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Billboard Wars: How Personal Injury Lawyers Took Over Philly

Armed with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets, personal injury attorneys have wallpapered the city with ads, flooding billboards, bus stops, social media feeds, and airwaves with their shiny pitches. But at what cost?


personal injury lawyer ads billboards philadelphia

Personal injury lawyer billboards all over Philly / Photography by Jeff Fusco

And Leonard Hill makes an even 30.

On a crisp November afternoon, as hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians toil away at work and big-dreaming Philadelphia school students toil away in classrooms, I’m doing something different: I’m cruising along Interstate 95, counting billboards.

Lawyer billboards, to be precise.

Why? Mostly it’s curiosity. Over the past couple of years, I — like, I suspect, you; like, I suspect, most of those hardworking Philadelphians — have noticed not just an uptick in billboards and bus wraps and transit stop banners promoting personal injury law firms, but a virtual barrage of said signs. You know the ones I’m talking about. Morgan & Morgan, the Florida-based firm whose founder, “Jawn” Morgan, is always trying to show us how Philly he is. Pond Lehocky, the ubiquitous outfit that’s constantly asking if we’ve been hurt at work. TopDog, whose bright yellow promotions feature close-up shots of firm founder James Helm and the phrase “Top Dog gets you top dollar.” And then there’s the aforementioned Leonard Hill, whose billboards — some in English, some in Spanish — promise to get you cash fast.

How many of these messages might a person be exposed to on a given day? That’s what I’ve come to count. Heading south on 95 — what I’ve come to think of as Philadelphia’s own Personal Injury Alley — I begin making tally marks in my notebook at Cottman Avenue. Before I know it, the signs — all of which promote male attorneys, for what it’s worth — are popping up faster than the miles are rolling by. There are billboards — multiple ones — for all the firms I just mentioned, as well as a bunch of others: Rosenbaum & Associates. Stern & Cohen. KK&O. My Philly Lawyer. Philly Law. By the time I pass the airport less than 20 minutes later — and spy my fifth Leonard Hill sign — I’ve counted no fewer than 30 billboards for personal injury lawyers.

That seems like a lot, until I turn around and head north — and count 33 signs.

Billboards, alas, are just one way that personal injury attorneys — that segment of the bar that traffics in everything from car crashes and workers’ compensation claims to medical malpractice suits and product liability litigation — have been hustling to get our attention in recent years. According to one analysis, in 2023 a stunning $84 million was spent on personal injury and product liability ads in Pennsylvania alone, bombarding the public with 780,000 messages across TV, radio, the Internet, social media, print, and — perhaps most conspicuously — billboards (where law industry spending has gone up 62 percent since 2019). The ads are so ubiquitous that personal injury lawyers — who make their money taking a portion (sometimes up to 40 percent) of the damages they finagle for their clients — have essentially become what local TV anchors were in Philly a generation ago: household names, if not outright celebrities.

Some of their messages, to be sure, are quite restrained. Kline & Specter, the powerhouse firm that’s made hundreds of millions of dollars going after some of America’s biggest corporations, simply features its white-haired partners Tom Kline and Shanin Specter. Very dignified.

On the other end of the spectrum are firms like TopDog, whose (often, I admit, hilarious) radio ads and TikTok videos make no pretense about what the firm is selling. One TopDog radio ad I heard while researching this story — played on Black radio — begins with dramatic keyboard music, followed by a man’s voice bathed in echo.

“After my accident, I called one law firm,” the voice deadpans. “They told me they was gonna give me justice. I’m like — wrong answer. I ain’t looking for justice. I’m looking for money. And lots of it. I hung up on ’em, called TopDog Law.”

“The rules do not mandate good taste in advertising, although there are a lot of lawyers and non-lawyers out there who view that as unfortunate,” says Thomas Wilkinson, a partner at Cozen O’Connor and past president of the Pennsylvania Bar Association. Once upon a time the rules — that is, Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct, which all lawyers in the commonwealth agree to abide by — did mandate a level of decorum in legal advertising. But in recent years the profession has moved away from that practice under the theory that advertising exists to give people information, and it’s not really the bar’s business how any given lawyer might choose to do that.

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The explosion of personal injury advertising in Philadelphia — the fact that it can sometimes feel as if personal injury attorneys have swallowed the city whole — is, in many regards, a sign of our times. We live in an age, after all, in which we’re essentially being hustled every second — tracked, profiled, targeted, geofenced, retargeted, pitched, and upsold — all in the name of companies improving their bottom lines. In such an environment, should we really expect lawyers not to shill for themselves?

But the ads also reflect the changes taking place in the legal industry itself. It’s been a long time since law was a “profession” — a high-minded, even genteel pursuit dedicated to the public good. Lawyers have been allowed to advertise for nearly 50 years; law firms exist to make money — full stop. But we’ve reached a new era entirely, with lawyers not just promoting their services, but working feverishly to expand the size of the market for those services.

“We used to have law firms that only practiced law, and that’s all they did,” says Ryan Makris, co-founder of a new Philly-based legal marketing firm called Very Decent Marketer. “Then you had law firms that practiced law and had a focus on marketing. Today, there are a lot of law firms where marketing is their primary responsibility and core focus. Really, where the big money is today for a personal injury firm is having a big presence in marketing.”

And it’s those marketing messages that are maybe the biggest tell about our times. The phrasing on billboards and taxi toppers and Instagram ads and airport kiosks may vary, but the subtext is always the same: Everybody else is getting theirs. Shouldn’t you get yours?

One day in the fall I arrive at the sleek Commerce Square offices of Pond Lehocky. As I walk off the elevator into the large reception area, I find my eye drawn to the impressive sign that hangs on the wall behind the reception desk. The top part spells out the firm’s official name: “Pond Lehocky Giordano.” The bottom part, which looks like a continuation of that name, says “Official partners of the Philadelphia Eagles.”

“For us to go into that sponsorship, it’s kind of our demographic,” Sam Pond, one of Pond Lehocky’s co-founders, says to me a few minutes later as we sit in a conference room that overlooks the city. With us is Pond’s fellow co-founder, attorney Tom Giordano, as well as Shawn Lehocky, the firm’s CEO (and nephew of its third co-founder, attorney Jerry Lehocky).

Pond continues: “Hardworking, could be union, working-class, middle-class people who have the grit of the Eagles,” he says, detailing Pond Lehocky’s client base. “That toughness of the brand — I think the Eagles sponsorship was just a natural match for us.”

Not so long ago the idea of a law firm even having a “brand” would have been something of a head-scratcher. But in this new sales-oriented era of the legal industry, defining and being able to communicate to the consumer who you are is essential. Pond Lehocky’s own identity flows, to an extent, from Pond himself, an intense, white-haired 66-year-old who grew up in the Northeast and worked a series of blue-collar union jobs before graduating from Temple’s law school four decades ago. A onetime all-state soccer player and former boxer, he’s not a guy lacking in either self-confidence or self-regard.

Over the past decade few Philly firms have been as aggressive — or, frankly, successful — when it comes to advertising as Pond Lehocky has. Founded in 2010, when the three name partners (along with David Stern, who left acrimoniously a few years ago) broke away from their previous firm, Pond Lehocky is now the largest workers’ compensation shop in Pennsylvania. It also has a robust practice securing Social Security benefits for disabled workers, and it markets itself as handling any manner of matters, from car accidents to whistleblower cases. All told, it employs 38 full-time lawyers, and its website boasts that it can handle cases “in all 50 states!”

Undergirding its growth has been advertising. Pond says the importance of advertising dawned on him one day many years ago when he was in court at the state office building on Spring Garden Street and watched another lawyer — one whose ads he’d seen frequently — representing a client. “I was horrified by the representation, quite frankly. I saw more and more of that, and realized you could be a really great trial lawyer … but if you don’t have any clients or customers, then you’re really not going to be able to do what you do because someone else has gone in and, in a free enterprise system, started marketing for those people that you want to represent. It was almost as if your hands were tied.”

Pond Lehocky’s early marketing efforts included ads in the Daily News and a billboard showing the faces of the four founding partners. The former was a hit; the latter less so. “We kind of looked like we were scowling at everybody,” Giordano says with a laugh, “so we made a decision very early on, we’re never going to put our faces on a billboard ever again.”

That early trial-and-error approach has given way, more than a decade later, to a powerful and sophisticated marketing machine, with everything from TV, radio, and billboards to Google ads, social media posts, and that Eagles sponsorship. (The firm has stuck to its vow not to put the founders’ faces on billboards, though the trio does appear in the firm’s TV ads, and the camera-ready Giordano stars in the firm’s social media videos.) The firm’s marketing team monitors and analyzes everything, measuring the effectiveness of various messages and platforms in terms of driving clients.

The point of all this promotion? Well, getting Pond Lehocky’s name and tough-as-nails brand out there is obviously part of it. But that goal is actually secondary to something else: growing the pool of people who might consider bringing a lawsuit in the first place.

“It’s not just getting people that know they have a case and getting in front of them,” says Lehocky. “It’s also growing the population of people that have been seriously injured or disabled but don’t know they have other avenues for benefits. A lot of our marketing is educating clients about what types of benefits they’re entitled to even when they have no idea that it’s possible.”

Today Pond Lehocky is so adept at making people lawsuit-curious that each week thousands of would-be clients — presumably many of them those gritty, football-loving, working-class people Pond references — reach out via phone, email, web chat, DM, and pretty much any other medium you can imagine to tell their stories and see if they might have a case. To be clear, not all of them end up as clients of Pond Lehocky. “A lot of people don’t have cases,” Pond explains. “The far majority of cases that come in, we vet and we don’t see that there’s a case.”

And even cases that do have merit aren’t necessarily handled by Pond Lehocky attorneys. In a model that’s become common among big personal injury firms, Pond Lehocky actually refers — for a share of the fee, of course — a substantial number of cases to other lawyers around the country. (The firm declined to say how many.) Indeed, the reason the firm can boast that it handles cases in all 50 states is because it has established relationships with other firms to actually handle the work.

Given how sophisticated legal marketing has become, it’s almost hard to fathom that, for many years, advertising by lawyers was not just frowned upon, but banned altogether. All the way back in 1908 — the middle of the Progressive Era, for what it’s worth, when high-minded reform efforts were underway in many aspects of American life — the American Bar Association outlawed advertising by attorneys, deeming it unprofessional, bordering on ambulance chasing (the act of personally soliciting a potential client immediately after an accident, when they’re at their most vulnerable). It was a prohibition that lasted nearly seven decades until, in 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it, calling it an infringement on attorneys’ free speech rights.

Over the next decade lawyers began tiptoeing into the advertising waters — some taking out ads in the Yellow Pages, a handful actually taking to TV to promote themselves. In Philly one of the pioneers was Rand Spear, who launched his own firm in the late 1980s and before long had dubbed himself “The Accident Lawyer” and come up with a memorable tagline (“Demand Rand!”).

“When I first started advertising, I was on channels 3, 6, and 10,” says Spear, who grew up in a family of retailers in the Northeast. (Fun fact: His first cousin is noted chef Marc Vetri.) “There was no cable; there was no Internet; there was no streaming. You would do a few stations, you would pick a couple of billboards, and move on.”

In time, the media changed, but legal advertising really didn’t — at least not until John Morgan and his firm, Morgan & Morgan, began disrupting the entire field a couple of decades ago. The Florida-based outfit not only advertised relentlessly on its home turf, but eventually began putting up billboards and airing ads in other markets around the country — even if it didn’t technically have a practice there. Indeed, when Morgan & Morgan started marketing itself in Philly in 2017, local firm Rosenbaum & Associates (which sometimes markets itself as Rosenbaum Injury Law) actually filed suit against it, arguing that John Morgan — who isn’t licensed to practice in Pennsylvania — was essentially defrauding Philadelphians by saying he’d be their lawyer.

The case was eventually settled, but something of an advertising arms race had begun. With Morgan & Morgan gobbling up market share in Philly, local firms felt as if they had no choice but to double down on their own advertising.

But Morgan & Morgan has had another­ impact on the legal ecosystem as well: It’s essentially done away with the pretense that law firms are anything but businesses.­ For years the tradition at law firms was to have the most business-savvy partner run the operation, but Morgan & Morgan — while still owned by lawyers — is operated by non-lawyers, people whose expertise is not in deposing witnesses or arguing cases, but in understanding balance sheets and marketing strategies and operating matrixes.

Perhaps such an evolution was inevitable. If, 120 years ago, America’s energy was being put into high-minded civic reform, today it flows mostly into creating ever more robust bottom lines. Over the past 25 years, corporate profits in America have nearly quintupled, and today the average CEO at a Fortune 500 company makes $16 million per year — an amount, someone recently calculated, it would take the average worker 200 years to earn.

No one represents the it’s-only-a-business new breed as much as TopDog Law, the entity launched by James Helm in 2019, not long after finishing — perhaps tellingly — a dual JD/MBA program at Rutgers.

“It comes down to unit economics,” Helm said cheerfully on a legal industry marketing podcast last year. (The TopDog founder, who grew up in Delco and now spends most of his time in Scottsdale, Arizona, declined my request for a sit-down interview.) In the podcast Helm went on to explain that you first have to know the average fee you generate on a case — if it’s $10,000, you have work to do; if it’s $25,000, you’re doing pretty well. Then you need to calculate the cost of acquiring a client. If you understand those two things — and if the delta between them is large enough — “then I can get aggressive about acquiring new customers, and I can do it profitably.”

Simple, right?

It’s a formula Helm has used with great success. Six years after launching TopDog, Helm’s operation now has a presence, according to its website, in more than 35 cities across the country, from Ann Arbor and Atlanta to Washington, D.C. Thousands of calls and contacts come in each week.

Key to the success have been decisions Helm made early on, starting with the consumer-friendly TopDog name. “I think traditionally [law] firms have been very bad at branding their businesses,” Helm said on the podcast. “Every other industry has names that are easy to say, easy to sell, easy to remember. Whereas with law firms, the brand wasn’t the focus.” In dubbing his outfit TopDog — a moniker that could just as easily have been used on, say, an energy drink or a new brand of kibble — he landed on something that both was easy to remember and conjured up winning. “I think a large part of our success is due to the name,” he said. “TopDog gets you top dollar.”

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Helm’s second outside-the-box decision was to focus on social media when it came to marketing. In part the strategy was born of necessity — Helm didn’t have enough money to advertise on TV; even Google AdWords was out of his league. But it also spoke to his age (27 at the time); Instagram and TikTok were as natural to him as TV was to Rand Spear.

“We really thought there was room to revolutionize [legal marketing], especially on the social media front,” says Ian Harrington, TopDog’s first marketing director. (Harrington would go on to work for Pond Lehocky and is now co-founder, with Ryan Makris and Kate Schenkel, of Very Decent Marketer.) “At the time, no law firm was doing social media with any kind of success or results. It wasn’t by accident that we saw that as an opportunity. James was young; he was good-looking. He wasn’t as good on camera as he is now. That actually took a long time to get right. But we were willing to put in the reps to figure it out.”

Early on, TopDog’s social strategy was based on Helm sharing his personal story. A high school wrestler, he’d started taking prescription painkillers following an injury at age 17, and he’s said he spent eight years as an addict before finally entering rehab while in law school. The message to potential clients: I know what it’s like to be down and out. I can help you get your life back.

But in time that strategy gave way to something more over-the-top — kinetic videos of a hyper Helm doing everything from mugging at the camera to rapping. “We had to get our name out there by being bombastic and creating the TopDog persona,” says Harrington. “The algorithms of the platforms push the louder, the bombastic, the faster-cuts kind of stuff. And we really leaned into that.”

As is increasingly the norm in the personal injury law business, the cases Helm generates — through social media or radio or all those TopDog billboards — are not primarily handled by him or any lawyer working for him, but by other lawyers around the country. In fact, if you look closely at the language, you see that TopDog Law isn’t really even a law firm. Helm’s LinkedIn page describes it as “a leading case acquisition and plaintiff intake platform,” while the TopDog website calls it “a national network for law firms licensed to practice in their applicable states.”

The uber-referral model is not one every lawyer — even in the personal injury realm — is comfortable with. “I think it’s important for the consumer to understand who they’re retaining to represent them,” says Spear. “I’m here every day. I work morning till night. I like meeting with clients.”

Perhaps more to the point: Advertising done primarily for the purpose of referring cases to other firms actually runs afoul of Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct. As the rules put it: “It is misleading to the public for a lawyer or law firm, with knowledge that the lawyer or law firm will not be handling a majority of the cases attracted by advertising, to nonetheless advertise for those cases only to refer the cases to another lawyer whom the client did not initially contact.”

When I email Helm about this, I get a quick reply from his general counsel, Sean Berberian. He says that because Helm — through the entity Helm Law LLC — maintains joint responsibility for all cases, he’s not, in fact, “referring” matters and is, therefore, “absolutely compliant with Pennsylvania rules of ethics, as well as other applicable jurisdictions.”

As it happens, none of this may even matter. When I ask Thomas Wilkinson, the former Pennsylvania Bar Association president, about the relevant section of Pennsylvania’s rules, he essentially shrugs. “There is not a tremendous amount of policing in Pennsylvania of improper advertising. Sometimes that policing only occurs when there’s been a complaint about the quality of representation or a client feels they’ve been duped in some way. But for the most part, if clients are pleased with the outcomes, they don’t care a great deal about how they got to the lawyer.”

I understand Wilkinson’s point. And yet it still strikes me as odd, the equivalent of a restaurateur — say, Marc Vetri! — running an ad for his restaurant, but then telling you when you call for a reservation that he’s going to get you a table at one of Michael Solomonov’s or Jose Garces’s restaurants.

Then again, for better or worse, what TopDog and so many other personal injury firms are selling is less legal services than the idea of suing in the first place.

When it comes to litigation, Philadelphia has long been considered a plaintiff-friendly city — a venue in which judges and juries are more likely than in other places not only to side with the alleged victims in civil cases, but to award bigger damages. It’s a rep that’s only been reinforced of late. Last January, in a case tried by Kline & Specter, a Philly jury delivered a massive $2.25 billion verdict against agrochemical giant Monsanto, finding that the company’s weed killer Roundup caused cancer in a Lycoming County man. (A judge later reduced the award to $400 million.)

In the past couple of years Philadelphia has also seen a spike in medical malpractice cases, the consequence of a 2022 Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that loosened the venue rules. For nearly 20 years med mal cases in Pennsylvania could be brought only in the county where the cause of action took place. Under the new rules, cases can be brought anywhere the defendant conducts business. Since so many medical systems have at least some presence in Philly, lawyers have rushed to bring cases here, with malpractice cases up 46 percent from 2019 to 2024. Who knows? the thinking goes. A Philly judge and jury just might give me the big damages I’m looking for.

As I noted earlier, the world of personal injury law is vast, ranging from simple car crash claims worth a few thousand dollars to Roundup-type tort cases worth hundreds of millions. Sam Pond argues that they all play a vital role in the system by putting a check on power — corporate power, insurance company power, employer power.

“Trial lawyers are the only regulators in a free enterprise system,” he says. “Do you think companies care about OSHA? Get a little fine? No.” It’s only the threat of a lawsuit — or the damages awarded in one — that makes them behave responsibly. And advertising, Pond argues, helps surface the claims that keep companies in check.

That advertising brings cases to personal injury firms is undeniable. The firms wouldn’t do it otherwise. But what other impact does legal advertising have?

Well — as is clearly the point — there’s evidence to suggest that it’s led to a rise in the overall number of lawsuits being filed. A recent study by the RAND Corporation found that between 2012 and 2019 — a period in which legal advertising across the country increased significantly — the number of cases filed in the 19 states RAND had data for (including Pennsylvania) grew by nearly 10 percent. Also growing: the percentage of cases in which juries found in favor of the plaintiff (rising from 52 percent to 64 percent), as well as the number of jury verdicts of $5 million or more (which more or less doubled).

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That rise in big verdicts seems to have intensified since the pandemic. In 2023, for example, Philadelphia hit a high-water mark of 10 so-called “nuclear verdicts” (those of $10 million or more), and in 2024 it registered 12.

Finding definitive causation between advertising and big verdicts is nearly impossible. But Curt Schroder, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform — a tort reform group funded by businesses in Pennsylvania — sees a link. All those personal injury ads and billboards, he notes, reach not just potential plaintiffs but also potential jurors, who may be increasingly likely to equate justice with big money.

“You see trends that were just not there before, and I don’t think it’s because plaintiffs have been injured more seriously,” says Schroder. “These nuclear verdicts run well in excess of any reasonable inflationary adjustment. We realize there are legitimate personal injury lawsuits out there, and people have a right to get just compensation. But we don’t think they should be overcompensated, because that starts to have real-world consequences.”

That advertising plays a role in those big-money verdicts seems reasonable enough. But a recent Wall Street Journal article offered an alternative — or at least additional — reason: public anger. As income inequality grows, as corporations make those record profits while working-class and middle-class families struggle, the jury deliberation room might be one place people feel they can express their frustration in a meaningful way.

Whatever’s driving the rise in cases and big verdicts, Schroder is right in saying there are real-world consequences — ones often borne, ironically, by all those hardworking people deliberating in jury rooms (or sitting at plaintiff’s table). As an example of what can happen, Schroder points to the medical malpractice insurance crisis Pennsylvania went through in the early 2000s. Because of a large number of claims and big verdicts, insurance companies at the time were jacking up malpractice insurance premiums to such an extent that physicians in high-risk specialties like obstetrics could no longer afford to practice in the state. That left Pennsylvanians with fewer and fewer doctors to help bring their kids into the world. Indeed, the reason the state Supreme Court 20 years ago put a limit on where med mal cases could be brought was to try to reduce the number of cases and bring insurance rates down.

In other situations, the cost of litigation is perhaps less dramatic, but it can still be felt. Over the past five years car insurance premiums have increased more than 50 percent across the U.S. While a variety of factors contributed to that — including pricier auto parts and labor — the insurance industry says a key driver has been increased claims and jury verdicts.

Those claims and verdicts have spawned one more thing as well. “Those verdicts and those awards — and the percentages that those attorneys take — are why there are so many personal injury ads,” Schroder says. “Because they can afford to pay for those ads. It’s like a snowball going downhill. It grows on itself.”

I initially became interested in this story because of all the personal injury billboards we now see on I-95 and other places around Philly. What fascinated me wasn’t just that there were so many of them; it was that, in this age of hyper-sophisticated digital advertising, lawyers were still relying on giant signs on the side of the highway to get their messages out.

But as it turns out, billboards are actually having a moment. For starters, the digital billboards we see more and more of are part of the vast marketing surveillance culture we’ve all been sucked into. Every time you drive past one of the signs, it picks up the device ID on your phone, letting an advertiser, if you fit the demographic they’re trying to reach, retarget you with the same or a similar ad the next time you’re online. See a brand’s ad on a billboard one moment, watch it pop up again in your Instagram feed a few minutes later. What a world we’ve created, huh?

“It’s brought more technology and more opportunity for out-of-home advertising,” says Michal Komemi, media director at Harmelin Media in Bala Cynwyd.

But traditional stationary billboards are still relevant too, Komemi explains. In contrast to online advertising, a giant sign on the side of a road actually gives an advertiser an air of credibility — it’s not just a scam website trying to steal your credit card information. “There’s a level of trust there,” she says. “You know the advertiser is real.”

Perhaps most important, billboards — both traditional and digital — are one of the few ad formats these days that we can’t block, swipe past, forward through, or otherwise ignore. You’re driving. Your eyes are open. You’re alert to your surroundings. Of course you see the signs. As Komemi says, “They’re 100 percent viewable. You can’t skip them.”

Which makes me wonder not just about the business impact of ads for personal injury lawyers — they work, clearly — but about their cultural and psychological impact. Because they’re so ubiquitous, because we literally can’t look away from them, are they somehow shaping the way we see the broader world? The ads might all be a little different, but each one invites us — or, after we’ve seen so many of them, maybe compels us — to view the world the way trial lawyers do, which is to say in an adversarial way. What happened to you isn’t your fault. It’s someone else’s responsibility. They should pay you.

Then again, maybe the signs are just mirrors, reflecting back the grievance that’s gripped so many of us. “The system is rigged against you. We fix that,” Pond Lehocky’s Instagram bio says. Could Donald Trump have put it any better?

There’s no reason to think that any of this is going away; in fact, we’re likely to see more of it. Ryan Makris of Very Decent Marketer believes a wave of consolidation is coming to the legal industry. Not only are small firms that don’t advertise struggling to compete against large firms that do, but who owns law firms may be beginning to change. The rules of professional conduct have long dictated that law firms be owned only by lawyers. But recently Arizona dropped that requirement, and other states are looking at that option too. All of it could open the door for private capital to invest in the legal industry — which would make law more corporate, not less.

“If the industry goes through consolidation, we’re going to start to see law firms that are bigger and bigger,” says Makris. “Bigger law firms by their very nature tend to put more of their emphasis on marketing. They’re more business-minded.”

In 1908, when the American Bar Association banned advertising, it did so, in part, to preserve the trust people had in lawyers. Attorneys might play by the rules of free enterprise, but the legal system is a public institution — the way society agrees to resolve disputes. So where are we, trust-wise, 48 years after lawyers started advertising? In a recent Gallup survey, only 16 percent of people said they had a high or very high impression of lawyers, compared with 31 percent who had a low or very low opinion of them. Lawyers had significantly lower ratings than doctors, nurses, judges, and police officers.

Then again, this is the path that what used to be known as the legal profession has chosen to go down. And maybe they shouldn’t care what the public thinks. After all, they’ve figured out a way to commoditize not only our injuries but our rage, and their futures, at least, are looking bright.

 

Published as “Sign of the Times” in the February 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.