An old joke asks, “How can you tell a lawyer is lying?” The punchline, “They’re moving their lips,” relies on a general view of the legal profession as less than fully ethical. Similarly, advertisers are often criticized for their willingness to engage in puffery and issue exaggerated claims, without sufficient evidence. So what happens when a lawyer engages in advertising?

A recent outdoor advertising campaign by the largest personal injury law firm in the United States, Morgan & Morgan, might offer some insights. The familiar billboards, usually featuring a picture of members of the Morgan family that founded the firm, also consistently include the company’s tagline, “For the People.” But in recent months, those billboards seemingly have been defaced by vandals. The graffitied revisions—appearing throughout Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Tennessee—look like spray-paint and include alterations such as putting beards, clown wigs, and devil horns on the lawyers’ faces. In addition, edits to the famous tagline lead to versions that read, for example, “For the Money,” “Chase the People,” and “Fool the People.”

The defacements prompted substantial attention, particularly on social media, where passersby took photos of the billboards and posted them widely. Traditional news media followed suit, with stories about the potential implications of such vandalism. But those news stories also raised some reasonable questions about just who could have been organized, well-funded, and persistent enough to vandalize so many billboards, across multiple states, at seemingly the precisely same time.

In raising these questions, several journalists pointed to Morgan & Morgan’s history of controversial advertising tactics. In 2015, the firm’s CEO John Morgan admitted to defacing billboards at that time, throughout Florida, though those incidents were not directly critical of the firm (e.g., adding a pro-Jaguars message to billboards in Jacksonville, Fla.). In addition, some of the firms’ employees and consumers have objected to an ostensibly risqué campaign in which the law firm marketed itself by asserting that its vast reach enabled it to serve clients better. Thus, it touted its status as the largest legal services provider in the personal injury category by featuring the tagline, “Size Matters.”

With regard to the recent billboards, the company has not explicitly admitted to being the culprit behind the current rash of vandalism. But John Morgan, in response to a request for comment, emailed one newspaper that “Only a true genius would deface his own billboards so that tv stations would do news stories about it and newspapers would write about it and hundreds of thousands of people would take pictures of them and post them on social media so that millions of people would see and share and ultimately end up on the front page of Reddit, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in free media.”

Discussion Questions

1. Are there ethical questions to be raised about such an advertising campaign?
2. Is Morgan & Morgan indeed a genius with this move? List the pros and cons (i.e., likely benefits and harms) of such a campaign.

Sources: Sharon Kennedy Wynne, “Morgan & Morgan Law Firm Billboards Defaced: Or Were They?” Tampa Bay Times, September 5, 2023; McKenna Schueler, “Newly Vandalized Morgan and Morgan Billboard Signs Have a Likely Culprit,” Orlando Weekly, September 5, 2023;