“If I was a diplomat and you send me to North Korea, it would be important to know how North Korea works.” That’s not necessarily a statement one would immediately connect with the plaintiffs bar, especially, if it was uttered by Michael Rhodes, head of Cooley’s cyber, data and privacy practice. But it is a line from a podcast moderated by plaintiffs firm leader Jay Edelson during a conversation with his defense-side colleague talking jokingly about the importance of understanding your opponent.

As plaintiffs firms are moving more and more into the social media space to lure new clients, podcasts are only one of several innovative approaches in their legal marketing toolkit. Edelson invests about 90 percent of the firm’s marketing revenue in digital campaigns and only about 10 percent in traditional television and radio ads.