Scott Warmuth, an applicant workers’ compensation attorney, and today a friend of mine, was one of the first to post Chinese billboards in the area forty years ago. This simple investment, and it was reasonably priced then, catapulted his firm into the stratosphere and gave Jacoby & Meyers a run for their money. What this visual punch conveyed was that everyone should know who their local injury lawyer should be if the need arose. The community identified with him and that is all Scott ever wanted- renown that is unusual for a work comp attorney and name recognition to build a legal brand.

Source: Warmouth Law Resource Library

Lawyers use billboards because they work. They know there’s great value in being buried in your brain so deep you have a subconscious link. A single billboard, for instance, on a busy highway can garner 25,000-50,000 views from passing vehicles per day. And that’s not passive viewing – a staggering 85% of consumers report actively looking at billboard messages.

Those figures come from Gitnux Marketdata Report 2024, which also reveals a sizable percentage of people take action after seeing a billboard advertisement. The trend is that 24% of billboard viewers say they have visited a restaurant advertised on a billboard they saw while driving. It’s not like an ad on the internet that we can swish, and it disappears. The billboard is always there. You can’t block it, and you can’t skip it.

Billboard advertising is an $8 billion industry in the United States, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, and is not likely to go away anytime soon. Like everything in life, size matters and the cost of billboards varies widely depending on its size and location. A full-size billboard in Los Angeles is roughly $5,000 to $10,000 for a four-week period. If it is on the Sunset Strip near Hollywood, a high demand area, a full-size billboard can cost $80,000 to $100,000 for four weeks.

The Out of Home Advertising Association of America, the lead trade association of the domestic outdoor advertising industry in the U.S, estimates the return is $6 for every $1 spent on billboard advertising. Regardless, it has to be effective for injury attorneys to continue doing it. They need to get cases, and lots of them, in the door. And because the rules for solicitation are pretty strict, injury attorneys have to cast a wide net and hope the injured calls them. Those same attorneys are also simultaneously running Google ads, FB/IG ads, etc. That's where things like SEO (helping websites show up in search results) and PPC (paid ads) come into play. It's about reaching the right people at the right time, wherever they are.

While billboards are a hit with plaintiff injury lawyers, those representing the defense (employers or insurance carriers) don’t seem to bother with them at all. That is because they are more transactional. They tend to have a seasoned background with exemplary results over a long period of time whereby, they have earned the respect of courts, insurance carriers, and their satisfied clients. Last, they tend to build their practice by word of mouth because businesspeople often hang out with other businesspeople, claim adjusters and insurance brokers to boot, at lunch, conferences, and trade shows.

Back to billboards, the good ones catch your attention. It pays to be bold, awesome, just anything but another boring lawyer. Carl Jacobs, another work comp attorney, hit his stride when he fashioned himself as "El Mero Mero", a common term in Mexican Spanish slang that translates as "the real deal."

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Larry H. Parker was well known for his use of billboards and television ads and spent well over $1 million per year just on billboards. Sadly, he passed away on March 6, 2024 at the age of 75 but his billboards and TV ads (with him in it as the main spokesman) live on and are unavoidable and still reflect, “We’ll fight for you!” Or at least his firm, boasting 125 attorneys, will. He no longer can.

Source: Yelp

In Sacramento, The Penney billboards are impossible to miss for freeway drivers. With their bold white-on-red copy, the names and portraits of Fred and Garrett Penney are prominently displayed, and a clear and concise message.

Penney & Associates website

Warmuth, 67 and just over 6 feet tall, still has 16 billboards in the San Gabriel Valley. As pictured on his billboard, he strikes me as an imposing figure and has a confident smile. He began his practice in Monterey Park with a Taiwanese friend who was looking for a white attorney. At the time, it was a widespread belief in the Chinese community that white attorneys knew the American justice systems better. “My Taiwanese friend at the time said, ‘You need to be white.’ There was a big portion of the population that felt it was better to have a white attorney,” Warmuth said.

Back then, insurance companies discriminated against people with foreign names and were prone to accusing immigrant claimants of fraud without real cause, Warmuth said. Chinese clients often would get suspiciously low insurance payouts or no payments at all for routine claims. So, he used his billboards to appeal to the Chinese community.

Scott Warmuth in his office.

In the interest of safety, freeway billboards in California are regulated in numerous ways, including for such things as location and how light or brilliant. For example, billboards are prohibited on officially designated California Scenic Highways. As to the question of whether freeway billboards are distracting to the point of being dangerous, that issue has been studied a lot over the years with most studies saying the distraction to drivers doesn’t reach the serious danger level.