👋 Good morning. Chris Dreyer here. Personal injury already runs on billboards. But the best advertisers make out-of-home do more than reach drivers: They use it to build trust and create something people will share. Below, I break down how PI firms can do the same.
Also today, an AI law firm raised $6 million to pursue consumer legal cases, starting with PI. And a new study linked major album-release days to a 15% rise in traffic deaths. Researchers point to smartphone-enabled distraction, a pattern every auto lawyer should watch.
I also sat down with Joe Vito, who turned bigger advertisers into referral partners while his firm recovered more than $100 million for clients in under four years. You'll also get a social playbook for showing up usefully in conversations about accidents and injuries, plus a field report from our Director of Paid Digital, Jessica Ford, on what we're seeing inside ChatGPT Ads.
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💡ONE BIG IDEA
How to Get More From the Billboards You Already Buy
The best advertisers now ask billboards to do more than attract attention. Of course, the name and phone number still matter. But the strongest out-of-home campaigns also build trust and give people something worth sharing.
Brian Rappaport runs Quan Media Group, an out-of-home specialist that planned campaigns for HubSpot, Skims, and Google's Gemini. In a Giant Spoon playbook, he describes the money pouring into the channel right now.
Four years ago the big category was online gambling. Today, it's AI and business-to-business (B2B) brands: Anthropic, Rippling, and Figma. In fact, financial-services brands raised their out-of-home spend 32.9% in the second quarter of 2025, and Stripe, Nike, and Meta were among 13 advertisers that more than doubled it in 2024.
So, what are they buying?
Credibility, for starters. "When you put a brand in the real world," Rappaport says, "there's credibility, validity." A physical presence tells people a brand is established and serious in a way a swipeable ad never will.
For PI firms, that matters. Hiring a lawyer after an accident runs on trust. An injured person may ask: Is this firm real, and can I count on it? Showing up in the physical world starts answering that question before the phone rings.
The second job is the one I keep coming back to: Out-of-home now makes content.
"Out-of-home is that unblockable channel that lives a second life on social," Rappaport says. Build the placement so people photograph it, and one physical unit turns into free distribution. When the fintech Ramp wanted to congratulate its neighbor Figma on going public, it printed and hung a banner in 24 hours. But this was even cooler. Twitter lit up, and the banner traveled far past the block it hung on. The placement did the easy part. The internet did the rest.
Here's how to put both jobs to work:
Build something people will photograph. Before you buy, ask what about this placement would make someone stop and post it: a sharp line, a bold visual, or a spot people already point their phones at. Design the board for photos, and it earns reach you didn't pay for.
Put it where your audience actually stands. Out-of-home is more than the highway board. Rappaport's brands buy gym networks, airport security bins, and sports-venue placements, choosing each format to reach the right people where they gather. Map your client's daily path, then buy the spot on it.
Put it in the brief from the start. Most media planners leave out-of-home until the end, leaving it with the leftover budget and causing it to underperform. Campaigns can now launch in four to eight weeks and measure brand lift and sales lift. Even a $75,000 campaign can produce a statistically significant result. Decide what you want the placement to do before you buy it, then measure it against that goal.
Personal injury already spends heavily on out-of-home. If I were spending that budget, I'd want more than roadside reach. I'd want the placement to make the firm feel established and give people something worth sharing. Choose the placement and creative for those two jobs, not simply to put the firm's name beside the highway.
The catch is timing. More brands are buying the best placements, so premium inventory in the biggest markets is getting harder to find. The board on your commute still works. The question is whether you're asking it to do enough.
🔗 Giant Spoon →
♟️STEAL THIS PLAYBOOK
Build a Social Strategy in Other People's Comments
Your next social post doesn't have to start on your own account.
PI firms have a legitimate place in public conversations about accidents, injuries, dangerous products, insurance, and safety. Local media companies publish those stories every day. People take the same questions to Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Can I sue? What happens after a crash like this? Does this recall affect me? Why does that intersection keep producing wrecks?
Your attorneys already know how to answer those questions. You can bring that expertise into conversations that already have an audience.
I came across this one in a Marketing Brew story, and it stuck with me.
BetterHelp stumbled onto this strategy after one TikTok comment earned more than 300,000 likes. So they built a system around it.
The company now comments on roughly 200 to 350 posts a month. About 10 to 20 generate more than 10,000 likes. BetterHelp Chief Growth Officer Sara Brooks told Marketing Brew that its daily new-follower count grew from roughly four to about 450 after the company started focusing on comments.
Not every comment takes off. That's the point. BetterHelp turned one breakout comment into a system its team can run every month.
We've talked before about building the media-response muscle inside your firm. Track the news. Prepare useful commentary. Become the expert reporters call when a story breaks.
Think of this as the public version of that strategy.
Here's the playbook:
Choose your lanes before the story breaks. Start with four or five subjects where your firm has real authority. That could include local crashes, dangerous intersections, vehicle recalls, insurance practices, trucking safety, nursing-home care, defective products, or new injury research. Your firm can also contribute to posts from doctors, rehabilitation providers, first responders, and safety organizations. The test is simple: Does your firm have something useful and credible to add?
Build a listening list and give someone ownership. Follow the local newsrooms, reporters, government agencies, creators, community pages, and industry accounts that regularly cover your lanes. Monitor Reddit communities and save searches for recurring questions. Then put one person in charge of checking those sources and responding while the conversation is still active. BetterHelp created guidelines that let its social media manager move quickly without waiting for approval on every comment.
Add expertise, not an advertisement. Answer one useful question. Correct a common misconception. Explain what the news means in plain English. A comment on a recall might tell readers where to check their vehicle identification number and why they should keep repair records. A comment on a dangerous intersection might add crash data or explain how road design contributes to the pattern. Give people information they can use without forcing them to click a link.
Draw a bright line around solicitation. Comment on the issue, not the injured person. Never drop "Call us," "DM me," or an offer to review someone's case beneath a post about their accident. Don't estimate case value, promise an outcome, or give fact-specific advice in public. The American Bar Association's Model Rule 7.3 treats a targeted offer of legal services to someone known to need help in a particular matter as solicitation. State rules differ, so have your ethics counsel approve the firm's policy, disclaimers, and review process before the team starts commenting.
Turn the response into a larger content signal. Track the questions and comments that earn replies, saves, profile visits, and shares. A strong comment can become a short video, an FAQ, a media pitch, or a larger post on your own account. It can also introduce your attorney to a reporter or creator who needs an expert later. BetterHelp says its comment strategy has already opened conversations with creators about collaborations.
Don't judge this strategy by how many people immediately call the firm. BetterHelp deliberately keeps the sales pitch out because selling would break the trust it wants to build.
Measure whether more people follow the firm, visit the profile, recognize the attorneys, share their explanations, and return with more questions.
Your firm doesn't need to own every story. It needs to make itself useful where the story is already happening.
🔗 Marketing Brew →
📰 TOP OF THE NEWS
A New Study Links Streaming Surges to a 15% Rise in Traffic Deaths
Traffic deaths rose 15% on the days major music albums dropped. A new study in JAMA Network Open compared U.S. traffic fatalities on the release days of the 10 most-streamed albums from 2017 to 2022 against the 10 days before and after each one. Researchers counted 18.2 more deaths per release day, a 15.1% relative increase, or roughly 182 additional deaths across the 10 release days.
Daily streaming climbed 43% on those same days. The researchers, at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham, point to smartphone-enabled distraction as the most likely contributor.
The design leans on timing. The researchers treated album release dates as effectively random with respect to crash risk, then compared fatalities on those dates with the surrounding days. The study found an association between the streaming surge and higher fatalities, but it did not measure whether drivers used phones.
The authors call it an association, not proof. Placebo dates, Friday-only comparisons, and holiday checks did not explain the increase, and nine of the 10 albums showed the pattern on their own. The subgroup results were also consistent with distraction.
The deaths fit the distraction pattern. They clustered in single-occupant cars, sober drivers, and clear weather, the conditions where a driver feels most free to look at a screen. Fatalities did not rise more at night or in the rain.
Built-in screens tracked with more deaths, not fewer. Cars with a smartphone-mirroring display saw a larger jump than cars without one, 5.6 additional deaths against 2.9. That cuts against the idea that an in-dash system is the safer place to manage music.
It is fresh, independent evidence linking streaming surges with traffic fatalities. Peer-reviewed federal crash data gives PI firms a timely, citable hook for client education and content on distracted driving.
An AI Law Firm Raised $6 Million to Go After Personal Injury
An AI-native law firm raised $6 million to build a new model for consumer legal services, starting with personal injury.
Foremark Legal, which calls itself the world's first agentic, outcome-based consumer law firm, announced the seed round. Airtree and 186 Ventures led it. It pitches an AI engine that evaluates a consumer claim in seconds, so contingency can work on cases others cannot afford to price.
The model runs consumer intake at machine speed. Foremark finds claimants through targeted digital campaigns, screens each one for eligibility and the filing deadline in real time, has a team member review the result, and places the case with a partner law firm on contingency.
By Foremark Legal’s estimate, consumers leave $1 trillion in valid claims unresolved every year because they never find timely representation. It starts with personal injury, where contingency is already the norm.
Foremark competes for your client at the top of the funnel. Foremark built its engine to reach injured people first, the same place firms already spend heavily to compete. A funded, AI-native intake operation raises the cost of that fight.
It can also feed you cases. Foremark screens claimants and places them with partner law firms, where the attorney-client relationship sits, not with Foremark. Depending on which side of that placement you land on, it competes with you for the client or provides you with a source of pre-screened cases.
Investors now fund consumer legal AI. For three years, almost every legal-AI dollar went to corporate contract tools built to cut costs. A seed round aimed at growing consumer claims marks a turn, and more AI-driven competition for injury clients will likely follow.
The model depends on better underwriting. Foremark says every completed case sharpens its scoring system. If it can price claims more accurately, it can profitably pursue cases other firms reject. That is the part of the business PI firms should watch.
🔗 Foremark Legal →
🚀 QUICK HITS
8th Circuit Dismisses Appeal Over Bayer's Proposed $7.25 Billion Roundup Settlement: The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an appeal by plaintiffs objecting to Bayer's proposed settlement and trying to move the proceeding from Missouri state court into federal court. The dismissal leaves the deal in state court, where a final-approval hearing is set for Sept. 14. Ashley Keller, the objectors' lawyer, said they will continue opposing the settlement there. Bayer, which faces about 65,000 Roundup claims, calls the deal "fair to all parties" and says it would resolve most current and potential future U.S. claims alleging that Roundup causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Google Launches Gemini Enterprise for Legal: Google expanded its Gemini Enterprise platform with AI tools for law firms called Gemini Enterprise for Legal. The plug-in connects to legal platforms including Thomson Reuters, Harvey, and Legora, and Google said its AI agents can handle specialized legal and administrative work without significant human oversight. Weil Gotshal, Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, and Williams & Connolly are among the firms collaborating on it. It arrives a day after Thomson Reuters released its Thomson 1.0 legal model, amid competing enterprise pushes from rivals including Anthropic.
Former Client Sues WGK Personal Injury Lawyers for Malpractice: A Morgan State University student wounded in an October 2023 campus shooting filed a legal-malpractice suit against Baltimore firm WGK Personal Injury Lawyers and attorney Mark Herman in Baltimore Circuit Court. The complaint alleges the firm did little investigation, filed a thin negligence complaint, mishandled its response to a motion to dismiss that a judge granted in June 2025, and withdrew 40 days before the appellate brief was due. The client, now represented by Royston, Mueller, McLean & Reid, seeks more than $75,000. Herman and WGK owner and managing attorney Jill Kolodner did not respond to The Daily Record.
Indiana Court Revives a Suit Against a Bar Over a Drunk Driver: The Court of Appeals of Indiana reversed summary judgment for Kenny's Tavern. A driver left the bar, drove the wrong way on a one-way street, and hit the plaintiffs head-on. The trial court tossed the claim because his blood alcohol was 0.066, under the 0.08 limit, and the bartender swore he showed no signs of intoxication.. The appeals court ruled that a jury should consider the evidence (the driver’s five drinks in two hours and a police officer's report of slurred speech and alcohol odor minutes after the accident) to determine whether the bar’s employee should have known their patron was visibly drunk. The court issued a memorandum decision, not a binding precedent.
🎙️ FROM THE POD
Joe Vito on Turning Big Advertisers Into Referral Partners
The referral goes to the firm that makes the client stop calling the lawyer who sent them.
Joe Vito is founding partner of Vito & Dollenmaier Law in the Chicago metro. He launched the firm in 2022 and recovered more than $100 million for clients in under four years. Before that, he spent a decade on the other side, working for insurance companies.
Episode 472 is about a contrarian bet. The national advertisers keep pouring ad budgets into Chicago, and Joe built the litigation shop they hand their hardest cases to. We got into how he earns the referrals, why an attorney sits on every file, and how he turns denied claims into settlements.
Communication is the product. Joe's team answers every client text, email, or call within 24 hours, and Joe and his partner sit on every email from a referring attorney. He knows why the discipline is rare: A PI firm can't bill a status call, and it rarely moves the case, so the update is easy to skip. Skip enough of them and the client calls the attorney who made the referral. That relationship is the one that breaks.
A lawyer owns every file. Joe's firm runs without case managers. Three associates own their cases, so a client who calls gets an attorney working the file. That is what he offers the firms that refer to him.
File fast, then keep pushing. Referrals reach Joe because the sending firm exhausted its pre-litigation options, so the case is ripe for suit. He files within a month and uses the tools of civil procedure to force it forward. In Cook County, he says, defense attorneys stall and judges let cases linger, so a motion to compel, or the 201(k) letter that sets it up in Illinois, keeps the pressure on.
Insurers respond to competence more than a trial record. Joe spent years defending insurers, so he knows how they read a file. Trying cases matters, he says, but adjusters rarely track which firms go to trial. What moves an offer is a firm that files clean, pushes hard, and refuses a cheap settlement at the end.
Take the cases other firms skip. Chicago firms often pass on premises and slip-and-fall cases, because a commercial carrier will move for summary judgment on notice and the offer sits at zero or $10,000 until that motion clears. Prepare the client to survive it, Joe says, and the same carrier starts paying real value. One motorcycle referral arrived with a flat liability denial. His depositions dismantled the speeding story, and the parties settled it for $400,000.
"[The referral partner] thought it was a loser. That's why he gave it to us... we turned it into gold."—Joe Vito
The takeaway for PI firms: You can grow right next to the firms outspending you. Be the shop that answers every call and works every case hard, and their hardest files start coming to you.
Here's our full conversation:
🤖 AI SEARCH TIP OF THE WEEK
Google now surfaces developing-topic link carousels in AI Mode, a horizontal row of timely article cards, each with a headline, image, source, and date, set between sections of the AI answer. Google already used the format in AI Overviews, and it can spotlight a searcher's Preferred Sources, which Google says now exceed 600,000, up from 345,000 in May. Google gives the carousel more space than the small inline citations AI answers usually show, and Search Engine Journal says the larger format may draw more clicks.
The action this week: publish the timely, clearly dated reporting these carousels pull from: a new state law, a vehicle recall, or a major local crash. Then ask your audience to add your firm as a Preferred Source in Google. The carousel shows for only some searches, so treat this as one more reason to keep publishing fresh, not as a guaranteed placement.
🛠️ TOOL OF THE WEEK
What We're Seeing Inside ChatGPT Ads
Rankings.io now runs ChatGPT Ads across more than 50 PI accounts. I asked Jessica Ford, our Director of Paid Digital, to tell you what she sees inside the campaigns: what works, what is not yet stable, and how she would test the channel today.
Jessica, take it from here.
· · ·
Thanks, Chris. The useful news is that PI firms are starting to close cases from our ChatGPT Ads. The caution is that we do not have a dependable benchmark yet.
Early conversion rates are encouraging. Across the PI accounts we manage, rates have ranged from 2% to 5%. That gives us a reason to keep testing, but results still vary too much by campaign and market for me to build a forecast around that range.
Click costs move around—a lot. We have seen clicks cost a few dollars and more than $60, with many landing between $12 and $25. I would start with a controlled test rather than a large commitment. A budget of $2,000 to $4,000 gives us enough room to watch delivery, conversion tracking, and lead quality before increasing the spend.
OpenAI can now optimize campaigns toward a conversion. Its new conversion-optimized cost-per-click campaigns let you select one standard conversion event, such as a lead submission. OpenAI then adjusts its per-click bids based on the likelihood of producing that result. You still pay for valid clicks, and the campaign needs reliable conversion tracking before it launches.
The platform still needs active management. Verification, billing, and account-access glitches can interrupt delivery. We have also seen some campaigns run more consistently after we simplified contextual targeting. Most brief issues clear quickly, but this is not a channel I would launch and leave unattended.
My read today: ChatGPT Ads has earned more testing, but not a forecast built on a young data set. If your firm is considering the channel and wants to compare notes on what a sensible test looks like, reply to this email.
Disclaimer: Personal Injury Mastermind takes all reasonable steps to ensure accuracy in the materials we share, including articles, newsletters, and reports. These materials are intended for general informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. They may not reflect the most current laws or regulations. Always consult a qualified attorney for advice on a specific legal matter.
Thanks for reading. Quick ask…if you know someone who’d benefit from this content, please forward this to them. I’ll be back next week. - Chris
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