Outside Counsel

When I learned that Steve Barnes and Ross Cellino were under investigation, I braced myself for the cackles of the jackals, and I have not been disappointed. Cellino & Barnes changed the paradigm for plaintiff's personal injury practices in this end of the state, and in doing so managed to step on quite a few toes, and bend quite a few noses out of joint. They built the largest personal injury firm in New York-- a remarkable thing, and they did it two ways: by advertising, and by getting results.

Lawyer advertising has been legal for long enough that you'd think it would be no big deal by now, but when Cellino & Barnes started putting up billboards they started a buzz that was like nothing the Buffalo legal community had ever witnessed before. The radio station that featured morning shock jocks Shred & Regan put up a parody billboard across the way-- probably the funniest thing they ever were associated with. The Ethics Committee of the Erie County Bar Association harrumphed, called down its wrath, and decreed that the advertisement was in violation because it didn't list the firm's street and mailing address. (They changed it.) Newspaper columns were devoted to "the billboard lawyers". And everybody who practiced plaintiff's personal injury law saw their practice change.

There are basically three ways that a plaintiff's practice gets work. Most have some sort of regular source of referrals-- a connection to a labor union, say, or a lawyer in a different practice area who refers cases. There are the referrals that come from existing clients, and then there are the cases that just walk in. It is this last group that everybody wants, and that advertising is targeted to, but most lawyer advertising is pretty poor stuff. The yellow pages have become useless as a reference because the ads are so ubiquitous, and that was about as far as anyone had figured it out until the billboards went up.

They hadn't been up long before people noticed that they weren't getting a lot of the walk-in clients they used to. By the time the television ads started, people were leaving their lawyers and signing up with Cellino & Barnes. "They've sucked all the air out of the room," a friend complained to me. Firms that would never have advertised in the past-- notably the Beltz office, until that time the undisputed leader in the category-- found that they had to start in order to compete in the marketplace. (The Beltz ads are classy, like commercials for high end brokerage firms. I wonder about how effective they are-- they seem like they were designed to avoid stepping on toes, or offending the sorts of people who are offended by lawyer commercials.) Somehow Cellino & Barnes managed to keep finding ways to advertise more heavily. I'm not sure when I noticed it, but for a couple of years radio broadcasts of Bills games referred to the area inside the opponent's 20 yard line as "the Cellino & Barnes red zone."

All of that is about the hype. The other part of it is that they helped a lot of people, and were tough adversaries. They gave out a lot of money, too, to the Parks, in scholarships, to other cultural organizations, to hospitals. They weren't shy about letting people know about it, but you'd have to say that they were good corporate citizens.

We practiced with Steve before he went off and started practicing with Ross, and we went off to start our practice. I feel sad that someone I know and like ended up like this-- they got greedy, they tried to corner the market, and it ended up the way that sort of story always seems to, sooner or later. "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered" is what is written on the tombstone of every failed law firm. The ecology of plaintiff's personal injury firms is such that they seldom get very large: usually they break up because the partners are each talented trial lawyers, with big egos, and they decide that they are tired of sharing. Cellino & Barnes grew to a very unusual size by avoiding that particular trap-- although the lawyers in the shop were all certainly capable, I don't think any of them would be on anyone's list of "Most Dazzling Trial Lawyer In Town." For the most part they are all lawyers who have labored in the insurance defense vineyards, a lot of them in-house. They knew how to try a case, and they were tired of getting clobbered. Cellino & Barnes offered the chance to be on the good end of a verdict for a change, and they didn't have to bring in any clients-- the firm took care of that. The trick to plaintiff's work is twofold: screen out the dogs, and be prepared to try everything. They had the lawyers on hand to try the cases, and that meant they were able to get the maximum value out of what they took in. It was a clever model-- it kept the egos out of the business, and made the practice more stable, but in the end the temptations of greed found another way in.

A couple of years ago they were talking about putting up their own building on the waterfront. Now everyone who worked there will be scrambling to find someplace to land. Ross and Steve will continue to receive quantum meruit on the cases that were in the office, and I suspect that they made a big enough pile of money during their run to keep them from having to dance in the streets for nickels. It's a shame, is what it is, and on top of it we are going to get the big helping of schadenfreude that's been fermenting in the basement since the first billboard went up. Indeed, the rumor mill was cackling about it for weeks before it happened.