A Brief History Of How Los Angeles Became A Land Of Billboard Lawyers

Welcome to Los Angeles — the land of palm trees, transplants and lawyers on billboards.

Jacoby & Meyers. Accidente. The Law Brothers. Larry H Parker who "will fight for you.” The Call Jacob guy with such a killer call-to-action that last name be damned. The list goes on.

Onto this crowded field enters personal injury lawyer Anh Phoong (pronounced 'Ann Fong'). You may have seen her blue-and-yellow billboards around town since November, emblazoned with the catchphrase, “Something Wrong? Call Anh Phoong.”

“My husband was like, ‘Let's think of something catchy,’” Phoong said. “Then he said something like, ‘Something Wrong, Call Anh Phoong,’ and I'm like, ‘Oh no, that's not gonna work.’ But it was catchy and it stuck.”

Origins of a billboard blitz

That was about seven years ago, when Phoong started a billboard blitz in her law practice’s home base of Sacramento after being inspired on a trip to Florida.

“We went to Orlando, and I kept seeing these billboards, these signs, of another law firm. And I just couldn't get it out of my mind,” Phoong said. “I was like, ‘Hey, we don't have anything like that in Sacramento,’ that's where the thought started.”

When Phoong expanded her practice south to the Bay Area in 2020, the billboards came along. The strategy was no different with her push into Los Angeles.

“After that, I was thinking, ‘What is a similar market to the Bay Area?’” Phoong said. “Obviously, it's very scary, because as you know, the competition is fierce.”

Why attorneys can advertise now

It’s no coincidence that billboards and personal injury lawyers go hand-in-hand. The union of the two had its seeds in California in the early 1970s, when upstart lawyers Leonard Jacoby and Stephen Meyers — yes, those Jacoby and Meyers — gave interviews to the media at the grand opening of their Van Nuys law firm.

When the state bar moved to discipline them for unethical advertising, the lawyers took the case all the way to the California Supreme Court — and won on free speech grounds. That was several years before a separate U.S. Supreme Court ruling paved the way for the onslaught across the country.

“The U.S. Supreme Court said advertising for professions is a matter of free speech, and as long as it was accurate, the states could not prohibit it,” said Richard Hamlin, an attorney in Los Angeles whose specialties include billboard law. “So sometime around there, lawyers started advertising. And gradually over time, it's expanded to what you see now.”

Hamlin started his practice before advertising was legal and remembers when Jacoby & Meyers was advertising their low-cost legal service as part of a nascent trend. His own brush with the phenomenon came in the 1990s, when a billboard operator client of his offered billboard space in lieu of paying him.

Why so many personal injury attorney billboards?

Hamlin is not surprised that personal injury lawyers would gravitate toward the practical ubiquity of the billboard.

“I think it's in the nature of the practice,” Hamlin said. “It's generally a high volume business. They have to have a lot of people coming through. And billboards are a good way to reach a lot of people.”

“It's a medium that lends itself well because people see it, they pay attention,” said Anna Bager, CEO of Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), the trade group for operators of billboards, benches, gas pumps, taxi signs, or pretty much any surface out in the world where advertisements can go. “When you see a message repetitively, you might actually call that number.”

Legal ads are now a billion dollar industry

Bager added that legal services is the largest category in the nearly $9 billion out-of-home advertising industry in the U.S., as well as in Los Angeles, where it's grown ten-fold since 2014.

“It's a traffic city, it has a lot of commuters. It's a very diverse population, so there's an opportunity to reach many different people in different communities with different messages,” Bager said. “It's also a place where there's a lot of tourists and where people like to share content. You can post a few impressive signs in L.A. and get global spreading through social media.”

Phoong said she hopes the 300 or so billboards she booked across the L.A. region, plus the radio and TV ad plays, will get her business the visibility it needs. Soon, her face will also be on buses in the area.

So far, Phoong said the results have been about what she expected.

“We knew that it wasn't going to be like, ‘Oh, they see me, they're going to call right away.’ But it's slowly growing. It's steady. The numbers are going up," she said. “I have to prove my market and prove that, you know, L.A. is going to be successful before we go and do a long term thing out there."