Attorney advertising in the US costs $3.2 billion a year. I track it across 210 markets, firm by firm, channel by channel. 3,720 advertisers. 27 million ads over three years. A category that grew 32% since 2020 and isn’t slowing down.
Those numbers should mean opportunity. For most firms, they mean the opposite. More noise. More saturation. More money chasing the same eyeballs with the same “injured? call now” creative.
Here’s what the data actually shows: the firms buying signed retainers from lead vendors think they’re growing. They’re renting someone else’s pipeline. The firms building brand presence, CTV, and attribution infrastructure will own their markets. Everyone else will keep writing checks.
The $3.2 Billion Picture
Legal advertising didn’t just grow. It compounded. We tracked every dollar from Q1 2023 through Q4 2025 across 210 markets. Impressions up 21%. CTV spend up 241%. Legal services now claim 6.12% of all local broadcast impressions. That’s one in every 16 local TV ads. One category.
ATRA’s data shows legal advertising volume growing steadily from 2017 through 2024. No plateau in sight. The IAB found CTV rebounded 16% in 2024, hitting $23.6 billion across all categories. Legal follows the same curve. Just later. And with less sophistication.
Spending more doesn’t mean winning more. Farah and Farah ran 55,000 broadcast airings in three years. Morris Bart ran 47,000. Thomas J. Henry ran 31,000. That’s saturation, not strategy. In most markets, higher frequency amplifies sameness.
Renting Growth vs. Owning It
Two ways a firm gets cases. Rent them or earn them.
Renting works like this: a lead vendor sells you “signed retainers” or “exclusive leads.” You pay per case. Your intake team races to call first. Maybe you close 30% of what you buy. The other 70% goes to the next firm on the vendor’s list. Zero name recognition. Zero referral equity. Zero compounding return. The moment the check stops, the phone stops.
Owning looks completely different. A firm running consistent CTV and broadcast across its DMA builds household-level recognition. Someone in that household gets hurt, your firm is the name they search. Phone rings first. Referrals flow by default. That equity compounds every month you’re on air.
Renting Growth
- Pay per lead, zero equity
- Intake speed race with five firms
- Pipeline vanishes when budget stops
- Vendor controls your growth
- No brand recognition built
Owning Your Market
- Household-level awareness
- Phone rings first, no race
- Equity compounds over time
- You control the pipeline
- Referrals grow organically
The FCC’s 2025 one-to-one consent rule made renting worse. Broad consent no longer transfers across sellers. Every shared lead now carries TCPA liability at $500 to $1,500 per violation. The economics just got more expensive and more dangerous.
Where the Money Actually Goes
Linear TV still dominates attorney advertising spend. Local broadcast captures 38% of all legal ad impressions. Cable and syndication take another piece. CTV is accelerating but remains a fraction.
That’s not a CTV failure. It’s a timing gap.
Legal advertisers moved to television decades ago and built entire strategies around broadcast reach. Those strategies still work for the cord-attached audience, especially viewers 55 and older. The firms making smart moves aren’t choosing one channel over the other. They’re layering.
Our data shows top-spending firms doubled their CTV investment over 12 months while keeping broadcast spend stable. They added streaming on top. They didn’t replace anything.
If you abandon broadcast too early, you don’t become efficient. You become invisible. The 65-plus demographic indexes heavily on linear. Cut that channel and you lose the audience most likely to need a personal injury attorney. Smart firms layer CTV on top of broadcast, capturing the streaming audience without surrendering traditional reach.
The Local Battleground
National averages are useless. The $3.2 billion total means nothing to a firm in Houston competing against Jim Adler’s $1.21 million monthly spend. Or a firm in Seattle where the competitive landscape looks nothing like Atlanta.
Some DMAs have two or three dominant spenders controlling 40% of impressions. Others have 15 firms in a tight cluster where nobody owns more than 8%. Your strategy depends entirely on which reality you face. And most firms don’t know which one they’re in.
How Local Dynamics Determine Winners
Map your DMA's competitive landscape
Identify the top five spenders, their channel mix, and their monthly budget. Your market’s concentration ratio tells you whether you’re fighting for scraps or exploiting gaps.
Find the channel gaps
Most markets have at least one underweighted channel. If the top three all run broadcast and zero CTV, streaming inventory is available at lower CPMs with zero competitive clutter.
Build frequency where competitors aren't
$50K monthly on CTV in a market where competitors run zero streaming builds recognition with no noise. That’s how smaller budgets outperform larger ones.
Measure at the household level
Connect CTV impressions to website visits, calls, and signed cases. If you can’t draw a line from exposure to intake, you’re guessing. Attribution turns attorney advertising into a system.
Every DMA tells a different story. The firms that win know their market’s numbers before spending a dollar. I track all 210. Most firms track zero.
CTV: 241% Growth and Still Underweight
CTV spend in legal advertising grew 241% from Q1 2023 to Q4 2025. Sounds massive. It is. But context matters.
Legal services still represent only 2.72% of all local CTV impressions. Compare that to 6.12% of local broadcast. The category is twice as dominant on traditional TV as it is on streaming. Meanwhile, Nielsen reports streaming captured 47.5% of all TV viewing in December 2025. Nearly half the audience. Legal advertisers put less than 3% of their CTV-eligible impressions there.
That gap between viewer behavior and advertiser behavior? That’s the whole opportunity.
The IAB found digital video surpassed linear TV ad spend for the first time in 2024, with CTV alone reaching $23.6 billion. Legal is one of the last major categories to fully make that shift.
Why CTV Is Growing
- 241% spend growth in three years
- DMA and ZIP-level targeting precision
- 47% of TV viewing is streaming
- Lower CPMs in less competitive markets
- Faster creative optimization cycles
Why It's Still Underweight
- Only 2.72% of legal ad impressions
- Most firms lack CTV buying expertise
- Attribution infrastructure still immature
- Broadcast inertia at large firms
- No industry playbook for legal CTV
Q4 2025 hit 3.53% CTV impression share. Highest quarter on record. The trend line points one direction. The firms building CTV infrastructure now will own the advantage when the rest of the category catches up.
The Creative Gap Nobody Talks About
More attorney advertising spend doesn’t solve the creative problem. Most legal ads are interchangeable. Same format. Same language. Same call to action. “Injured? Call now.” Across 3,720 advertisers in 210 markets. Nobody stands out because nobody’s trying to.
Our creative analysis across 3,720 advertisers found widening variation in tone, from aggressive saturation to trust-led branding. But the majority still cluster around urgency-driven commodity messaging. Higher frequency amplifies sameness when the creative is identical.
CTV makes this worse and better at the same time. Worse: streaming audiences expect production quality. A 15-second broadcast spot that works on daytime linear feels cheap on Hulu or YouTube TV. Better: CTV opens formats broadcast can’t touch. Longer storytelling. Sequential messaging. Audience-specific creative rotations.
Then there’s the second screen.
MNTN Research found 83% of TV viewers use a second device while watching. Among streaming viewers, 65% look up information or visit an advertiser’s site during a program. Your CTV spot triggers a branded search. If your website doesn’t convert, competitors running local service ads on your firm name capture the demand you just created. You paid for the impression. They got the case.
That’s the full chain. CTV generates awareness. Awareness generates search. Search generates clicks. If you don’t own the conversion infrastructure at the end of that chain, you’re funding someone else’s pipeline.
What $3.2 Billion Buys (and What It Doesn’t)
Money buys impressions. It doesn’t buy brand. Doesn’t buy attribution. Doesn’t buy conversion infrastructure.
A firm spending $50K monthly pushing traffic to a homepage with no intake form, no call tracking, no conversion optimization isn’t advertising. They’re donating to their media vendor. The impression gets served. Nobody measures what happens after.
The firms losing in this market share one trait: they treat advertising as a line item instead of a system. Buy impressions. Hope the phone rings. Compare this month’s calls to last month’s. That’s not measurement. That’s guessing with expensive inputs.
Attribution changes the math entirely. When every CTV impression connects to a website visit, every call connects to a source, and every signed case connects to a campaign, advertising becomes a machine with known inputs and measurable outputs. You know which channels produce. Which creative converts. Which markets deserve more investment and which ones to cut.
Without attribution, $3.2 billion is just money in motion. With it, every dollar has a job.
The Firms That Win in 2026
Three things separate the firms that’ll own their markets from the ones that keep renting growth. No shortcuts. No hacks. Just the infrastructure that compounds.
First, they build brand at the household level. CTV, broadcast, and local digital working together until their firm name is the default answer in their DMA. Not a jingle. Not a billboard. Consistent, measured presence that compounds over quarters. Not weeks.
Second, they own their local market data. They know who’s spending what in their DMA, which channels competitors ignore, and where the gaps sit. National benchmarks don’t help a firm in Houston competing against different firms than one in Philadelphia. Market intelligence at the DMA level is the only data that matters.
Third, they connect every dollar to signed cases. Not impressions. Not clicks. Signed retainers traced back through intake, through calls, through website visits, through ad exposure. That’s the infrastructure that turns $50K monthly into a growth engine instead of a cost center.
The $3.2 billion flowing through attorney advertising will keep growing. More firms. More channels. More noise. The firms that build the infrastructure to cut through it won’t just survive the saturation. They’ll be the ones everyone else is trying to catch.
References
- Legal advertising market data derived from ACR-based monitoring of 23M+ Smart TVs across 210 US DMAs, Q1 2023–Q4 2025.
- Nielsen. "Streaming Shatters Multiple Records in December 2025 with 47.5% of TV Viewing." 2026.
- ATRA. "Legal Services Advertising in the United States, 2017-2024." 2025.
- Interactive Advertising Bureau. "2025 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report." 2025.
- Nielsen. "Connected TV Is Transforming Advertising." 2025.
- MNTN Research. "An Exploration of Second-Screen Use by TV Viewers." 2022.