37. Personal Injury Lawyers

Summary

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The Economics of Everyday Things – Episode 37: Personal Injury Lawyers

Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Radio Network)
Air Date: May 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the striking world of personal injury lawyers—their business models, the economics behind their advertising blitz, and why their ubiquitous billboards, catchy jingles, and celebrity spokespeople like William Shatner have become an inescapable part of American culture. Host Zachary Crockett unpacks how personal injury law firms operate, the incentives in their fee structure, and explores both the positive effects and public perceptions of lawyer advertising.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ubiquity and Need for Advertising ([01:41], [02:14])

• Personal injury lawyer advertising, once banned, is now integral to the industry and a key reason firms like Hupy and Abraham have grown powerful.
• Jason Abraham (managing partner, Hupy and Abraham) emphasizes, “If you're going to be successful as a personal injury lawyer on a big time scale in today's market. And it really is a marketing circus, we have a seven figure budget for sure.” ([02:14])

2. The Economics of Personal Injury Law ([03:42], [04:02])

• ~400,000 personal injury claims are filed annually in the U.S.; 50,000 firms compete for this business, leading to about $53 billion in annual verdicts and settlements, largely paid by insurance companies.
• Settlement amounts are judged using software like Colossus, which factors in injury details, lost wages, attorney reputation, and more ([04:10]).

3. How Settlements are Calculated ([04:10]-[05:30])

• The calculation is not simply “three times your medical bills.” Personal circumstances, degree of injury, and especially “pain and suffering”—considered the most nebulous category—all influence a claim’s value ([04:59]).
• Notable quote: “For some people that use their hands for work, a wrist injury is gonna be worth more than for someone that isn’t working at all.” – Jason Abraham ([04:37])

4. The Contingency Fee Model ([05:30]-[06:21])

• No upfront retainer; lawyers typically take 33-40% of the final payout, meaning lawyers only get paid if they win.
• Notable quote: “If you do it well, there’s the reward at the end of the day of sizable compensation. But if I’m an hourly billing lawyer, whatever my rate is, that’s the most I can possibly earn.” – Jason Abraham ([06:21])

5. Risks and Selectivity ([06:33]-[07:06])

• 5-10% of cases are typically dropped due to issues like no insurance, bad facts, or lost clients ([06:40]).
• Notable quote: “Good lawyers are very selective. Investing your time and your money in a case that is a bogus case is a really bad financial idea.” – Nora Engstrom, Stanford Law ([07:06])

6. The Rise of “Settlement Mills” ([07:53]-[08:15])

• 96% of cases settle out of court. Firms optimize for volume and speed—Engstrom calls these “settlement mills” or “lawyer light” operations.
• Notable quote: "The mentality is, you know, in a wreck. Get a check." – Nora Engstrom ([07:53])

7. The Relentless Need for New Clients ([08:29]-[08:45])

• Because most people only hire a personal injury lawyer once, firms must constantly attract new clients, fueling vast ad spending.
• Notable quote: “It’s the wild, wild west out there.” – Jason Abraham ([08:45])

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Historical Deep Dive: From "Ambulance Chasers" to Ad Blitz ([11:36]-[13:18])

• Early 20th Century Bans: The American Bar Association and states banned legal advertising, concerned that lawyers would “act like commercial actors.”
• The ban led to direct "ambulance chasing": hospital walkarounds and curbside client recruitment ([12:31]).
• Landmark Supreme Court Case: In 1977, Bates v. State Bar of Arizona legalized attorney advertising, opening the modern era of billboard and TV ads ([13:03]).
• Notable quote: “If the advertising rules didn’t change to allow lawyers to advertise... we’d never have offices throughout the Midwest. We’d never be this big.” – Jason Abraham ([13:27])

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Inside the Modern PI Law Firm: Marketing as Mission ([13:40]-[15:12])

• Large firms build in-house studios and marketing teams to respond instantly to market opportunities and news events ([13:51]).
• Seven-figure marketing budgets are now the norm; the largest PI firm, Morgan & Morgan, spent $200 million on ads in a single year ([14:24]).
• Massive ad spending makes the market hard to penetrate for newcomers ([14:45]).
• Use of celebrity spokespeople builds prestige and signals success.
• Notable quote: “You start peppering the airwaves with TV… It gives the message they must really be successful.” – Jason Abraham ([15:12])

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Commercials: Wild West Creativity & the Creation of Legal Folk Heroes ([15:37]-[17:02])

• Lawyer ads become memorable for their over-the-top style and assertive branding (“The Hammer,” “Tarzan the Lawman”).
• Notable quote: “Bring it on. I’m Jim Adler. The Texas Hammer.” ([16:14])
• Surveys show that clients want confidence and aggression in their lawyers, not friendliness, explaining the style of most ads ([15:37]).

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The Legal Advertising Industry ([16:33]-[18:18])

• Agencies like Practice Made Perfect (PMP) specialize exclusively in PI lawyer ads, often charging up to $6 million/year per client.
• Strategic ad placement (e.g., near workplaces prone to injuries) increases efficiency ([17:43]).
• Billboards must be simple, clear, and bold—viewed for no more than seven seconds ([17:57]).

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Digital Disruption: Google Keywords & Levelling the Playing Field ([18:18]-[18:51])

• Digital ad spend has exploded; personal injury law has the most expensive search keywords, some up to $226 per click.
• Increased advertising has democratized legal access, shrinking the “secret handshake” advantage of the wealthy ([18:51]).
• Notable quote: “We now see… less of a gap between the haves and the have nots when it comes to the initiation of claims.” – Nora Engstrom ([18:51])

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Public Image and Internal Critique ([19:27]-[20:20])

• Despite success and client service, 85% of the public think PI law ads hurt the profession’s image ([19:27]).
• Many lawyers internally critique the field’s ad-driven image, saying it “tarnished the dignity of the profession.” ([19:40])
• Notable quote: “I think that’s in some ways competitive jealousy, because they understand that the personal injury lawyers have the ability to be very successful, which means make a lot of money.” – Jason Abraham ([19:54])

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Memorable Moments & Final Thoughts

• Abraham acknowledges the “ambulance chaser” stereotype with humor and self-awareness.
  • “If someone has an accident, we’re the ones they’re calling.” ([20:45])
  • “Just because I have a professional Juris Doctor degree, that doesn’t make me put my pants on any differently than someone else.” ([21:04])

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Key Timestamps

• 00:01–01:41 – Opening; William Shatner legal ad; landscape of PI lawyer advertising
• 02:14 – Jason Abraham on the importance of marketing
• 03:18–05:30 – How injuries and settlements are valued
• 05:30–07:18 – Contingency fees, risks, selectivity in picking clients
• 07:53–08:29 – Rise of settlement mills and their business model
• 11:36–13:18 – History: How legal advertising bans were overturned
• 13:40–15:12 – The marketing arms race among PI firms
• 16:14–17:19 – OTT ads; Law Hawk, Texas Hammer
• 16:33–18:18 – Advertising agencies for PI lawyers; importance of location and design
• 18:51–19:27 – How advertising changed access for low-income clients
• 19:27–20:45 – Ongoing negative perceptions and intra-legal jealousy

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Notable Quotes

• “If you're going to be successful… in today's market… it really is a marketing circus…” – Jason Abraham ([02:14])
• “Good lawyers are very selective. Investing your time and your money in a case that is a bogus case is a really bad financial idea.” – Nora Engstrom ([07:06])
• “If the advertising rules didn’t change... we’d never be this big.” – Jason Abraham ([13:27])
• “If someone has an accident, we’re the ones they’re calling.” – Jason Abraham ([20:45])
• “We now see… less of a gap between the haves and the have nots when it comes to the initiation of claims.” – Nora Engstrom ([18:51])

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a comprehensive understanding of the economics and spectacle of personal injury law in the U.S.

Transcript

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[Jason Abraham]

Ready?

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Set. Ford.

[Personal Injury Lawyer Commercial Spokesperson]

The accident came without warning. Now you're injured. What you do next could cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's William Shatner, one of television's most recognizable actors. He was Captain Kirk in Star Trek. He's won two Emmy awards. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But in this commercial, he's playing a different role. Spokesman for a personal injury law firm.

[Personal Injury Lawyer Commercial Spokesperson]

Don't risk your family's future.

[Zachary Crockett]

You want more.

[Personal Injury Lawyer Commercial Spokesperson]

All the money you deserve. Get it done. Call free right now and tell the insurance company you mean business.

[Zachary Crockett]

In many cities, ads for personal injury lawyers have become a part of the landscape. Attorneys deliver cheesy one liners in daytime TV spots. Their faces loom over us on billboards and bus stops. They hold up wads of cash and give themselves nicknames like the Hammer and Tarzan the Lawman. These ads might be funny or annoying, but in the personal injury business, they've become a necessity.

[Jason Abraham]

If you're going to be successful as a personal injury lawyer on a big time scale in today's market. And it really is a marketing circus, we have a seven figure budget for sure.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics radio network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, personal injury lawyers. You'd be hard pressed to find a more lawyer y lawyer than Jason Abraham.

[Jason Abraham]

My grandfather and father were both lawyers and I said from a very young age that I wanted to be a lawyer. And I really didn't know what that meant. But I followed that dream.

[Zachary Crockett]

Today, Abraham is the managing partner of Hughpie and Abraham, the largest personal injury law firm in the Midwest. He oversees 11 offices across Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois. And over the past 30 years, he and his team have recovered more than a billion dollars in settlements for 70,000 clients. He's the guy people call when they have a slip and fall, a car accident, or a medical malpractice incident.

[Jason Abraham]

You see all the gamut of stuff, whether it be, you know, the injuries aren't all that serious, or someone dies or loses a leg. It just turns people's life upside down when they have an accident that isn't their fault. I can tell you this, you're not in good hands like the insurance companies want you to think when something happens, because their job is to pay you as little as possible.

[Zachary Crockett]

Americans file around 400,000 personal injury claims a year, and there are 50,000 firms vying for that business. Across the industry, verdicts and settlements from these claims amount to $53 billion in revenue. Most of that money is paid out by insurance companies.

[Jason Abraham]

There used to be this common perception that the value of your personal injury case is three times your medical bills.

[Zachary Crockett]

But it's actually a little more secret and a lot more complicated than that. Many insurance companies use a program called Colossus. It contains around 600 codes for different injuries, each with an accompanying monetary value. The program adjusts that value according to a bunch of factors. Any lost wages, who the claimant's attorney is, how frequently that attorney goes to trial, and then it spits out a number.

[Jason Abraham]

I don't know what they have on their end and their computers and values. But generally every case is different because every length of treatment is gonna be different. The medical bills are gonna be different. Your wage loss will be different. For some people that use their hands for work, a wrist injury is gonna be worth more than for someone that isn't working at all.

[Zachary Crockett]

Another factor is what's known as pain and suffering. That's compensation for any emotional hardship a wrongfully injured person might go through. And they. And it tends to be the most nebulous part of any settlement.

[Jason Abraham]

What they're going to look at is the nature and differences of your injuries. Did you damage five different things in the accident or just one? How long of a period of time did you go to the doctor, Is it going to be permanent? And then generally how it impacted your life as you were going through treatment.

[Zachary Crockett]

Settlements can range from a few thousand bucks for a soft tissue injury to hundreds of millions of dollars for wrongful death suits. One study found that the average across all personal injury claims is around $31,000. Clients can represent themselves, but those who retain counsel receive significantly more money. On average. That's in part because personal injury lawyers have a strong incentive to win. They're usually paid on contingency. The client doesn't pay a retainer up front. The lawyer only makes money if they win a judgment or settlement. At that point, they might make 33 to 40% of the payout. It's a good model for people who don't have the resources to pay for representation out of pocket. And it can also be very lucrative for the lawyers.

[Jason Abraham]

If you do it well, there's the reward at the end of the day of sizable compensation. But if I'm an hourly billing lawyer, whatever my rate is, that's the most I can possibly earn.

[Zachary Crockett]

But a contingency arrangement also means that when a case flops, Abraham has to eat the cost.

[Jason Abraham]

I would say maybe 5 to 10% of your cases get dropped for one thing or another. And it could be no insurance. Could be bad facts, could be client disappears. That's just the cost of doing business.

[Zachary Crockett]

There's a stigma that personal injury law is clogged with frivolous lawsuits filed by naive clients. But the contingency model disincentivizes lawyers from picking up cases they can't win.

[Nora Engstrom]

Good lawyers are very selective. Investing your time and your money in a case that is a bogus case is a really bad financial idea.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Nora Engstrom. She's a professor at Stanford Law School who has written extensively about personal injury law. She says that the costs lawyers assume for a client, filing fees, expert witnesses, transcription, travel costs, they can add up fast if a case goes to trial.

[Nora Engstrom]

In a big case, it's not unusual to have six figures worth of costs and expenses of litigation.

[Zachary Crockett]

But in today's landscape, personal injury trials are rare. 96% of all claims are settled out of court.

[Nora Engstrom]

The mentality is, you know, in a wreck. Get a check.

[Zachary Crockett]

Engstrom calls these firms settlement mills.

[Nora Engstrom]

I think of settlement mills as something like a lawyer light. You know, it's kind of like a lawyer, not entirely. And it's just fast, simple, efficient resolution of claims.

[Zachary Crockett]

By nature, many personal injury firms are high volume, quick turnover businesses. They need new claims to keep the lights on. And that model requires an unrelenting stream of advertising.

[Nora Engstrom]

Most people are tortiously injured once, if at all. It's a one off client situation. And for personal injury lawyers, that means you've got to repeatedly attract new clients in the door.

[Jason Abraham]

Everyone's bombarding potential clients with TV commercials, radio commercials, billboards, SEO advertising. It's the wild, wild west out there

[Zachary Crockett]

that's coming up

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[Zachary Crockett]

There was a time not long ago when lawyers were not allowed to advertise their services. In 1908, the American Bar association deemed ads to be unethical, and many states banned advertising altogether.

[Nora Engstrom]

It Was thought that if lawyers advertised, they wouldn't be professionals. They would act like commercial actors. There actually are reported cases, for example, lawyers getting in trouble for handing out matchbooks with their law firm names on it, Law firms handing out calendars, or even having bold faced names in the yellow pages. All of these things were problematic, according to the bar, because they ran afoul of this very strict advertising prohibition.

[Zachary Crockett]

Personal injury lawyers had to rely on more direct customer outreach.

[Nora Engstrom]

What they did was a lot of ambulance chasing, which is to say, walk the halls of the hospital or look for car wrecks in the breakdown lane.

[Zachary Crockett]

The ban on advertising stayed in place for 69 years. But in 1977, everything changed. Two Arizona lawyers were struggling to find clients. They illegally took out an ad. They were sanctioned by the bar, and they decided to fight the case in court.

[Nora Engstrom]

They challenged it all the way to the U.S. supreme Court. And the Supreme Court in this 1977 groundbreaking opinion, struck down the bar's long standing prohibition on legal advertising.

[Zachary Crockett]

Bates vs. State Bar of Arizona opened the floodgates, especially for personal injury attorneys like Jason Abraham.

[Jason Abraham]

If the advertising rules didn't change to allow lawyers to advertise on tv, radio, newspaper and all the other mediums, we'd never have offices throughout the Midwest. We'd never be this big.

[Zachary Crockett]

At a large firm like Hughpie and Abraham, advertising is almost as important as the council itself. Abraham has his own 7 person in house marketing team.

[Jason Abraham]

I'm sitting in my studio right now. I see a teleprompter, I see all our TV equipment. I'm on my podcast equipment. We have green screen, black screen, white screen. Because, you know, we want to be prepared if there's a mass accident here that would require me to film a commercial in 10 minutes. You'll see us on billboards, you'll see us inside the Milwaukee brewers ballpark. Sometimes you'll see us on big trucks. You'll see us at events all around the Midwest for motorcyclists.

[Zachary Crockett]

Abraham's firm spends well into the seven figures on advertising each year. Last year, the largest personal injury firm in the nation, Morgan and Morgan, spent more than $200 million on ads. This kind of spending has made it very hard for new personal injury firms to break into the business.

[Jason Abraham]

If you're a brand new player and you want to get in, you're almost going to have to spend three or four times what we're all spending right now to really make a name for yourself. If you're in, you're in. And if you're not in, the cost of admission is just so high.

[Zachary Crockett]

After all, it's not just any firm that can afford to hire William Shatner as their spokesman. The ad you heard at the beginning of this episode, that's a Hupie and Abraham classic.

[Jason Abraham]

You start peppering the airwaves with tv. Well, you have William Shatner and it gives the message they must really be successful if they can afford to have William Shatner be on their commercials.

[Zachary Crockett]

One thing that has to be in every commercial, the firm's catchphrase.

[Personal Injury Lawyer Commercial Spokesperson]

Tell them you mean business. Tell the insurance company you mean business.

[Jason Abraham]

Call Hughpie and Abraham.

[Personal Injury Lawyer Commercial Spokesperson]

Tell them you mean business.

[Zachary Crockett]

By personal injury law standards, Abraham plays it pretty safe with his ads. That can't be said for others in the industry. Brian Wilson the Texas Law Hawk Challenge of Justice Due process Due Wheelies Surveys in the legal field have shown that potential clients want their lawyers to be confident and aggressive. They don't care much for friendliness. And that's probably why the same motifs show up in ads from so many personal injury lawyers. Greedy insurance companies play dirty.

[Jim Adler]

Bring it on.

[Zachary Crockett]

I'm Jim Adler.

[Jim Adler]

The Texas Hammer in the land of Kentucky. Darrell Isaacs.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Hammer makes the fight for justice.

[Jason Abraham]

Lowell the hammer Stanley 459 cash 459

[Zachary Crockett]

cash T so who makes all these ads for lawyers anyway?

[Kyle Hebenstreet]

Kyle Hebenstreet. I'm the chief executive officer of pmp.

[Zachary Crockett]

PMP is short for Practice Made Perfect. They're one of a handful of advertising firms working exclusively with personal injury lawyers.

[Kyle Hebenstreet]

There's probably about five to seven agencies in the United States who do what we do and have been doing it for a long time.

[Zachary Crockett]

PMP works with around 30 firms with client budgets ranging from $120,000 to $6 million a year. Hebenstreet is the first to admit that conversion metrics for advertising can be a little loosey goosey. But going by what can be measured, the investment in marketing is worth it. For most firms.

[Kyle Hebenstreet]

We typically focus on what the average cost per case would look like for our clients.

[Zachary Crockett]

Heaven street says attracting a $15,000 case would usually cost around $1,000 to $3,000. It's a good investment. Part of the company's strategy is placing ads in areas where workers might have higher on the job injury rates.

[Kyle Hebenstreet]

A billboard by a shipyard, for instance, would be a strategy that we would employ to expand the messaging to that potential target audience.

[Zachary Crockett]

A good lawyer billboard needs to be big, bold and simple.

[Kyle Hebenstreet]

We find that people specifically with respect to billboards have about two to seven seconds to actually see the imagery and read the copy. It's like firm name, logo and an image. Typically you're going to want a picture of one of the attorneys in a suit and tie and then, you know, some sort of copy that speaks to accident or injury.

[Zachary Crockett]

Legal advertising firms are also increasingly focused on digital ads. One study found that between 2014 and 2018, the 10 most expensive Google search keywords were all related to personal injury law. Law firms paid as much as $226 per click, over 100 times more than the average keyword. Nora Engstrom says that all of these ads have democratized access to legal counsel.

[Nora Engstrom]

There was a time when your likelihood of going to a lawyer depended a lot on your wealth and personal circumstance. And rich folks were more likely to go to a lawyer even for personal injuries than poor folks. Rich people knew the secret handshake to to find a lawyer and to initiate a lawsuit. We now see, I think, less of a gap between the haves and the have nots when it comes to the initiation of claims.

[Zachary Crockett]

But that doesn't mean everyone loves all those ads. In a Florida bar association survey, 85% of respondents said they thought ads harmed the public perception of lawyers.

[Nora Engstrom]

Lawyers tend to think be really down on attorney advertising and say that this has eroded the profession. It's tarnished the dignity of the profession.

[Zachary Crockett]

Jason Abraham chalks this up to envy.

[Jason Abraham]

I think that's in some ways competitive jealousy because they understand that the personal injury lawyers have the ability to be very successful, which means make a lot of money.

[Zachary Crockett]

He understands the reputational risks he's taking when when he runs a silly ad on tv. But like most lawyers, he doesn't need to be loved.

[Jason Abraham]

I don't have any problems with people making fun of what I do or calling me an ambulance chaser. And if it makes somebody laugh and it can be sensationalized at the end of the day, that's fine with me. But I'll tell you this. If someone has an accident, were the ones they're calling.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Economics of Everyday Things I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Julie Kanfer and Daniel Moritz Rabson.

[Jason Abraham]

Just because I have a professional Juris Doctor degree, that doesn't make me put my pants on any differently than someone else.

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