🔒Personal-injury lawyers find that fame = fortune

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

— Henry VI

William Shakespeare

We feel like we know them, personally. And we do — kind of. Their faces stare down at us from countless interstate highway billboards, the sides of CT Transit buses, in late-night cable TV ads.

This is not an accident. Even local practitioners spend in the millions of dollars to buy advertising every year. That’s because, when you’re in trouble and you need help, they want you to think of them and remember their names. First.

Crash your Harley? John Haymond’s your man. Mauled by a rabid pit bull? Jonathan Perkins. Want to make insurance companies quake in their boots? Trantolo & Trantolo is waiting to take your call.

Fear is a powerful action trigger for people who are in crisis and need to do something — and fast. That’s the reason for the heavy advertising investment by PI practitioners: When there’s an emergency and you need to make a phone call for help — right now — the Carter Marios of the world want you to think of their names — first.

But there’s also humor. Grandma got run over by a reindeer? Brooke Goff, who wants you to know she’s a member of the next generation of personal-injury practitioners, smiles down from her I-95 billboards wearing a Santa hat. She’s young, she’s female, she’s got a sense of humor — she’s not one of those grim middle-aged white dudes in $3,000 suits. If you’re in trouble and you can relate to that — even if no reindeer was involved — call Brooke. She’s cool.

Among local legal practitioners, personal-injury lawyers are the most visible faces. They were the first subset of their profession to embrace consumer advertising when the American Bar Association over time relaxed its ethics code to (reluctantly) allow members to advertise. Before that, it was considered sleazy — only lowlife ambulance-chasers would slap their 800 numbers on a matchbook cover. “There are a lot of egos that need massaging,” says PI lawyer Keith Trantolo. “But that’s nothing new to the law.”

Also among local lawyers (as opposed to those in big corporate firms in New York and Washington), PI lawyers earn the highest incomes, on average. That’s a decent tradeoff for having to put your mug on the side of a bus to generate phone calls. They’re also held in relatively low esteem by members of the public. There’s a connection there, too.

Ambulance chaser. That’s about the basest form of professional slur, summoning the specter of the lawyer wildly pursuing an ambulance to the emergency room to sign the victim of whatever up as a client. (As befits the legal profession, ambulance-chasing even has a fancy name: barratry. It sounds almost respectable.)

With such big bucks at stake, perhaps it’s no surprise that many PI practitioners are cutthroat-competitive. Carter Mario refused to be interviewed for this article if it also included certain of his competitors. (And this from a guy who slaps his mug on the sides of buses.)

A common misconception of PI lawyers is that they spend much of their time in courtrooms arguing Grandma’s case against the evil insurance giant in front of credulous jurors.

Sometimes they do, but rarely. About 95 percent of lawsuits terminate in a pre-trial settlement. This means that just one in 20 personal injury cases is resolved in a court of law by a judge or jury. PI lawyers spend far more time screaming on the phone or sending demanding emails to insurance companies than they do arguing before a jury.

The most obvious reason: “Going to trial is expensive,” says Keith Trantolo, including hiring expert witnesses such as physicians. “We don’t believe in trying a case in any way but large” potential verdicts, he says.

Trantolo, 43, is managing partner of the firm started by his grandfather in 1938 and built by his father, Vincent Trantolo, now (mostly) retired. Today Trantolo & Trantolo has 14 attorneys working out of offices in Bridgeport, Hartford, Torrington and New Haven.

Growing up Trantolo got to watch his father “represent someone who really needed help in a David vs. Goliath situation, with Goliath being the insurance company. I really admired that.”

The most important skill for a lawyer is “how to talk to people and understand people and, most of all, listen to people,” Trantolo says. Especially people who have been gravely injured due to the negligence or indifference of an individual or organization.

But he acknowledges that members of his profession must forever confront “age-old stereotypes. I would rather nobody get injured,” says Trantolo. “I look at personal injury like a doctor, in the sense that nobody wants to go to the doctor — unless they have to. And nobody wants to go to an attorney who handles personal injury — until they have to.”

Trantolo & Trantolo (the firm) were early embracers of consumer advertising in the 1980s — and weathered “a massive backlash” from peers who viewed advertising as sleazy, even desperate. Today the firm spends well in excess of $1 million annually on consumer advertising. The “branding” message, Keith Trantolo explains, is “Let our family help your family.”

Representing victims of injury or accident is likewise a family affair for Ronald LoRicco, who joined the New Haven law firm built by his father, Richard, right out of law school in 1990. The senior LoRicco passed away last April, but the firm he built is today anchored by two of his sons. The firm handles criminal defense and workers comp cases, but 75 percent of the firm’s work is in personal injury.

“I think the perception that is put out by the insurance industry is that there are these ambulance-chasing lawyers out there looking to make a quick buck, rather than lawyers who are looking to help people be compensated for injuries that they suffer due to negligence,” says LoRicco. “There are big pockets of money in the insurance industry that [dismiss] the profession, because we make them do what’s just and right. That’s the driving force for the bad rep personal-injury lawyers get.”

So the practitioners have to tell their own story, and paid advertising is the most efficient and controlled way to craft and communicate marketing messages. “In the old days the lawyering business was predicated on relationships and reputation,” LoRicco says.

Today, it’s a different game. “Nowadays it’s social media and search engine [optimization]” to reach the most eyeballs and generate the most inquiries. A certain percentage of those turn into clients — and, if the attorneys play their cards right, those clients turn into settlements, and sometimes even winning verdicts.

The personal injury profession has always been middle-aged white men,” says Brooke Goff, who at 33 is neither middle-aged nor a man. (She is white, though.) “Then I came on the scene, and now the middle-aged white men don’t know what to do with me.”

Brooke Goff is not exactly demure. But demure doesn’t get you very far — especially in a profession that requires you to spend most of your daytime hours arguing and threatening. Surprisingly, given her advertising’s emphasis on her youth and gender, Goff’s client base is not predominantly female. “I probably represent 70 percent men,” she says, of a caseload that includes workers compensation cases, motor-vehicle accidents, slip-and-falls and the like.

Goff set her sights on a legal career as a little girl when she confused the words “lawyer” and “liar.”

After college, when she began taking law courses at Quinnipiac, Goff worked as a paralegal, where “I saw how much settlements are made and deals put together just by handshakes and [personal] relationships [between plaintiff’s lawyers and defense attorneys]. That’s the good-old-boys club. But it shouldn’t be that way; it should be by performance.”

After she got her JD she told her sole-practitioner employer she wanted to be his partner. He said no, so she started her own firm three years ago. In the early days she drove an Uber at night just to pay her staff. Today Goff has five lawyers (including herself), a vibrant social-media presence, a weekly radio spot, outdoor advertising — and a growing caseload.

“They can compete with one another by overspending” on advertising. “With me, I’m a woman — and they really don’t know how to compete with me. So it’s kind of rocked the world of personal injury in Connecticut.

“If you’re good at what you do, it doesn’t matter if you’re a woman or a man. The way I negotiate my settlements, the way I try my cases, the way jurors see me, is no different from any of those guys,” she says “You have to walk the walk.”

Jonathan Perkins is one of Connecticut’s most visible PI practitioners. From his office in Woodbridge, he says he spends between $1 million and $2 million annually on advertising, the bulk of it on his firm’s ubiquitous billboards. Dog bite? Slip and fall? That’s old hat. How about vaping/e-cigarette accidents? Now that’s looking forward.

Perkins’ kick-out-the-jambs marketing strategy has paid dividends. In three decades out of NYU law school Perkins has a statewide footprint (offices in New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, Waterbury and New London) and eight lawyers on staff. A year ago the firm added the growing practice area of employment discrimination.

“Personal injury lawyers do tend to get a bum rap,” says Perkins, who seconds LoRicco in attributing part of that bad rap to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies with which they do battle.

“Most good lawyers are striving to look out for the best interests of our clients,” Perkins says. “We often have clients who cannot fend for themselves and we work really hard — with no upfront pay and sometimes for years on end — to try to make their lives better.”

“We are like Robin Hood.”