Are personal injury lawyers frauds and scammers?

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If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid uplifting and moving on air chats. Open your free iHeartRadio app search, Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hota Kotby is presented by CVS. A few weeks ago, we received a voicemail from a listener. Hello. I have a question that I would love to hear y'all tackle on the pod. What is going on at personal injury law firm? Like it's giving scam, it's giving not a, you know, trustworthy business model that I don't quite understand what the business model is and how they're making money and have so much money for so many billboards. So yeah, I'm just curious about how they make so much money, how they're scamming or if they're scamming. Because I'm pretty sure they're crying on poor people, but I don't exactly know how it works. And I'm curious. All right, thanks guys. Thanks for making your style. I really enjoy it. So the short question is what's going on with personal injury law firms or the scams? Why do they advertise so much? How? How do they make all this money? We're here in New York. You guys see these ads? Yeah, some of the New York ones are really specific. It's like someone's home that was like, did you get beat up by like a homeless guy? It's like, what do you get so granular with the thing that the question that they're asking? I always find that fascinating. It's your name, John, or you punched in the face on the subway last Tuesday. I always like in New Jersey, there's, it's black and then it has white text, like kind of drawn like chalk style text. It says, I got heard in jersey.com. I've always liked that. I've never gone to that website, but I'm like, that's powerful ad. Yeah. It's stuck in your head. If I didn't have it to me, I haven't been hurt there yet. But I know where I'm going. I'm also wondered, yeah, about how the money works because the most famous like personal injury lawyer in Ohio will always say at the end of the Zad, I don't get paid until you get paid. Yeah. So like, they won't charge you unless they win a case, I guess. But I don't know how true that actually is. Yeah, that's, I watch, you know, a lot of local sports. So that's where I see the most during a like a meds game. My God, every commercial break is like two to three of those. If you're tired of your attorney ducking and dodging you, let the bull take a fresh look at your case. I'm just a born fighter and I love to win. I'll get you the award you deserve. Your fight is his fight. And remember, if you mess with a bull, you get the hoards. I despise bullies, insurance companies, manufacturers of unsafe products and drugs, corporate crooks and business owners who try to be good people out of money out. It makes my blood boil. So do you know who I am? I'm the bullies bully. Call me if you need me. I'm John Morgan, the people's lawyer. But yeah, I see them all the time. It does, to Manning's point, feel a little bit like a scam to our listeners, you know, question it does feel a little bit like they're shaking advantage of people who are in circumstances where they can't pay for a lawyer out of pocket. Yeah. Right. So it seems like whatever they win, it's like in my mind, here's how it works. These people will come in and they say, hey, we're not going to charge you up for that. If they think your case is a little genuine, they'll take you on, but then they'll take a larger percentage of your case, then if you were just paying a lawyer out of pocket. Oh. You know, so like if you're paying a lawyer out of pocket, you're maybe you're paying hourly or whatever it may be. And whatever final cost that is will be less than Barnes is saying, hey, we're going to take 30% of your actual winnings in you and a million dollars. Yeah. That's probably more than you'd have to pay them out of pocket just for hourly. Which is my guess. Yeah. Which is, it seems unfair and I think it is, but also if you are like, if you have no money, that's the obvious only route because you can't really get better than nothing. You represent yourself or you don't see it at all. Yeah. There's the big pop culture example of this of a better call Saul. And I don't like the show doesn't really tackle this industry at large, but does show you a lot of the ways like small time lawyers do kind of get one over on their clients. Yeah, cut corners. Yeah. So I'm interested to see what we learned today. There's also a lot of allegations about fraud here, fraud in terms of, you know, auto insurance fraud. Oh, yeah. And idea that, you know, people are kind of playing up accidents to then get higher settlements. And it's basically insurance payout so then that makes everyone's insurance higher. Yeah. But that the lawyer is helping you do this? Yeah. So the victim in this case isn't you the, you know, plaintiff. Yeah. Society. Yeah. It's it's, I mean, it's insurance companies and then, but then because the rates would go up, yeah, it's society. Well, I can tell you because my, I have a car in New York and the insurance is crazy astronomical. I have seen, you know, not a dash cams are becoming more of a thing. Yeah. I have seen people do that like in my mind, like someone get, you know, on a highway break, checking someone to get into an accident. I'm like, that's ridiculous. People aren't really doing that. Mm-hmm. I don't know. It's just because I watch these videos, but I've been fed a couple videos on like roads that I drive. Yeah. A lot where people are intentionally slamming on their brakes, getting hit. Yeah. And then coming out and pretending, oh, I heard my back. Yeah. That's fun. So my leg. My leg. So it does seem like there is something going on there. I at first would think, yeah, sure, if you get an accident, you, you, you, you know, no, that's not sure I get a little checked out. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I think about if I'm at a sports game and an athlete throws something in the stands and it hits me. That's why I dream come true. I'm going out with an ambulance, you know, like, you know, I dream come true. Yeah. There's this old basketball clip of, I don't know, some guy got mad and threw a ball into the stands. And then the guy, they literally pulled the guy out who got hit with the ball on a structure. Hey, these guys are strong. He's ready to get, I was like, this, that would be me. Yeah. I give it to Liberty hits me, you know, like, oh, yeah. I'm dead. Yeah. Basically, I'm dead. Yeah. You gotta bring me back to life. That's how much money I need. Yeah. I imagine this, like, when the personal injury lawyer gets involved, it's more of an embellishing the foul versus flopping. If that makes sense, if I have to make it sports, you're not making it totally out of nothing. You're really an embellishing. It was a legitimate action. Yeah. And then the lawyer is now being like, well, do you have any aches in your body at all? Yeah. Yeah, back pain that you had two months ago, we're actually going to tie it now to this car accident. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Versus that video, the video that you saw, which I think I've seen too, is more like V, that's the scam that's happening from the, you know, driver level. Yes. We're going to hear from you. a few people this week. One, a reporter here in New York City who covered a interesting beef going on between so-called Billboard lawyers and the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Two, a legal scholar to give us the history of personal injury law and get into what she calls settlement mills. And three, a very famous personal injury lawyer, you might recognize from a few Billboard yourself. What? All that after the break. 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Our podcast is called Hey Jonas. We've here since everyone has a podcast we wanted to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going boys? Hey Nile. It's the same thing with slow hands. Slow hands is not about anything else really is it? Yeah, you know, our tastes so good. Yeah. About food. You do the same Nick, but some of the stuff that you've done. You too, Joe. [laughs] Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. [music] So as I set out on researching this episode, a local story came across my desk. So I caught up the writer to hear more about it. Hi, I am Jose Martinez. I'm a reporter with the city reporter dot NYC. Why don't you just lay out the story here between MTA versus, you know, so-called billboard lawyers. Give us the brief rundown. This stems from the state of New York's efforts to make some reforms to auto insurance, to lower cost. And that is an outgrowth of what the MTA says is injury lawyers constantly targeting the transportation authority. Anytime its buses are anywhere near, or sometimes not even near, the site of a crash. There are all types of claims. If you look at the numbers, the MTA last year got hit with $561 million in claims. That's what it paid in 2025. And that was an increase from one year earlier when it paid $454 million. So that extends across the system, whether you're talking about the subways or collisions involving its buses. You don't need to be getting crushed by huge car insurance payments to want the reforms that the governor has set out. You don't even need to own a car. You just need to be frustrated like I am. That money that we should be spending on great service is going for payoffs to well-connected billboard lawyers instead. Guys who seem to think that the MTA is actually spelled ATM. So the interesting thing is though, as anyone who's ridden the subway would notice, there are tons of advertisements for these firms on the subways and buses. Exactly. The bus that's quite a quote, "advertising." Exactly. Also, I have the average in an Orboros sort of thing. So while they're going after them legally, the MTA also partially relies on ad revenue from those same firms. Emphiting. Emphiting. When Jan O'Leab or the head of the MTA said billboard lawyers, I said, "Ah, now there's four of you because I ride the train every day and you'll be in a single car and it seems like the entire car is coded in advertising for these lawyers who are at the same time while spending a lot of money also going hard after the MTA." Can you lay out how much money the MTA brings in from advertising? Yeah, the MTA brings in about $183 million. That was last year in advertising. That's according to the Office of the State Controller, which does not break it down to the level. So I can't get a figure on just how much the law firm of Morgan and Morgan spent in the subway system, but I can tell you it's not a small amount. What do you think might happen as far as the process of these reforms? Is there any likelihood of getting any traction on that from the MTA side or what do you think? It's something that the governor has been pushing. So we'll see where that ends up, but the MTA is as an institution that is looking to save money, has gotten on board with this, others have supported the governor's push. So it's in their interest to do this, but the lawyers, they're going to spend money. I want to read you one fact here from Morgan and Morgan. There was a report a few years back that said, Morgan and Morgan spent more than $218 million on ads in 2024. And that was outspending its closest competitor by more than a 4-to-1 ratio. And the founder of Morgan and Morgan, who I spoke to, was all too happy to tell me about how he views advertising as a part of a meal in that this is the guy who you see, his face superimposed on the statue of Liberty. You will see him flying on a pigeon high above the Empire State Building, and you'll see that on subway cars, you'll see it on the walls of subway stations. They are not shy about spending a lot of money to then file claims, which the MTA will sometimes call frivolous money grabs. The statement they actually gave me described these lawyers as ambulance chasers. So it's a battle between two sides, but they do kind of need each other. Yes, advertising revenue. It's like Batman in the Joker. It's kind of beautiful. You know, or like it's like heat. But I thought that was a pretty interesting story about this kind of toxic relationship. Yeah. Up next we'll learn about the history of personal injury law, especially why they advertise so heavily and so much more than other lawyers, where you don't see as much. For this, I went to my friends at Stanford. My name is Nora Freeman-Anxstrom. I'm a professor at Stanford Law School, and I research how the tort system works in practice. Here's a bit of background on personal injury law as we know it, and why the US was so perfectly ripe for an explosion of these types of firms. We love this, who? So personal injury law has been around for a very long time. Certainly, there was some personal injury law before the United States became the United States. And in the United States, we are different, though, and that we actually do a lot of our regulation through personal injury law and through tort law. So other well-developed countries have a much bigger bureaucracy. They do much more front-end regulation when it comes to health and safety. In the United States, we do things a little differently. We don't like big bureaucracies. And so we do a lot of our regulation actually through back-end tort law. So we have a more developed tort system than other countries. And again, it's not because there's more regulation in general. Actually, I think there's probably my own views. There's probably less, but we just allocate more of our regulation through civil litigation than through top-down regulation. So personal injury law is a branch of tort law. Tort? So here's a quick aside of what tort means. It's one of those terms I'd heard all the time, but I was like, "Okay, seems like we should. We should. That's a word there." But yeah, now, you'll know what it is. So tort is a word. It comes from the Latin word for twisted. And so when we think about tort law, what we're thinking is kind of twisted situations. And so the law's aim is to untwist those situations. Law has certain limitations. And one of those things is we can't. If your arm is amputated, we can't bring your arm back or if your child is killed, we can't bring your kid back. But what we do is this kind of bizarre, not entirely satisfactory translation of injury to money damages. And it's thought that through that translation, good things happen, compensation for injuries and also deterrence to trying to get folks to let say drive more carefully going forward. I guess as far as why America is set up so differently than other systems, to de-stem from just like a personal freedom angle. And then we're kind of reverse-engineering laws. Yeah, it is thought that there's kind of this rugged individualism streak. And tort law is the most kind of individualistic of laws, right? So criminal law, you can really want someone to be prosecuted. And you can't make that happen unless you're in the prosecutor's office. The government decides who to prosecute. A private individual, even if they've been terribly wronged, can't get that machinery in motion. Tortilla empowers each one of us essentially to become private attorneys general and to vindicate our own interests. So there is this like deep individualist streak to tort law. It's also kind of distinctly egalitarian. Think about the BP oil spill, the deep water horizon accident. Federal judge granted final approval Monday to an estimated $20 billion settlement in the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The settlement is the largest with a single entity in justice department history and will be paid out over a 16 year period. A Shrinberg can hold the CEO of BP accountable for that oil spill and actually cause the CEO to be deposed and perhaps to testify in a trial. So some folks think about the tort system as this distinctive eye to eye justice where you can force through the law someone to answer for what they've done to you directly and so it empowers individuals in a kind of distinctly American way. I think of so many of these sorts of cases just like very small stakes like oh like that doors hit hit me in the shoulder. Let me see if I can get a few hundred bucks out of you. Yeah. But you know there are examples where okay you might be a individual person suing a giant massive corporation. And now are you gonna get anywhere with that? I don't know but it seems like something that should be on the table. Yeah we're like the the consequence of that pursuit. However trivial it may seem could help people afterwards. They might have a slower revolving door after that case. To make sure that like more people don't get hurt by the by the door. I guess the whole point is to or whatever it's like yeah in a U.S. The only way that people are held accountable through lawsuits. Yeah. Yeah. Professor angstrom also noted that lawyers don't need to specialize to practice certain types of law the way doctors do. Once you're licensed by the bar it's an all-purpose license. Yeah. All to say that makes it hard to know precisely how many personal injury lawyers in firms that are because you could you can switch around because I think when you pass the bar it's you learn about all kinds of law and then you specialize then you just go up to your heart. Well it's funny I feel like I've been in situations where I have like lawyer friends and I'm like you look at this thing and I'm like yeah I can look at it but you should really talk to you know whatever I'm like could represent me. Yeah. You could. I know yeah I think about that all the time. You could do it. I'm sure it's like on you're just a good person and you're like actually I don't actually know that much about your specific thing. Yeah talking to someone else. Yeah. All right so now we're going to get to our main question. Are personal injury firms a scam? Professor Ainshroom has called out what she refers to as settlement mills. So some personal injury firms are what I call settlement mills and these are some of the firms that are the big billboard firms that maybe you're driving as you're listening to this podcast and you might be seeing a billboard right now for a lawyer and that lawyer may or may not be a settlement mill. So the settlement mill business model is a distinctive kind of model where there's some lawyers that really specialize in auto accident claims and these lawyers you know one lawyer explained it to me that their mentality is in some ways a stack them deep and settle them cheap mentality which is they're going to have a big volume of claims. They're going to prioritize getting compensation quickly with little fuss, little process and you know maybe they're not getting absolute top dollar but they're getting something whereas without any lawyer it could be that the insurance company would deny the claim or delay payment on the claim. So settlement mills are providing a service. It's not a service without controversy. It's actually quite a controversial service but I keep using the word some because I think it's important to note that some advertisers, even very heavy advertisers don't have that model and actually have much more of a kind of a bespoke model where they are actually investigating claims and engaging in litigation the way you would kind of see on TV. So just because a law firm advertises doesn't mean you should drop any conclusion about what kind of practice is going on at the law firm. The short answer is yes some yeah are kind of scammy or just you know or that they're quick strategy. Quick solution yeah but not all of them even if they're advertising heavily. Which is more in line with the better call saw kind of thing where it's like okay if you take if you got a personal injury lawyer and you sit down across the table with your client across the table from the MTA you can just be like look $500 like yeah. Just get us out of here. Rather go through all this litigation see you in court or cut a little check. We can settle this really easily and so that makes sense actually that it's yeah a really quick and easy strategy for them. Yeah and then yeah so not all personal injury law firms are settlement mills the more scammy type and here's how you can help distinguish for yourself between the two. The big distinction in my mind is whether a firm is set up to provide traditional legal services which is to say you know is the firm set up to investigate the claim kind of or not? Is the firm set up that if the insurance company isn't offering a fair settlement that they really will take the case to trial some firms that I've studied have gone years and years without ever taking a case to trial. To me that's a sign that they're not really set up to try cases and they are again kind of having this volume mentality. Another kind of clue that a firm might be a settlement mills that they don't carefully screen cases. So traditional law firms are actually taking on significant risk when they agree to represent you because if if the representation doesn't end in money under the contingency fee they won't recover a dollar and so recognizing that there's this significant risk traditional law firms actually vet cases and that clients pretty carefully because they're going to be essentially coventures with the client and investing in the client and a firm that is not really investing isn't really going to be investigating doesn't have to screen. So that's another kind of clue that the firm might have more of a settlement mill business model as opposed to a traditional business model. Yeah and the settlement mill version of this law firm you could see how from the client perspective it feels so much more transactional whereas let's say you actually did get injured and you really want someone to care about what happened to you you want that your representation to have compassion and try and get the best deal possible that's probably not going to happen at a settlement mill. Yeah this typical business model is the contingency fee which we fear doesn't mean everyone has skin in the game meaning they're getting money from the settlement so they need they need to get money or else no one has money. So here's a little bit more on that because I wasn't sure exactly if it was as clear as it as simple as it seemed. Another reason actually why the United States has such a robust sort system is we allow and have always allowed the contingency fee that's not like other countries other countries actually now or some countries are starting to permit contingency fees but it's really been a deeply embedded part of America's legal system since the beginning. So how does it work the lawyer is going to charge a portion of the ultimate winnings on the case and that means if there's no recovery the lawyer gets nothing so the lawyer really is kind of you know this makes it seem a little cross but is taking a bet on you and is in it with you. It's this really nice actually relationship in a way because you can rest assured they're going to work hard on your behalf because you know if they don't get cop dollar they're going to not see much money either if they lose the case they're going to get nothing at all. Also typically embedded within the contingency fee is that the lawyers get upfront the cost and expenses of litigation and that's a big deal because cost and expenses of litigation this is separate from the attorneys fees this is things like court costs, the no-gur for costs if there's going to be depositions, videographer costs if there's going to be video depositions, travel if there's travel, the costs to download documents and store documents if it's a big document intensive case that stuff can add up. It can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars even or sometimes millions of dollars in big cases lawyers also embedded within the contingency fee tend to cover those costs and so if some ways when you're hiring a contingency fee lawyer I think it's important to think that you're actually getting professional services that the lawyer is going to work for you for free. You're getting banking services that the lawyer is going to front all these cost and expenses on your behalf so you don't need a bank loan to do that and the lawyer is providing insurance services because if you lose your case you don't have to pay the lawyer back in most states in terms of the cost and expenses of litigation so it's kind of a three-for-one deal. So hearing that you can kind of start to imagine how it would then be who everyone to maybe inflate the money being asked for through these sorts of things if it's all about a percentage of the contingency fee. Yeah. Yeah. Or then it's like, okay, well, maybe we spent this much on this or, you know, it's like when you're doing your taxes and throwing some expenses in there, you know. Yeah. And I'll not be giving any examples. Yeah. I don't know what that could entail. I don't know what that would look like. I don't know what you're talking about. How common is it that someone is paying a lawyer or a lawyer is getting paid via a contingency fee versus an hourly rate in terms of personal interest? In these. Yeah. From what I understand, it seems like overwhelmingly contingency. Okay. Like them working on it. That's not a bad thing. No, no. Yeah. Because they have skin in a game. Yeah. So I'm going to say all that to retract an earlier statement I made earlier where I was thinking the contingency fee was more like a scammy sort of thing, right? We're just saying, okay, yet they're going to do the contingency fee because people don't have the money to pay out of pocket for these costs. Yeah. And it may be lower cost if you have the money up front. Yeah. But, you know, if they're getting paid on the back half, it's going to be even higher. It seems like you could go to a legitimate place and still be, you know, using the contingency fee. I guess to her point, like you just got to make sure that place is actually legitimate and not just going to settle quickly no matter what. Yeah. Because you get into these meals, right? If they don't want to spend a lot of money out of pocket, they're not going to want to go to trial. They're not going to want to do these things because I cost money. Yeah. I think that's more of the distinction on that side of things, not the, are they working on a contingency fee? Yeah. You know, it's like, are they willing to go the distance with this or are they going to take the first decent looking number? Did you argue that because they're working on a contingency fee, they are incentivized to wrap the case up as soon as possible. If they don't, if you're not going to get a big payout. Yeah. If you're going to get a big payout, then they'll hold on. Yeah, then why not? If you take it to court, if you're paying even 200, 300 K, because you could get $5 million versus settling for a million. So I guess if you're getting money's personal entry lawyers, the question you should ask is, tell me about your last five trials. Yeah, you should try to see how often they actually go through to litigation versus purely like, hey, we're going to be neutral. I might be going into the personal injury law firm being like, well, yeah, I didn't really go, but let's see what we can get out of this. So you're a bad guy. So you're a bad guy is what you're saying. I'm just saying the system allows for something like that. So I'm going to pay it more on my insurance because of you because it is for a while over here. Hey, man, I've been hurt before. I've never gone into one of these law firms, but I know I broke my wrist. Yeah, I'm thinking about what I'm going to do. You should call when he's guys up right now. I need to get my boy back on the. Yeah. So then the next part of the listener question was, why are there so many damn ads? Yeah. Great question. But there's an answer. The prime advertisers are personal injury lawyers. And that kind of makes sense that some areas of law, you don't really need to advertise because you're going to have a repeat clientele, right? Like if you represent Coca Cola, Coca Cola is going to be a good client to you. Your whole career, you don't need any other clients. Like you're good. You just keep them happy and you just keep working for them and you don't need to worry about business generation. Personal injury law is really different than that because very few people are unlucky enough to be repeatedly, torsiously injured. Like you have to be really unlucky to keep on suffering serious injuries at the hands of other people when those other people are behaving unreasonably. And so the vast vast vast majority of personal injury clients, a personal injury client only once. And so that means a personal injury lawyer needs to constantly find new clients. You need to constantly find new individuals that you can represent, particularly if you're going to be representing people on small claims where maybe every claim you're just going to earn $1,000. Well, you need a lot of clients that you're earning just $1,000 for to earn a living and to pay rent and your law office and to pay your support staff and things like that. So that kind of explains that personal injury lawyers have kind of more clients coming in the door. They need to have more clients coming in the door. And so they naturally gravitate towards advertising. But it turns out it hasn't always been the same as all these ads. Lawyer advertising was actually banned for a while. Last century. Did not know that. Don't worry. Nora will explain. If you really roll back the clock, attorney advertising was pretty common and it was not particularly controversial. So I always show my students when I teach this at Stanford, a slide that was Abraham Lincoln's advertisement as a lawyer. So he advertised that he was a lawyer with fidelity and trust. So Abe Lincoln, honest Abe, was an advertising lawyer. Then for a while, advertising was banned by the ABA and by the rules that govern the profession. So here's why he was banned for a time. Who was controlling the bar in the early years of the last century? Well, it tended to be rich folks and it tended to be the lawyers who were kind of the leaders in the profession. Again, these are wealthy folks. Who are the wealthy folks in the profession? They were the folks who represent the corporate interests. And so if I'm, let's say, a corporation and I've got my corporate lawyer on speed dial, one of the things I don't want is to be sued, right? You don't want to be sued. And so maybe what you do is you figure out what it is that those personal injury lawyers are doing. And at the time in the early years of the last century, the personal injury lawyers were seen as kind of on the fringes of the profession. They were recent immigrants. They weren't allowed into the big firms. They tended to be Jewish individuals. And there's some historical support for this idea that essentially the bar, which again, was very much in league with the corporate clients, figure out what it is that those folks who were keep suing us or doing, and let's make that illegal. And so at that time, they made it illegal to engage what was called solicitation, which is to go up to someone and say, hey, you know, looks like you're injured. You know, here's my card, made it illegal to advertise. Did a lot of other things to essentially think about what are the things you need to have this volume, you know, kind of business to represent individuals who've been heard in accidents? And let's make that illegal. And that is going to buy us a certain amount of protection. And the fact that all this was kind of bound up as well with ethnic and racial bias, I think fortified the move of, you know, while solicitation is bad, let's ban it. Advertising is bad. Let's ban it. But of course, those were the ways that folks at the time, you know, you know, regular folks were able to give representation. So you mentioned Better Call Saul. There's obviously long, long been this caricature of like a sleazy lawyer type. And in some ways, that can just be traced back to these corporate interests, trying to keep people out from practicing and keeping the public from finding representation. Yeah. So it was kind of shocking when I heard this. I was like, wow, yeah, there goes all the way back. Yeah. Fight for a little man. Yeah. I'm sure everybody listening to this house, this kind of sleazy, you know, all, but it certainly my students don't think of personal injury lawyers as what, you know, we think of public interest lawyers. Like public interest lawyers are the good guys, right? And personal injury lawyers are easily caricatured as like all those are the sleazy guys. And you think about it and it, and it, and it you just, I encourage everybody to kind of interrogate that conception because, you know, let's say I'm wrongfully deprived of overtime pay. If you vindicate my right to overtime pay, you're definitely public interest lawyer, right? I'm wrongfully deprived of asylum. If you vindicate my right to asylum, you're definitely public interest lawyer. I'm wrongfully accused of a crime. If you vindicate my liberty interests as my criminal defense lawyer, you're definitely public interest lawyer. I'm wrongfully deprived of my child because of corporations negligence. When you vindicate my kind of my claim in a wrongful death capacity, you're not a public interest lawyer. Like to me, that just it, it doesn't quite work. I start to wonder about again, this kind of motivation to paint individuals who are vindicating this interest as others, particularly since historically we know all of this was so bound up with racial and ethnic prejudice. And then there was a case in 1977 before the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court case dates versus State Bar of Arizona where lawyers who wanted to advertise challenge the ban on attorney advertising, they said that the restrictions on attorney advertising violated their First Amendment rights to speech and the Supreme Court sided with the lawyers. So the lawyers won in vates and not made it so that attorney advertising was permitted starting in 1977. So far, this already helped me look at personal injury lawyers in a much better light, but there are some bad actors as we've touched on before. As to the charges of fraud, here's what Professor Angstrom had to say. There is some Slees and corners of this just like their sleeves and just basically every other area So in the auto sphere we particularly worry About bogus claims when it comes again to very small claims I know I highlighted what's referred to as built claims This is the sort of thing that happens when a plaintiff is injured But instead of going to the chiropractor four times maybe they go say 20 times and the idea there is for every time you go to the chiropractor your damages are going up a little bit If we multiply ultimately the end of the day your economic loss By some number in order to get your total loss and then we kind of are building everything It's good because the lawyer is going to be taking roughly a third and so you know every time Let's say the chiropractor is a hundred dollars from the lawyer's perspective every time you go to the chiropractor And pay a hundred dollars. I get a third of that which is thirty three dollars and that's pretty great for me So we do worry about what's called medical buildup We see this particularly in soft tissue injury cases These are sprained strains Concussions and with flash and they don't show up on x-rays and so they can be really hard to verify So that's how you would do fraud Mm-hmm. This was the embellishment stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what you were talking about in earlier Manning when you're saying like hey, you know the the it starts with a legitimate claim and then you just milk it a little bit more Yeah, you know, they need to go to the chiropractor twice and you end up going 20 times. Yeah, let's make sure Yeah, let's make sure the kids know just to tie it back to sports the Embellishing of a foul is seen as a lot more noble and honorable than just flopping and creating the foul Yeah, you know if you're getting a personal injury lawyer you don't want SGA Yeah, exactly that explains more the more common, you know fraud as it were versus the more extreme ones where it's like I'm driving into the highway and stopping my car. Yeah, helping. There's an accident There was yeah, so I will say seems like, you know pretty normal in the sense that like every industry has their version of that You know when people build people for their invoices or whatever like Yeah, every industry has the kind of thing we stretch a little bit as we learn We call them dentistry So, you know, it doesn't seem like outright scamming is happening. Well, yeah, and in the case like in those cases again like it's not the plaintiff Right exactly. Yes They would stand to make more money. Mm-hmm. It's you know, it's an ethical dilemma no doubt, but you know, it's not like okay I'm someone who's injured and now I'm losing out necessarily. Yeah Basically, what I mean is I'm not losing sleep over the Existence of some embellishment happening at the personal injury law firms seems like it's mostly fine And till you have to ensure your car in New York City What car? Mm-hmm. Boom So I wondered the what are the fixes for this some people in corporations like Uber for example are pushing for a cap on contingency fees But professor angstrom doesn't think this works economically and would end up just hurting people who actually do need representation So that would mean yeah, there's a limit to how much you could possibly get Or like how much the lawyers can yeah, so then they're less incentivized to work necessarily. I see the full extent Yeah, if you went above that yeah So if you're yeah 10% they can only get 10% and I'm right how much you want you'd have to make you know a lot of money Yeah, so they really take less cases which yeah would Help fix the settlement firm thing, but would hurt people who need it. Yeah, exactly There no doubt are a lot of especially let's talk about just automobiles. There's obviously tons of accidents Yes, and it also makes it seem like in that case The lawyers would only take on bigger cases exactly Yeah, because you're not gonna if you're gonna be settling for 50,000 dollars then you know Doesn't really make sense for me to keep taking on if you're capping it at 10% or yeah, you don't want to focus on a few big cases Yeah, the other way you know they're getting a few thousand dollars for each one instead of like okay Yeah, yeah, so then meanwhile we're to people who don't need to hire on a contingency would be fine. Yeah, it would affect them at all Yeah, they're just like I'm good. Let's let's do this. Yeah, so here's her idea for what could work One of the reasons why you're asking me these questions about you know What are these lawyers like and what are those lawyers like? Is there snow wear for a consumer of legal services to find this stuff out? You know is this billboard lawyer a quality advertiser there are definitely quality billboard lawyers out there Some billboard lawyers are not providing high quality legal services. How are you supposed to know? I send my kids to a public school. I can look and see what the test scores are and other metrics of quality If I'm going out to eat I can look and see is this restaurant recently been cited for health safety violations How come when I need a lawyer? There is no information. I mean none I'm here It's stand for law school and I can't tell you very often like is this one or good lawyer or really bad lawyer There's no publicly objective verifiable information Period and there should be that's just a glaring gap in the market for legal services and their ways were a little bit of information Could create a real competition. We'd actually have more competition Over contingency fees right now lawyers basically all charge the same percentage which doesn't make sense Some lawyers should probably be charging more than they are and some lawyers should be charging much less than they do If you want let's say a lawyer who is going to take my case to trial I really want to go to trial you should find a lawyer who takes cases to trial And who would fit your desires and needs if you're saying god, I just want to check I want to check quickly. I do not want to get caught up and all this and boss stuff I don't want to be deposed god help me um you should find a lawyer who has a record for quickly and easily Getting some monetary compensation with very little trouble Um, it's just nuts that we can figure out basically information on every other component in our lives But have no information when it comes to something so important The other thing too when we think about fraud is a question in there could get it medical build up Because it could reward lawyers for having relatively low claimed economic loss and relatively high recovery So if you wanted to create natural competition to say hey lawyers don't send your clients to extra medical care Um, that would actually look bad for you because what you want is a high ratio of total recovery to claims loss It would actually create a natural incentive to be really judicious about getting your client medical care So it would actually address the problem uh that that folks seem intent on addressing But in a way with very few negative collateral consequences I think to your point it's like some people just want a quick payout Mm-hmm, and that's fine And then other people will will be like okay, I want to see this through to the full extent Yeah, because you want more money or you just want want to go through the system properly Yeah, yeah to her point it would be really helpful If you did need a personal injury lawyer, but you could read like yeah, here's a lawyer reference.com Yeah, yeah tender for lawyers, you know, oh there you go wow. I want a lawyer Because we need to build that You're like all right here's the type of lawyer that I want you know, I only want lawyers with you know She's talking about like you know ratings for issues like you could have like yeah, you know Only four stars are higher Here's the price range or contingency range that I want Yep, it makes sense. Yeah There's just yeah, it's hard to get that information into her point I like that the ratio idea right because it's like yeah, you can rack up a whole bunch of costs And your payout could be high, but your costs are also high right? Yeah, so yeah, someone needs to pay that you know Yeah, things have to be paid whether up front or afterwards. Yeah Yeah, and time also. Yeah, it's like well if you're going to the chiropractor 30 times. Yeah, you don't need to go Zero times. Mm-hmm. That's also time your rights a lot of days. Yeah You're going two days to the yeah, otherwise it would be actual fraud if you lied about it many times you were going to the Well, yeah, yeah, let's not even think about that don't even say that Lying about chiropractic and then this is kind of her last defense of the personal injuries lawyer big corporations Would prefer that there be no personal injury Well, right they would prefer that they don't have accountability I know it sounds kind of lame or or like I'm naive or something But I really do think that we are all better off we are all safer Because we have the regulation that tort law supplies and again this goes back to the idea that in the United States We have very little top-down regulation And so we count on our courts to supply That missing piece to make sure that the roads we drive on are somewhat safe and the water we drink is somewhat safe and the pills That we ingest are somewhat safe now just like everything else are there some bad actors out there Absolutely do those bad actors give other people a bad name? Absolutely should we have more information to be able to distinguish between the folks who are really out there and who are you know Have a business model that maybe doesn't align with someone's interests There's no doubt that if you want really individualized kind of one-on-one on legal services and you end up at a settlement mill, you'll be really frustrated. You will walk away feeling really, really like the legal system let you down. On the other hand, if you want a quick check and you got a settlement mill and they get you one, that's kind of a great thing. So I think it's generally what we need is way more matching so that people get the legal representation of kind of the style that suits their needs and interests. And if along the way that transparency makes it, so those folks who really are kind of taking advantage of the rest of us kind of, it all gets revealed, that would be a really good thing too. - So Dublin is right, Tinder for lawyers. (laughs) - It is this weird thing in America too where we have this like, it's like our love for billionaires. We love a corporation. If we, you know, if someone, I think I was thinking about the people who like to make Donalds over like the hot coffee, you know, that's you know. - Oh yeah. - Jerry and Avocurkey is awarded almost $2.9 million to a woman scalded by a cup of McDonald's coffee. - And it's like, and they get, you know, what we think are like, exorbitant amounts of money. Like, okay, you get $2 million because you don't know that coffee's hot, like you can't, but it's like, it's McDonald's, you know, it's like, who cares? - They'll be okay. - Who cares? - McDonald's has to pay $2 million because someone's spelled a hot coffee on themselves. - Yeah. - It's like, yeah, the instant reflex when you hear that is like, oh, it's this person's phone, stupid. - Exactly. - Yeah. - They're like, oh, maybe there's more to this than I'm seeing from my phone. - And you're taking advantage of this corporate, like you. - Yeah. - But a whole person in a drive-through is taking advantage of McDonald's. - Yeah. - Who cares if you are, you know, the good of you. - Maybe Spillin' Coffee in yourself shouldn't send you to the hospital. - Yeah, it's just, yeah, I don't know why we feel bad for corporations in this country. Even if people are lying, even if they're frauds, you know, even if the whole thing's a scam, it's McDonald's. Like them wheezing $3 million, changes absolutely nothing for anyone. - Yeah. - Besides the person whose life is gonna change is they get $3 million more dollars, you know? - To underscore your point even further, usually those are settlements. McDonald's like $3 million, that's fucking nothing. Get your ass out of my office. - So hearing all that, the history and then kind of how they actually work, how do you guys feel about, has this changed how you perceive personal injury lawyers? - Yeah, because I was under the imp-- I mean, I've always felt like they have, you know, legitimacy, but that, yeah, it's more about, what's changing is their perception. It's like I always thought, yeah, they're sleazy people who are trying to make a quick book and they probably sometimes take advantage of, you know, people who have been hurt in real circumstances in order to make money, but learning so much more about the context of, you know, the trajectory of the personal injury lawyer across history, I have a little bit more respect for the practice. - Yeah, I think to me, it's, it definitely changed how I perceive the whole field and it's way, and I think a lot of it is the kind of sleazy and this thing, it's basically an aesthetic issue where like these ads are just corny and ridiculous. - It's more silly than seizing, yeah. - So it's like, but they are ads, so, like I could name a handful of these people, so they work in that sense. - It's kind of like this David vs. Goliath thing, right? Where, yeah, we have this, you know, sleazy personal injury lawyer perception, and it's like, yeah, 'cause the corporations want us to think that. Sure, the advertising, like we said is stupid. - Yeah, they don't really help themselves. But it's advertising. - Yeah, like what do you, 'cause like, all right, if there was a tasteful ad, that was like a lot of serious about the stuff. - The theory is, you would not even, you wouldn't even notice that you'd be like, oh, this must legally have to be here for some reason. - It has to become increasingly silly to get your attention, 'cause they're competing with each other. - Yeah. - And I, you know, maybe if we went through enough of them, I bet there's some that try to look a little classier. Or there are, I know there are. I support them, all of them, stand with them, and the frauds too. - Now there's some downstream effects that affect, you know, someone like Devon, who's car insurance, who is being affected by this. - Yeah, but just, you know, the original goal of the personal injury lawyer, I think we like. - The honest, the honest personal injury lawyer is of course for good. - Yeah. - Because we do, there should be some more laws, probably, about things. - Some more guardrails for sure. - But we don't do that here. - Yeah, so this is a marathon. - This is our best path. - Yeah. - So to wrap things up, I thought it was only right that I speak to a billboard lawyer myself. - Oh. - So after the break, I hop on the phone with John Morgan, from Morgan and Morgan, to hear about how he got his face to be literally everywhere, and how he feels about being accused of fraud. - Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora, and as the number one podcaster, IHART's twice as large as the next two combined. Plus, only IHART can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think IHART, streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHARTadvertising.com. That's iHARTadvertising.com. - Hey, I'm Hota Kottby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hota Kottby. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum and depression. - Listen to Joy 101 with Hota Kottby on the iHART Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - All right, listen up. Our podcast is called, "Hey Jonas, "preferences everyone has a podcast we want to do as well." And we've had some incredible guests so far. - I was going, boys. - Hey, Nile. - Yeah. There's no answer to anything else, really, is it? Yeah, you know, our tastes so good, can't be about food. You do the same, Nick, like, some of the stuff that you've done. YouTube, Joe. (chuckles) Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever. You listen to your podcasts. (gentle music) So first, mind just introducing yourself and what you did. I'm John Morgan and I'm the founder of Morgan and Morgan, America's largest personal injury firm. How did you get into a personal injury law? When I was a sophomore in college, my dad called me. He said, your brother Tim has been an in-accident at Walt Disney World. He dove into the Polynesian lagoon and he is a quadriplegic. He can move nothing. It was, and still is, the single worst day in my family's life and there began that part of our life. And it was a case that was against Walt Disney World and he was trying to save a little girl's life and in the process of litigation, Disney fought him from having any kind of good life, even though he was on the job. It turned out to be only a worker's comp case. But in my mind, we hired the wrong lawyer who didn't do a lot of things that I learned later. We were Guinness Disney who was punished until I felt, and we were poor people. And when you're powerless, hopeless, and helpless, it's a terrible feeling. I didn't know what a personal injury law was, but through that whole process, I saw what a personal injury lawyer should be. And Tim's bad luck that day turned out to be my future. - So then how big today, how big is the firm? - As we see today, the firm has 7,000 employees and we have over 1,100 lawyers. - How many cases a year does Morgan Morgan handle? And then what's the vetting process like for cases? - We have over 4 million people try to hire us every year for something. Of the people who try to hire us, we probably initially only take 8% of the cases because for all sorts of reasons, that's the ones that qualify. Then we get that 8%, and then we even call that down based on a lot of factors. So we probably keep about 6, 7% of all the intakes that come in. Last year we referred out almost 30,000 cases to other law firms throughout America. And so, and those cases are our most profitable because our margins are like 85% of the cases we refer out. - Explain how that works then. So you, what's that model like? - The models like this. Okay, we're not doing employment law in Illinois, but you are. Case comes in, sexual harassment case comes into Illinois. We don't do it, but you do. We refer it to you. You pay us a referral fee. - For the cases you do take on, what's the business model like there? - It's contingency, right? - Or we've never charged anybody by the hour. It's, you know, if you don't win, you don't pay. And that business model is, we get a case in, and we treat every case that we get in, as if it's going to be litigated. We don't treat any case like we're going to settle this someday. We are assuming we're going to trial, and we try more personal cases than any other law firm in the country by a zillion miles. We are on 100 to 150 dockets a week, trying cases three weeks ago, we were over here, we got a $600 million vertical one, and our trial teams have been our secret sauce. And when you have big results at trial, it protects all the cases behind it, 'cause they know, you know, some people come to a gun fight with a knife, and some people come to a gun fight with a gun. We come to a gun fight with an oozy, and so that's how we fight back. If I look at why we're successful, because we're real trial lawyers, we're not lawyers who just take the last best offer, which 95% of most PI lawyers in the country do. We're built differently. What's your overall success rate? Yeah, I mean, look, we lose. We lose trials. And you know, Wayne Gressley said it, "If you never take a shot on goal, you're never gonna make a goal." I would say we win. And our litigation, at some point, 85%, 90% of our cases. Now, some of them we settle along the way, but our success rates very high, but we do lose. If you're not losing cases, you're not trying cases. If somebody tells you they're not losing their line, or they're not trying cases. What do you think is the biggest misconception about personal injury law? First misconception is that, you know, we have all this money to take on cases that are frivolous. They use the word frivolous. I'll say two things about frivolous. First of all, it's frivolous until it's you. Until you have been the victim. And then it's not so frivolous anymore. And the other thing that I will say about frivolous is this, I don't have the money or the resources to be horse and around with bullshit frivolous cases. Go to forthepeople.com. Look at verdicts and settlements. Click it. Look at the offer before trial. Look at the offer after trial. Hundreds of those verdicts. And guess what? Those juries agree that I was right. And so these same juries, these same jurors, we trust to send people to the death, to prison for life. We have the civil justice system, the criminal justice system, the best civil and criminal justice system in the world. And I trust juries. I don't trust insurance companies. What's your overall kind of guiding principle or approach to marketing? My overall approach is I want to, I want the public to know that I'm always going to be there for them, protecting America. I like my role. And I like the role of David versus Goliath because my battles are against the giants. But I have something else that they don't have. I usually have, in my cases, the truth. And the truth is this. Many, many people in America are injured or hurt through no fault of their own. And by the way, it's not intentionally, usually, by the other party who did it. But what happened is something was taken from them. Their health, their money, their job, their enjoyment of life, consortium with their spouse. I get to take that case and those people and try to give back to them as much as I can. I can't give it everything back. I can't make a quadriplegic, unquadriplegic, like my brother. But I can try to make their life as whole as I can by giving them back what was taken from them. And I love that job. It's watches. They didn't do anything wrong. They went through an intersection and a truck hit 'em. And now they're ruined. Why would anybody be opposed to somebody being represented for that? It's learning about kind of the history of Tore and Law. Tore is, I believe it's the land word for twisted or untwisting. So it's basically just the same thing right here. Exactly. Exactly. So how did you decide what your advertisements would look like? And then I want to see that, how is that evolved as you've expanded? Well, I don't even know why he was calling me. I look young. I'd go down. Were you in that advertisement center now? Yeah, unfortunately. I was getting ahead of somebody doing it for me because I've never liked my face because I always feel like I got a fat face. And I looked like Beaver Cleaver growing up. And I never liked the way Beaver Cleaver looked either. And, but I'd go do these ads with like a five o'clock shadow and no makeup. And when I look back at those ads, I'm like, I can't believe anybody called this kid. I was a big fan of the ad. I started that first year, the $100,000 budget. And the budget this year will be $550 million. You were quoted in the story too about the MTA and billboard lawyers. What's your response to that sort of framing as far as billboard lawyers or ambience chasers? Well, my response to that is this. When state farm, all state progressive farmers, every drug manufacturer in the world, every maker of every unsafe car, when they stop advertising, I'll stop advertising. I find it interesting that these people who are in the business of denied, delayed, defend, criticized me for advertising when they spend way more money, guy co-spends of fortune. So it's interesting they want to talk about billboard. Take their billboards down. Take your billboards down. Take your commercials down. Why do you want me not to tell the public the dangers that you are putting on the public? I know why you want me to take my billboards down. I know why you want me to take my commercials down. Because I'm telling the people the truth. You're telling the people a bunch of lies. It's called the First Amendment, baby. It's called the First Amendment. [Music] No such thing is a production of kaleidoscope content. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne and Mingesh Hottikator. The show is created by Mandy Fidel, Noah Friedman and Devon Joseph, Theaman Credit Song by Mandy, mixing by Pran Bandy. Our guest this week are Jose Martinez, Nora Friedman Aangstrom and John Morgan. You can buy John Morgan's memoir Life is Luck, wherever you get your books. Visit nosuchthing.show to subscribe to our newsletter. If you have feedback for us or a question, our email is [email protected] or you can leave us a voice mail by calling them on very nice show notes. Thanks and we'll be back next week. Bye. [Music] Joy is essential and it's also elusive, but now. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hottikotby. Joy 101 with Hottikotby is presented by CVS. Alright, listen up. Our podcast is called "Hey Jonas, we've here since everyone has a podcast we wanted to as well." And we've had some incredible guests so far. How's it going boys? Hey Nile. Yeah, you know, our tastes so good can be about food. You too, Joe. [laughs] Drop what you're doing and listen to "Hey Jonas" on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. This Black Music Month, a quest love show celebrates the visionaries. Shaping culture, gruesome, from country-curl blazer Mickey Gaiden to hip-hop icon, Fat Five Freddy, the Sonic Genius of Thundercat and the revolutionary voice of Chuck D'Horn in Loud. Look at me. So the time it might be off, the time might be muffled, but what's going to come out of there is something that you can feel. Celebrate Black Music Month with special episodes of the quest love show. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. He left Nigeria, he conquered Hollywood, and he never forgot where he came from. David Ayelolo is one of the most powerful storytellers of his generation. On this episode of 154, we go deep. Nigeria, identity, navigating Hollywood at the highest level and the responsibility that comes with using your platform to change the world. This is 154. New episode streaming now. Don't miss it. Listen to this episode of 154 available now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or whatever. ever you get your podcast. Guaranteed Human.