Make it obvious who it's for. Kramer's first rule is that the viewer has to know the board is for them before they pass it. A board that shouts INJURED could belong to any firm on the road. One that names the case, "hurt in a truck wreck," "hurt on the job," tells the exact person it's built for that you handle their fight. The driver who knows someone who just got rear-ended by a semi should feel you put the board there for them.

Match the message to what they already know. Kramer sorts viewers from unaware to brand-aware and says to assume yours know less than you hope. A household-name firm can run its logo and a wink. Everyone else has to earn the glance. Give the viewer one reason to choose you, a practice you're known for or a result you can prove, not the promise every other billboard makes.

Say one thing, and make it readable at speed. A driver gets three to six seconds, so Kramer's rules are blunt: one idea, six to eight words, a logo at 10 to 15% of the board, enough contrast that it doesn't blur. Her model is Framer's board: "the only site builder that gets design," seven words that say who it's for, what it is, and why it's different. PI creative breaks here, cramming a name, a tagline, three practice areas, two faces, a phone number, and "no fee unless we win" into three seconds. The driver reads none of it.

Bring the magic, and keep the committee out of it. This is the rule PI ignores most. "Avoid creative everyone is neutral on," Kramer writes. "That means it has no magic." The more partners who sign off, the safer and blander it gets. A board three people argued into agreement is a board no driver remembers. The ones that stick take a position: Baseten put one enormous word, "inference," on a hot-pink field while every rival went blue. Yours might be the practice you own or the fight you're known for, said with the same nerve.

Put proof in their hands before you pitch. Craig's pivot started with a book, not a billboard. He overnights hard copies of Semitruck Wreck: A Guide for Victims and Their Families to every serious inquiry, and says he's never lost a client who read it. A second book walks readers through vetting any lawyer, with checklists, credentials, and red flags. One grieving family showed up already down to three firms and asked the exact questions his book told them to ask. They hired him. Answer "How do I pick the right lawyer?" before someone else does.

Earn credentials the other side can't claim. Craig holds board certification in truck accident law, a credential fewer than 80 attorneys nationwide carry. Indiana has four. Two are at his firm, Craig, Kelley & Faultless. He backs it with a podcast of his own case experts, reconstructionists, heavy-truck mechanics, and financial planners, so he can tell a prospect, "Go listen to Episode 14. That's your reconstructionist." Every episode becomes searchable proof.

Get to the evidence before the defense does. While most firms wait for discovery, Craig's rapid response unit deploys the moment he signs a case. In one wrongful death case, his investigator caught the shipper showing up early to move the truck and filmed the load, still unsecured. That footage turned a $1 million policy into a multimillion-dollar recovery.

Staff the roles that build trust, even when they don't bill. Craig hires people who never send an invoice: a social worker who visits clients at home and works their benefits, paralegals who earn trucking certifications beside the attorneys, an MBA writer who turns each expert interview into content. He says it's bought him zero turnover, and every attorney on his roster came up as his law clerk and made Indiana Super Lawyer.

Agents read across the whole web. Google's information agents run 24/7 in the background, scanning blogs, news sites, and social posts alongside real-time data, then send the user one synthesized answer. To get picked by an agent, you have to show up across all those surfaces, not just your own pages.

Agents are starting to act, not just answer. Google is expanding agentic booking to local services. For categories like home repair and pet care, a user can "ask Google to call businesses on your behalf," and it rolls out across the U.S. this summer. Legal isn't on that list yet, but the direction points to a near future where a client's first contact with a firm runs through an agent.

This is where the searches already are. AI Mode passed one billion monthly users a year after launch, with queries doubling every quarter, and Google made Gemini 3.5 Flash its default model there worldwide. The name inside those answers is the one an injured person finds first.

The injured skew young and suburban. E-bike crashes clustered in wealthier, more suburban census tracts, the reverse of the pattern for traditional cyclists, whose injuries concentrate in the urban core. Riders 14 and under made up a rising share of the e-bike cases (15.6%, against 10.2% for bicycles), and moderate-to-severe injuries ran higher too (15.8% versus 11.9%). The families in these cases sit where PI firms already spend to reach them.

The defendant often isn't the rider. Police coded e-bike riders at fault more often than cyclists (58.4% versus 52.9%), but the study points past the rider to the machine. It flags a flood of "out-of-class" e-motos, sold alongside street-legal e-bikes, with motors over 750 watts and speeds past 62 mph. The authors also urge manufacturers to address battery-fire risks through UL safety certification. That puts manufacturers, retailers, and battery makers in frame, not only the person on the bike.

Regulation is catching up, and it will set the liability baseline. The findings feed a bipartisan federal bill, H.R. 5265, the Safe RIDE Act, introduced in September 2025, alongside state pushes on minimum age limits, speed caps, and frame labeling. Every new labeling or speed standard creates a duty a manufacturer or retailer might breach.

Uplift Lands Its Fourth PI Firm Deal: Uplift Investors added Rhode Island's Bottaro Injury Lawyers to its managed services organization, Orion Legal MSO, its fourth personal injury firm since January, Bloomberg Law reported. Under the MSO model, Uplift takes over a firm's back-office functions, marketing, finance, technology, talent, and administration, without owning the practice, which keeps it clear of the ban on non-lawyer ownership. Bottaro joins Louisiana's Dudley DeBosier, Kentucky's Hughes & Coleman, and Georgia's John Foy & Associates. Uplift closed its first fund this month at $670 million and says it will keep investing in PI firms and litigation service providers.

A Judge Casts Doubt on J&J Talc Cancer Claims: A federal magistrate judge told roughly 69,000 plaintiffs to prove Johnson & Johnson's talc caused their ovarian cancer or risk dismissal, Reuters reported. In New Jersey, U.S. Magistrate Judge Rukhsanah Singh wrote that testimony from two plaintiffs' experts, who could not rule out other causes, cast doubt on whether any plaintiff can show talc "specifically caused her ovarian cancer." J&J, which denies its talc is unsafe or contains asbestos, called the ruling a step toward dismissal. But Singh stopped short of dismissing the consolidated cases and gave plaintiffs until November 19 to make their case.

Appeals Court Decertifies the Boeing MAX 9 Shareholder Class Action: The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decertified the shareholder class action that accused Boeing of putting profit over safety before the January 2024 Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 cabin-panel blowout, Reuters reported. The court ruled that the shareholders never showed how to calculate damages across the class. Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., writing for the panel, said their damages expert offered only "a series of 'maybes,' 'perhapses' and 'what ifs.'" The court sent the case back to the trial judge. Boeing still faces a separate shareholder class action over the two fatal MAX crashes that killed 346.

Teen Drops His Meta Claims Days Before the Addiction Trial: A 15-year-old Florida plaintiff known as R.K.C. withdrew his claims against Meta days before a Los Angeles trial, Reuters reported. He acted after the three other platforms he sued had already exited. YouTube and TikTok settled in June on confidential terms, and Snap reached a tentative settlement. R.K.C. started using social media around age 8, he said, and it left him with depression and anxiety. He cited "the overall successful result of the litigation" and his reluctance to endure a weeks-long trial. Meta said he dropped the claims without any payment and called the suit baseless.

YouTube Appeals the Landmark Social-Media Addiction Verdict: YouTube filed a notice of appeal in Los Angeles County Superior Court, days after Meta appealed the same verdict, the AP reported. Both are challenging the jury's finding that they designed their platforms to hook young users. The case centered on a 20-year-old woman, identified as KGM, who said social media addicted her as a child and worsened her mental health. The jury found that negligence by Google-owned YouTube and Meta was a substantial factor in her harm. It awarded her $3 million in damages and recommended $3 million more in punitive damages. Lead plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier said he expects the appellate court to affirm the verdict.

EvenUp Partners With Claude to Sharpen AI for PI Cases: EvenUp, an AI platform built for personal injury work, partnered with Anthropic's Claude to reason across the medical records and billing data that bury critical facts across thousands of pages. EvenUp supplies its proprietary PI data and workflows. Claude Opus 4.8 adds the long-context reasoning. CEO and cofounder Rami Karabibar said PI law is one of the toughest challenges for AI, one that demands consistent reasoning across huge volumes of records. The tie-up follows Anthropic's broader push into legal, which this year added more than 20 software connectors and a dozen practice-area plugins.

Never take the first rate. From her years selling airtime, Trudy knows there's almost always added value left on the table. A preempted spot is leverage, not a loss: When political ads muscle in or a game runs long, that's the moment to push for an upgrade. If a Super Bowl or playoff spot falls out, she demands an equal or better replacement, not "a bunch of garbage" to make up the points.

Hire specialists, not more generalists. When Trudy tried to fix her bandwidth by adding marketing coordinators, output went up but quality didn't, because she'd brought on more generalists like herself. Specialists turned it around, people trained in data, design, and video. That's when the quality climbed and she got her time back.

TV still buys credibility digital can't. TV gets the most eyeballs fastest to the right people, Trudy says, and local news and sports still drive leads into the firm. Anyone can throw up a Meta or Google ad, but real creative on TV shows a firm with substance. Weak creative won't save the buy, but strong creative earns trust.

Plant the brand before they ask AI who to call. Trudy wants the seed planted long before someone needs a lawyer: a billboard they passed, a community event they showed up to, a TV spot that stuck. So when they ask ChatGPT "what's the best firm after my car accident" and several names come back, hers is the one they recognize. Bottom of the funnel is where a young firm starts, but omnipresence is how it grows.

Know your seasonality before you panic-spend. Trudy once split an annual goal into 52 even weeks and kept missing it early in the year. She overspent to catch up, until a data hire showed the misses were just seasonality. Her rule now: Fish where the fish are. Double down when accidents peak, ease off when they don't, and plan around the dead weeks like the 4th of July.

Anyone in the channel can delegate to it. Tag @Claude to pull a report, draft an update, or work a task, and it answers in the thread with what it made. Anthropic says 65% of its own product team's code now comes from the internal version, though that's engineering, not a law firm.

It stays scoped to the channels admins allow. A Claude set up for one use can't carry memories into another. It doesn't read private channels, and admins get a log of every task and who asked for it. TechCrunch's own example: a Claude for legal work walled off from the engineering channel.

Admins control the access and the spend. System administrators pick the tools, data, and channels Claude can touch, and set token-spend limits for the whole firm and for each channel.

It's early. Claude Tag is in beta for Claude Enterprise and Team customers only, and it replaces the existing Claude in Slack app.