Funny Personal Injury Ads: Do They Work?

I was recently reading about a firm from New York that was focusing on the use of funny ads to promote their work. Basically, the idea is to get across that they only take real cases. Steve Lombardi recently spent some time looking at the tactic of strength or toughness to get that message across with :

These Lawyer Ads Do Not Represent Our Profession, December 17, 2009

As I pointed out, sometimes those tough commercials may be of questionable accuracy.

I go back and forth on how I feel about these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Eck-dlk0n4&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoDNdTXx-7U&feature=player_embedded

The message is don’t call us unless you are hurt. Personally, I talk to people all the time with all sorts of injuries. They will have broken bones, loss of fingers, and servere spine issues and still ask if they are hurt bad enough to be talking about a claim.

In Minnesota, you need to meet a threshold in order to bring a pain and suffering claim in car collisions. Insurance companies save a lot of money by, in my opinion, practicing law and telling people they aren’t hurt enough.

Now, to be clear, I don’t see a case in either of the two commercials. I would believe that no rational person would. Instead, tort reformers will pretend like this is what the ordinary case is. So I don’t like the myth that these commercials promote.

We go to trial with cases because we have a good faith belief that the client should recover. Not to waste the jury or the court’s time. It really doesn’t help if the jury has been polluted by the belief that they can’t be trusted.