Are personal injury lawyers frauds and scammers?
A legal scholar explains why "ambulance chasers" have gotten a bad rap.
Hi Things,
First order of business: Next week, we’re recording a finance mailbag! Please send us your money questions, horror stories, or anything else. Leave a voicemail at (860) 325-0286 or email us at mannynoahdevan@gmail.com.
You can hardly go for a drive, take a walk in the neighborhood, or turn on a television without being bombarded by ridiculous ads for personal injury lawyers. Are these flamboyant characters legitimate legal representation or scammers? This week, we find out how personal injury firms work, why they advertise so heavily, and how to discern a legit lawyer from a scammy “settlement mill” looking for a quick pay-day.
(Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Others)
Our guests this week are personal injury lawyer John Morgan (Morgan & Morgan), Stanford legal scholar Nora Freeman Engstrom and journalist Jose Martinez from The City Reporter.
If you like this episode, you’ll enjoy our look into the world of dentistry:
Related Links:
Read about Prof. Engstrom’s paper on competition and contingency fees here. (Full paper available here)
Jose Martinez for The City Reporter: ‘Billboard Lawyers’ Defend Ads and Tactics Amid MTA Push for Lawsuit Reform
You can buy John Morgan’s memoir “Life is Luck” here.
Didn’t make it into the episode but I highly recommend this great and extremely relevant story by Patrick Radden Keefe for The New Yorker: The Car-Crash Conspiracy.
Have a question you want us to answer? Email us at mannynoahdevan@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (860) 325-0286
Thanks and we’ll see you next week!
Couple weeks ago I criticized the circumcision episode because I thought it strayed into both-sides'ism. I wanted NST to stay truer to the mission built into the original pitch: providing listeners a more trustworthy version of "doing my own research"; using their journalistic skills to help us sort out the differences between facts, opinions, agenda-driven arguments, received ideas, and what we really know, with regard to topics that people disagree on.
Since I took time to post a critique, I thought I should say that this latest episode was great, on exactly those terms.
I'm like a lot of people who think they're too smart for advertising. Always assumed that my intense side-eye towards personal injury lawyers was another sign that I'm too clever to be fooled by their pandering, cheesy ads.
Kind of loved finding out that I've been a total sucker for the longer PR game that big corporations and anti-regulation interests have been playing around tort law. Good to get knocked down a peg, and useful to be reminded that I have to check where my assumptions come from. I loved getting a lesson on how tort law fits into U.S. regulatory mechanisms overall, and a history lesson on how the "ambulance-chaser" narrative started, and who started it. Even loved hearing John Morgan's origin story (though I suspect he's more complicated than he presents himself as being).
Side-note: I still think PI lawyers could do themselves a favor and hire some better ad firms. Morgan & Morgan advertises in my city, and their ads are the most transparently condescending pandering trash imaginable: bus banners pretending to care about our local sports teams, or clumsy shallow references to over-exposed local quirks. Buddy is up on billboards captioned "Jawn Morgan" (such a well-known inside reference you almost have to be a tourist to enjoy it). So many of my friends have noticed those ads just enough to express how much they hate the guy. Maybe all PR is good PR, but I think the pandering just feeds into the idea that these guys are looking for suckers as clients. Ads that seem to take clients more seriously might help change the common perception of lawyers like Morgan.
https://www.reddit.com/r/funnysigns/s/m5XPjjtccv