What Is It About Personal Injury Lawyers and Billboards?
The country’s largest personal-injury firm spends $350 million annually on marketing: “Everybody wants that truck wreck.”
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MARKETING
Billboards are a great way to target everyone: “The American Tort Reform Association, a lobbying group that advocates for caps on award damages and changes to current civil liability laws, estimates that in 2024 attorneys spent $541 million-plus on out-of-home and outdoor ads, a category that includes billboards as well as space on buses, subways, and other public areas. This is an increase of $70 million compared to 2023 and nearly $200 million from 2022. Morgan & Morgan, the country’s largest personal injury firm, reportedly spends a staggering $350 million annually on marketing alone. So why are so many law firms, from single-attorney practices to firms with thousands of employees, investing so heavily in billboards?”
“The first reason is competition. According to the American Bar Association, in 2024 there were 1.3 million practicing attorneys in the United States, a ratio of one attorney to every 260 Americans. While the number peaked in 2019, with 1.352 million practicing attorneys, since 2000 this cohort has grown, on average, by 1 percent a year. ‘If you do not advertise, you will get eaten by people like me,’ says Brooke Goff, a personal injury attorney in Connecticut.”
“Goff has certainly put her money where her mouth is. Her ads, a mix of clever puns and pictures of her cutting it up with celebrities including Vanilla Ice (‘Slip and fall on ice ice baby? Call Goff Law’), Flavor Flav, Mike Tyson, Chevy Chase, and Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff (no relation), dot all of the state’s major highways.”
“While the billboards are playful — they’re highlighted regularly in the r/Connecticut subreddit, no small honor — Goff takes them extremely seriously. To ensure her name and face stay in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of people who drive past her ads daily, she tries to change them every eight weeks. While she wouldn’t go into specifics, she says she spends $1 million-plus annually on her campaigns.”
“‘Everybody wants that truck wreck,’ says Bobby Steinbach, founding partner at MeanPug Digital, an attorney marketing agency in Brooklyn. ‘Because PI is direct-to-consumer, it can affect anybody. It’s not like estate planning, where you’re targeting a very potentially small set of folks: people that have high net worth or a lot of assets. [PI ads] can really be relevant to anyone and everyone.’ And if you want to target ‘everyone,’ there’s no substitute for hanging a huge rectangular advertisement on the side of a busy roadway.” READ MORE
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