we improve things for the viewers, for our marketing team that is really advocating for them, and then how can we improve things for everyone here at Top Class Actions? That's what I really want to continue to push, that vision. If we keep the consumer as our focus and don't lose that focus, then we're just going to continue to grow.

Caleb: I love it. A deeper and ever greater understanding of who the customer is, what the most important problems are that they face, and then finding out, is there a valid reason to contend alongside them for justice for it.

Scott: Yeah. And let's do it. Let's take them from when they qualify, let's send them to the law firm, so we know they're going to get great care. I know if they reach out to our law firm, we're going to get back to them typically within hours, to get them an update on their case and really help. We're not just going to put them in some black hole where we're not going to hear from them until it's time to write them a check. It's so important, creating that great connection where Top Class Actions is the resource if you need a lawyer. We don't do family law yet. We're not doing consumer protection law yet. But if there's something in the consumer space, you were hurt, you were injured, you come to us.

Caleb: TopClassActions.com is the place to go to check it out. And Scott, thank you so much. For anyone who's listened or is curious about this, that would be the place to check it out, TopClassActions.com. Awesome. Thanks.

Scott: Thank you, Caleb. Great to see you.