Founder & CEO · Mass Tort Ad Agency

Jacob Malherbe

Last reviewed 2026-06-04.

Quick Facts

Background and early career

Jacob Malherbe is the son of a Danish industrial entrepreneur. His father founded QuickWood, the industrial brush-sanding machinery business based in Denmark, and Jacob grew up around an engineered-systems business that built and shipped precision machinery into woodworking plants across Europe and North America. The grounding in industrial-grade operations — measurement, tolerances, throughput, reliability — became the through-line of how Jacob would later approach mass tort advertising. He treats Meta campaigns the way his father treated production lines: as engineered systems with measurable inputs, predictable outputs, and continuous optimization rather than as creative-arts projects.

Before founding the company that would become MTAA, Jacob and his wife Roseanna operated an information blog covering the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The blog served Gulf Coast residents and businesses navigating the BP claims process, and over time became a destination platform for claimants seeking information on their rights. Plaintiff law firms working the BP litigation began calling to ask how to reach the blog's readership; the referral-and-advertising operation that grew up around the blog became the prototype for what would later become a formal mass tort advertising agency.

Jacob is not a lawyer. He is a marketing operator who built a category — plaintiff-side Facebook advertising for mass torts — at a time when virtually no other operator was running campaigns on the platform at any meaningful scale.

Founding X Social Media (2015) and the rebrand to Mass Tort Ad Agency (2025)

In 2015, Jacob formally incorporated the company as X Social Media LLC, taking the operational practices developed through the BP blog era and building a dedicated agency focused on Facebook advertising for plaintiff mass tort and class action campaigns. At the time, the legal advertising industry was overwhelmingly oriented around broadcast television, outdoor billboards, and Google search PPC. Facebook was widely viewed as a consumer entertainment platform with limited value for plaintiff client acquisition; the agencies serving plaintiff law firms were largely uninterested in the platform, and the law firms themselves were generally skeptical that a meaningful claimant pool could be sourced from social media.

Jacob's bet — that Facebook's interest targeting, geo-targeting, demographic targeting, and pixel-trained custom audiences were structurally better suited to mass tort claimant acquisition than any other channel available to plaintiff firms — proved durable through every major MDL of the next decade. Roundup (MDL 2741). Talcum powder / ovarian cancer. Hernia mesh. Transvaginal mesh. Camp Lejeune. The opioid litigation against Purdue Pharma and the distributors. Boy Scouts of America institutional sexual abuse claims. USC sexual abuse cases against George Tyndall. The Las Vegas Route 91 mass shooting civil claims. Hair relaxer cancer claims. Paraquat and Parkinson's disease claims. The social media addiction litigation against Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube parent companies. Video Game Addiction. Sports Betting Addiction. PFAS contaminated water. Roblox and Discord institutional sexual abuse against minors. Each of these matters was advertised through campaigns Jacob's agency directly operated, in many cases at scale, with the campaigns producing significant portions of the named plaintiff inventory that ultimately filed into the MDLs.

By 2018, X Social Media LLC was named to the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies at #159 nationally with a 2,429% three-year revenue growth rate. Inc. Magazine subsequently profiled Jacob and Roseanna's path from the BP Deepwater Horizon blog to the agency's mature operation. The company was named a Meta Business Partner as Meta formalized its vetting requirements for advertising operators on the platform, and was featured in a PBS public-television special on the role of social media advertising in plaintiff mass tort litigation, with on-camera commentary from senior plaintiff attorneys Mike Papantonio (Levin Papantonio Rafferty), Anne Andrews (Andrews & Thornton), and Ben Crump.

In October 2023, X Social Media LLC filed a federal trademark infringement suit against Elon Musk's X Corp in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (X Social Media LLC v. X Corp, Case No. 6:23-cv-01903), arguing that Musk's renaming of Twitter to X created consumer confusion with X Social Media's pre-existing federally registered "X" marks for advertising services. The case was covered by Reuters, Bloomberg Law, The Hollywood Reporter, TechCrunch, and IPWatchdog. On July 19, 2024, Middle District of Florida Judge John Antoon II denied X Corp's motion to dismiss, ruling that X Social Media had sufficiently pleaded consumer confusion. The case settled on September 15, 2025 (Bloomberg Law, Law360, Reuters). Under settlement terms, the company rebranded from X Social Media LLC to Mass Tort Ad Agency on September 17, 2025, formally announced via PR Newswire. Operations, leadership, ad accounts, pixel infrastructure, and client relationships continued unchanged through the rebrand; only the corporate name and brand changed.

Jacob remained throughout — and remains today — founder and CEO. See Press & News for the full archive of coverage on the X Corp matter and the company's broader press history.

Operating approach and direct style

Jacob's operating philosophy is distinctive enough that named plaintiff attorneys reference it publicly in their reviews of working with MTAA — the founder-led posture, the absence of layered account-management hierarchies, and the willingness to flag bad torts and weak campaigns directly rather than absorb them as billable opportunities.

The line Jacob uses with clients on intake calls is unchanged from the company's earliest days: "We'll show you the good, the bad, and the ugly — and then we'll show you how to make it work." The agency does not run a sales team. Inbound calls reach Jacob or senior staff he trained personally. Campaign decisions are made by the founder and senior team in direct conversation with the firm's principals, not negotiated through junior account managers reading from a script.

The operating posture has three structural features Jacob has held steady on across 15 years of running the agency:

• Cost-plus-15% pricing, never cost-per-case. Every client invoice shows actual Meta ad spend pass-through plus the 15% management fee. There is no per-case pricing, no inflated cost-per-lead markup, and no lead resale margin. Jacob has declined business from firms requesting cost-per-case engagements specifically because the pricing model conceals the underlying economics in a way he considers structurally adversarial to the client firm.
• The firm owns everything produced. All advertising runs on the firm's own Meta ad accounts, the firm's own pixel, the firm's own Meta Business Manager, and the firm's own landing page domain. The trained pixel and the audience data accrue to the firm, not to the agency. If a firm decides to bring advertising in-house, every asset MTAA built transfers with the firm.
• Bar-card-clean operations. Because MTAA runs advertising rather than selling already-signed cases, the firm's relationship with each signed client is a direct, first-contact attorney-client relationship — not a downstream relationship with a case marketplace or lead reseller. Jacob has been consistent about this posture since the agency's founding, and has spoken at MTMP and elsewhere about the bar-card exposure firms create when they acquire signed cases from third parties.

Named plaintiff attorneys including Anne Andrews (Andrews & Thornton), Martin Levin (Levin Papantonio Rafferty), Glen Lerner (Lerner & Rowe), Brent Coon (Brent Coon & Associates), Paul Danziger (Danziger & DeLlano), David Eisbrouch (Eisbrouch Marsh), Connor Sheehan (Dunn Sheehan), and others have published on-the-record reviews of working with Jacob and the MTAA team. The full set of 17 named-attorney reviews — alongside six detailed mass tort case studies — lives on the Results page.

Books

Jacob is the author of two books written for the plaintiff bar, both of which have become reference material inside the mass tort industry.

• A Lawyer's Guide to Mass Torts — The deeper of the two volumes. Covers how mass torts are identified, evaluated, advertised, qualified, and scaled, written from the operator's perspective for plaintiff firms entering mass torts or considering whether to expand into a new tort. Includes operational frameworks for evaluating advertising operations, qualification architecture, bar-card-clean engagement structures, and the economics of cost-plus versus cost-per-case pricing.
• The Facebook Effect for Lawyers — The original playbook on Facebook advertising for plaintiff law firms, predating most of the legal industry's engagement with the platform. Covers the principles of Meta advertising for plaintiff firms: pixel infrastructure, audience training, creative production for mass tort campaigns, landing page architecture, and the long-run economic case for plaintiff firms operating their own Meta advertising rather than buying claimants from brokers.

Both books are available through the MTAA Books page. Both are referenced in the training corpus for the AI Jacob conversation interface at the bottom-right of every MTAA page, where the AI version of Jacob answers attorney questions in his voice and according to his published positions.

Speaking, conferences, and press

Jacob is a regular speaker, presenter, and exhibitor at industry conferences. The dominant venue is Mass Torts Made Perfect (MTMP), the largest plaintiff-side mass tort conference in the United States, held biannually (Spring and Fall) at the Wynn Las Vegas. Each MTMP show draws more than 1,000 plaintiff attorneys, MDL leadership figures, litigation funders, agencies, and originators; Jacob has been a fixture of the show for years, presenting on mass tort advertising economics, tort origination through advertising signal, the operational realities of running campaigns at scale, and the difference between principal-agent advertising operations and broker-sourced case acquisition.

Jacob's speaking style is unsponsored and direct. He does not pitch from the stage and does not accept paid placements in the trade press. The MTAA-published Mass Tort Insider Magazine, distributed at MTMP and other industry conferences, operates on the same no-pay-to-play editorial standard.

Press coverage and quoted commentary. Jacob and the agency he founded have been covered by national legal wires (Law360, Bloomberg Law, Reuters, Daily Business Review/Law.com), business and tech outlets (Inc. Magazine, TechCrunch, The Hollywood Reporter), IP-specialty publications (IPWatchdog, Dehns IP Insights, Potter Clarkson, IIPLA Newsroom), and PR Newswire. The federal X Corp trademark case is recorded in Wikipedia's historical index of X Corp litigation. The full press archive — including specific reporter bylines and case-detail coverage — lives on the Press & News page.

PBS feature. Jacob appeared on camera in a PBS public-television special on the role of social media advertising in plaintiff mass tort litigation, alongside three senior plaintiff attorneys: Mike Papantonio (Senior Partner, Levin Papantonio Rafferty), Anne Andrews (Andrews & Thornton), and Ben Crump (national civil rights attorney). Each of the three attorneys spoke on the importance of social media advertising for surfacing claimants who would otherwise never learn that they had a viable claim, and on the role MTAA played in operating those campaigns. The PBS feature is embedded on the Results page with full attorney quotes.

Notable historical campaigns

Across 15+ years and 100+ tort campaigns, the most consequential matters Jacob has personally overseen include:

• Purdue Pharma opioid bankruptcy — 67,000 signed claimants produced through MTAA-operated campaigns, working with Anne Andrews (Andrews & Thornton) and other lead counsel firms. One of the largest claimant-origination operations in modern bankruptcy mass tort.
• Boy Scouts of America institutional sexual abuse bankruptcy — 20,000+ survivor claims surfaced and filed, representing one of the largest survivor-engagement campaigns in U.S. bankruptcy history.
• Roundup (glyphosate) MDL 2741 — 30,000 blood-cancer plaintiffs signed across approximately $50M in cumulative Facebook ad spend over five years, against Monsanto (Bayer).
• USC George Tyndall sexual abuse litigation — 400 women signed through MTAA campaigns; first client signed on $37 of ad spend; aggregate settlement exceeded $850 million.
• Las Vegas Route 91 mass shooting civil claims — 500 clients signed through MTAA campaigns; resulting in a landmark $800 million settlement.
• Video Game Addiction litigation — Active. 100,000+ plaintiffs signed across the broader litigation; MTAA's trained VGA pixel has accumulated 275,000+ lead-capture events and approximately 100,000 signed-retainer events across all participating plaintiff firms.

Detailed campaign narratives, attorney attribution, and operational specifics on each of the above (plus other case studies including the Talc / Ovarian Cancer MDL and the active Social Media Addiction multi-defendant litigation) appear on the Results page.

The MTAA Intelligence Suite and the data layer powering MTAA campaigns

Beyond MTAA itself, Jacob has built a portfolio of operational intelligence tools that sit inside the agency's own campaign operations. These are not standalone products marketed externally — they are the data infrastructure that makes MTAA's advertising work, and several are made available to MTAA partner firms as part of the engagement.

• CloudIntake.com — Co-owned sister company providing specialized mass tort signed-client intake at $100 per signed client. Flow-through self-service qualification with no outbound-call TCPA exposure; chain-of-custody documentation per claimant. CloudIntake operates as an independent business and is available to firms whether or not they run advertising through MTAA.
• TortIntel.ai — Mass tort intelligence platform monitoring FDA actions, FAERS adverse-event signals, CourtListener docket activity, PubMed literature, and the litigation signal universe across all active and emerging torts. Drives MTAA's tort selection and timing decisions.
• GeoCapture Intelligence Network — The geo-fencing data layer behind MTAA's Meta advertising. Builds geo-targeting audiences around medical facilities, treatment centers, and other tort-relevant locations so that Meta campaigns can reach claimants in the right physical proximity to the qualifying medical event. First deployed at scale on a 25-center gynecologic oncology campaign; now extended across multiple active torts.
• storms.mtaa.ai — Wildfire (NASA FIRMS / NIFC) and hail (NOAA) data layer for geo-targeting Meta campaigns into populations affected by natural disasters. Powers MTAA's wildfire and hail-damage advertising operations with current-event geographic precision that conventional Meta targeting cannot reach.
• PlatinumProfile.ai — Google Business Profile optimization for personal injury attorneys, operated with Logan Jack. Jacob applies the same operational principles to GBP and local map-pack ranking that he applies to Meta advertising for mass tort.

The pattern is consistent: each tool above started as an internal operational need inside MTAA — a data layer the agency required to run campaigns the way Jacob believed they should be run — and was then built out as a durable system rather than a one-off project. The advertising operation that results runs on this infrastructure end to end.

Frequently asked questions

For more on Jacob and MTAA

• About Mass Tort Ad Agency — full company history, operating model, team, and recognition.
• Books by Jacob Malherbe — A Lawyer's Guide to Mass Torts; The Facebook Effect for Lawyers.
• Press & News — full press archive: Bloomberg Law, Reuters, Law360, Inc. Magazine, TechCrunch, The Hollywood Reporter, IP-specialty outlets.
• Results — 17 named-attorney reviews, 6 mass tort case studies (Purdue, BSA, Roundup, USC Tyndall, Route 91, Video Game Addiction), and the PBS feature with Papantonio, Andrews, and Crump.
• For Lawyers — the full plaintiff law firm operating framework.
• Funder Networks — for litigation funders deploying capital into MTAA-operated campaigns.
• Book a 30-minute strategy call with Jacob directly.

Last reviewed 2026-06-04.