Then, one day, one of his clients posted the documents for joining the suit on MySpace (a tactic, of course, that would only work in the aughts). All of a sudden, completed screening questionnaires and signed attorney-fee agreements were rolling in through the web. By the time the case settled for more than $40 million, Gallo had added hundreds more clients and was working with them through Yahoo groups and bulk emails. He was also working on a software platform that would let him manage more clients, more efficiently.

Taking on the case of Beggs, Valdez, and their fellow CSCA graduates in Los Angeles gave Gallo a chance to test his strategy and his new suite of digital tools. He launched a website through which he and his co-counsel could run much of the information- and signature-gathering for the suit. Potential plaintiffs could not only download the initial complaint and sign up for email updates, but also submit answers to several rounds of screening and intake questions, execute a fee agreement online, and upload their own details for complaint and discovery purposes.

This last part is key: Discovery is the phase of the case in which each side shares its evidence with the other, and it can be extremely expensive. In this case, the two parties had agreed on a standardized “fact sheet” that each plaintiff could fill out online to substantiate their claims, in lieu of a blizzard of document requests and questions. “It isn’t anything that you can’t do with a bank of law clerks and telephones…but it was much more efficient,” Kelly explains. “And it’s a lot more accessible for the actual claimants. A lot of those people are working two or three jobs now trying to get out of this hole that they’re in. And so for them to set aside an hour during our business hours, to sit down and go through this is much more difficult. A lot of these people are night owls. They get off work at 1 in the morning, they come home—and a lot of the stuff that they send in is between one and five in the morning. And so I think it makes it a lot more accessible for the claimants.”

The website also featured a blog and FAQ, through which plaintiffs could ask questions and to which Gallo and his team would post responses, updates on the case, and video messages to the group. “We could answer a question once instead of 500 times,” Gallo recalls. “And it did this terrific thing, where we had a thousand clients, and they all felt well informed, and therefore they weren’t calling us, and creating a situation that would have been unworkable for a relatively small firm like ours.”

Beggs and Valdez agree. “It was pretty frickin’ easy to sign up and get information,” Beggs recalls. “I was impressed. I thought they would be like, ‘So you’re number 970, what’s your name again?’ And that wasn’t the case at all—it was really nice.” Valdez recalls the process as “simple and straightforward,” estimating that the site saved him several days’ worth of time he would have otherwise had to spend on travel, mailings, and phone tag.