How Personal Injury Lawyers Take Your TV.

new york
CNN
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Drive down any highway in America or turn on the television for 10 minutes and you’ll probably see an ad for a personal injury attorney.

“Injured in a car accident? Injured at work? Slipped in the store? Call this lawyer now for compensation,” goes a typical plaintiff’s personal injury lawyer. A lawyer is usually behind a desk or in a courtroom advertisement and a phone number with a word or phrase on the screen. They call on the audience to call out sparks.

There is a stigma surrounding attorney advertising and it was restricted throughout the 20th century until the Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that it violated First Amendment protections. The court said the ban made access to legal services “particularly poor for the non-poor and the uninitiated”.

The decision opened the floodgates for lawyer advertising. Tort claims arose in the 1980s, in part due to injuries suffered by workers exposed to asbestos.

According to data from Kantar, TV advertising spending on legal services reached $1.2 billion through November.

Many personal injury attorneys advertise aggressively because they have built many practices in a competitive and unusual business model. Advertisements help reach clients who don’t know a personal injury attorney, can’t rely on referrals, or don’t know their legal rights.

“I hope to showcase my business and attract my business,” introduced John Morgan, founder of Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal injury law firm in the country.

Morgan appears in light-hearted TV spots and on his own billboards with the tagline “For the People.” Morgan says the most successful ads are those that inform people of rights they may not otherwise be aware of.

“Clients are one-time clients and you don’t have a recurring relationship with an institution,” says Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at NYU Law in personal injury cases. “The question is always, how do you create a relationship between injured ordinary people and lawyers?”

Personal injury lawyers have different advertising practices, says Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies attorney advertising. Some lawyers promote the case themselves. Other attorneys advertise and then refer the cases they receive to a network of other attorneys and select certain rewards.

And then there are what Engstrom calls “settlement mills” — personal injury attorneys who handle a lot of cases but aren’t “focused on maximizing the value of each individual claim.” These lawyers promote wanting to handle as many cases as possible.

Most personal injury attorneys work on a retainer basis, so they are paid only when they negotiate a settlement for a client or win a case at trial. Less than 1% of all cases go to trial. Their fees are typically between 33% and 40% of the total amount awarded.

A contingency fee structure is the only way many people can afford legal representation for an accident.

“It’s become an advertising and marketing game for the personal injury attorney to get the cases,” said Jason Abraham, vice president of Huppy & Abraham, the largest personal injury law firm in the Midwest. “You can never be a gamer if you are not in the advertising and marketing circus to earn the income. It’s impossible.”

The company uses actor William Shatner as a paid spokesperson in advertisements. Using Shatner was “a game changer,” says Abraham, and “gave us instant credibility.” The commercials with Shatner helped the law firm enter new markets like Iowa.

Personal injury firms often advertise on TV as a “live response” tool to reach people recovering from accidents in the hospital or at home. “If someone is lying in the hospital, they call right then and there,” Abraham said.

In addition to advertising for personal injury attorneys, consumers are often inundated with ads for mass crimes, such as those currently flooding the airwaves in search of victims of the Camp Lejeune poisoned drinking water. According to Kantar, $206 million was spent on mass advertising through November.

Firms focused on recruiting clients, often bankrolled by hedge funds and litigation-finance firms, often finance advertising and refer claims to attorneys.

But critics say attorney advertising is being misused and there are efforts to control it.

“We’re not saying you can’t do advertising. It cannot be misleading, deceptive or unethical,” said Matt Webb, senior vice president for law reform policy at the U.S. Chamber Institute for Law Reform. It is used very frequently to create a lot of nonsense and speculative arguments.

The number of prosecutions is decreasing, the high costs of bringing a case, strict state laws designed to increase the trial.

State courts, which traditionally house about 98% of tort litigation, have seen a sharp decline in tort cases, said Stanford’s Engstrom. In the year In 2015, fewer than two out of every 1,000 people filed a torture lawsuit, down from about 10 out of every 1,000 in 1993.