By Tom McGrath

Full article in Philadelphia Magazine

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.

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“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.

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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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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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.