I've seen some of these loads, some of them have vicious sounding names.
As far as how "effective" they are... I'd say fire em into a block o' ballistic jello... If they penetrate 12" to 14" they hey they probably are effective. If all they go is make a ghastly surface wound then you're depending onpain or psycological shock or fear the stop or repel an aggressor. I personaly would rather depend on projectiles disrupting vital tissue. It means banking on a statistic correlation... ballistic gelatin does not emulate human tissue exactly. What it does do however is give you a rough correlation... bullets that penetrate 14" in gellatin should over time, in the majority of cases prove to be an effective projectile. Shot placement is key. The larger the hole that is made the better, the more holes that are made - the better. The more and larger holes you can put in vital organs the better.
Shotguns allow you to tailor your ammo probably more than any other weapon. With handguns you can vary bullet weight and pressure / velocity but that's not a huge change. You can load something like a glaser safety slug but that's not a huge change either... A S&W Governor / Taurus Judge gives you some more options but it's still not close to a shotgun. With a shot gun you can load everything from slug to birdshot, you can even mix shot, mix anything you like - #0 with #4 buck, #000 with #2 - whatever. You can cut shells, and a lot of guns even let you go from 2 3/4 to 3" Ya, I don't think you can fire a bolo round out of any rifle or handgun that I know of.
If you live in a stone castle, then maybe #000 is the best defense load, if you live in a townhome, sharing a wall with two other town homes on each side of you, maybe #4 is a better choice. My gut feeling though is that depending on the situation, #00, #0 or #1 buck is going to be the better HD round than any of the exotic so-called self-defense loads out there (in most cases).
Having a lawyer use the name against you is hard to predict. I have read of shooting cases where the family situation of the deceased is so messed up they can't find next of kin, or in other cases next of kin is incarcerated, in another country ... or just generally doesn't have the werewithal to file a case.