Why Are There So Many Personal Injury Lawyer Billboards?

Drive down almost any major highway in the United States and you’ll probably see a number of giant advertisements asking if you’ve been injured and telling you to call a number if so. Often, these billboards include images of suit-clad lawyers, whose large smiles are paired with somewhat fearsome gazes that promise to aggressively win you lots and lots of money.

If you’ve noticed more personal injury lawyer billboards than ever in the past five years or so, you’re not imagining things. Legal services spent an estimated $650 million—double what they spent in 2021—on outdoor advertising in 2025, a 260% increase since 2017. In comparison, hospitals and clinics, which came in second place for the most outdoor advertising that year, spent $400 million. 

How did personal injury lawyer billboards become so common across America? Why is this the advertising method of choice for this particular group of attorneys? The answer is a combination of factors, including a nationwide spike in spending on legal advertising and the power of trends.

Changes in advertising tactics

Law firms and attorneys faced strict restrictions on advertising from 1908 until 1977. In 1908, the American Bar Association barred advertising by attorneys, and simultaneously prohibited “ambulance chasing”—the act of pursuing a potential client directly after an accident. Yet things changed in 1977 when the Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s ban on attorney advertising, finding it to be an infringement of free speech.

Soon after, law firms began dipping their toes into marketing. One of the first majorly successful American firms to invest in large-scale national marketing was Morgan & Morgan, which began putting up billboards not only in their home state of Florida but all around the U.S. (When their billboards went up in Philadelphia in 2017, they were actually sued by a frustrated local law firm that accused them of defrauding Pennsylvanians by claiming to be able to represent them.)

Still, the firm’s massive, decades-long advertising push has been quite successful; founder John Morgan is a billionaire and the firm employs over 1,200 people. Morgan's efforts also helped spark a sea change in the legal world by inspiring firms to brand themselves as businesses and to invest more energy into marketing overall. “Morgan & Morgan is somewhat of a playbook,” said Kyle Hebenstreit, CEO of Practice Made Perfect, an advertising firm that focuses on lawyers. “You can build a national practice if you’re just really aggressive about it.”

Why all the billboards?

Lawyers tend to buy up billboards for many reasons. One is that these forms of advertising can reach wide audiences. Anyone, after all, can be injured on the job or while walking down the street.

Simultaneously, workers in labor-intensive industries tend to be particularly vulnerable to on-the-job injuries, which might be why billboards tend to pop up at intersections and highways near areas filled with warehouses and other manufacturing sites. 

Clearly, there’s a large possible market for personal injury lawyers. According to Clio, only a small percentage of people who could make personal injury claims actually do so: 62 million people seek medical help for an injury each year, yet an average of 400,000 personal injury claims are filed each year.

The power of trends

Another reason for spike in personal injury lawyer billboards since 2019 is that the pandemic led many companies to slash their advertising budgets, opening up new space for law firms to purchase cheap billboard real estate—and to fill them with ads that any marketer would recognize as rather low-budget. This sparked a trend that has continued to thrive to this day, even as advertising budgets around the nation have risen again. 

Lawyers and law firms can be competitive as well, and when one trend takes off in the industry it tends to spread, which could also partly explain the billboard craze. “In lawyer marketing, there’s a herd mindset,” personal injury attorney Howard Atkin told WBEZChicago. “Once one lawyer’s doing it, and other lawyers perceive that that lawyer has success in their career, then other lawyers are trying to follow that lawyer’s lead.”

More money, more lawyers

Additionally, there may be more advertisements simply because law firms can afford to pay for them. A 2025 report from Marathon Strategies found that nuclear verdicts, in which a jury awards over $10 million, rose by 52% in 2024 and have been on a general upward trajectory for years. 

Advertising could have something to do with the number of claims being filed overall. So could increasing anger at income inequality, as a 2024 Wall Street Journal article proposed. Regardless, increasing numbers of claims and jury verdicts have led to more money for personal injury lawyers, and more ads. 

“Those verdicts and those awards—and the percentages that those attorneys take—are why there are so many personal injury ads,” Curt Schroder, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, told Philly Mag. “Because they can afford to pay for those ads. It’s like a snowball going downhill. It grows on itself.”

In recent years, some plaintiffs have even begun receiving advances from Wall Street, which turn into returns for investors upon the firm winning high-value cases. This may also have led to more pressure on firms to heavily advertise and win cases. It has even allegedly resulted in plaintiffs being pressured to get more surgeries or medical treatments to increase their payouts in lawsuits, according to The New York Times. 

So how much does it actually cost to put up one of those ads? A billboard in Los Angeles might cost $5,000 to $10,000 per month, and in prime areas like the Sunset Strip, a billboard could cost $80,000 to $100,000 per month. But outdoor advertising leads to 7.1 billion impressions—or opportunities for an ad to be seen—per week in Los Angeles, according to The Los Angeles Times. 

So, should you hire a personal injury lawyer?

It’s a good idea to hesitate before actually calling one of those numbers on that billboard you drive by every day. Personal injury firms that take on large numbers of clients and pay big bucks for advertising are sometimes called “settlement mills,” and are sometimes known for paying little personal attention to individual clients. Ultimately, it’s best to do plenty of research before hiring any lawyer. 

Of course, while some personal injury lawyers are only in it for the money, some are genuinely devoted to helping their clients win. One thing is clear—those billboards with the smiling lawyers and cheesy slogans probably are not going away anytime soon.