Dallas-Fort Worth doesn’t look like any other legal advertising market in the country. Not because it’s small. DMA number five, 2.8 million TV households tracked by Nielsen, $6.9 million monthly in legal ad spend. It’s massive. The difference is concentration.
One firm controls 34.7% of every legal ad dollar in the market. Thomas J. Henry spends $2.4 million per month in Dallas alone. That’s the highest single-firm share among all 210 tracked US markets. Not New York. Not Los Angeles. Not Houston, the other Texas giant. Dallas.
And almost none of it touches streaming.
CTV captures 9.7% of Dallas legal ad spend. Nationally, streaming hit 47.5% of all TV viewing in December 2025, per Nielsen’s The Gauge. On Christmas Day alone, streaming surged to 54%. Four platforms set records that month. Dallas legal advertisers put less than a dime of every dollar into the channel where half the audience already lives.
That’s the gap. The Dallas market data maps the full competitive landscape across all 148 firms.
Where $6.9 Million Goes Every Month
Growth in Dallas is aggressive. The market jumped 25.5% year-over-year, from $5.5 million to $6.9 million monthly. That outpaces Houston’s 20% growth and every other top-10 DMA except Atlanta.
The channel mix tells you who’s driving it.
Broadcast and radio combine for 89.7% of all legal ad spend. Cable barely exists at 0.7%. Streaming captures $665K, roughly what one mid-tier firm spends on broadcast alone. The entire CTV market in Dallas is smaller than Ben Abbott’s monthly television budget.
Compared to other top markets, the imbalance is stark. Atlanta allocates 48% to streaming. Los Angeles runs 33%. Even Houston, with its own broadcast-heavy culture, reaches 18%. Dallas sits at the bottom of every major-market CTV comparison.
Thomas J. Henry Owns the Market
No other advertiser in any market we track commands the share Henry holds in Dallas. His $2.4 million monthly represents 34.7% of the DMA.
Here’s how that money splits: 78% broadcast television ($1.86 million), 13.4% radio ($321K), 8.5% streaming ($202K), and zero cable. He floods WFAA, KXAS, KDFW, and KTVT with spots. Morning news, evening news, primetime. The Texas-scale approach to brand saturation.
Henry isn’t local. He built his practice in San Antonio and expanded into Dallas-Fort Worth as a media play. NPR investigated his advertising economics in 2024, documenting how critics question whether the math works. It does. His firm converts broadcast saturation into signed cases at industrial scale, the same model Jim Adler pioneered in Houston.
But 8.5% CTV. That’s $202K streaming against a $2.4 million total budget. The market’s dominant player barely acknowledges the fastest-growing channel in television. He’s winning with a strategy built for 2015. In 2026, that’s a choice that leaves enormous room for someone else.
The Top 10 and the Dropoff
Remove Henry from the equation, and Dallas fragments fast. The number two advertiser spends less than 37% of what Henry does. Beyond the top five, budgets collapse below $255K.
The top five control 68.1% of the market. That concentration is unusual among major DMAs. New York’s top five hold 36.6%. Chicago’s top five hold around 40%. Dallas is structurally different. Nationally, the top 10 legal advertisers control 29% of all spend, but Dallas skews far above that average.
Jim Adler, “The Texas Hammer,” runs the second-largest budget at $866K. His profile matches his Houston operation: broadcast-heavy at 78%, radio at 19%, and streaming at just 2.4%. Twenty thousand dollars a month in CTV from a firm spending nearly $900K total.
Ben Abbott runs third at $627K. Almost entirely television. Streaming at 0.9%. Five thousand dollars a month.
Thompson Law Is the Exception
Thompson Law tells a different story. At $463K monthly in Dallas, they allocate 38.3% to streaming. That’s $177K in CTV spend, making them the second-largest streaming advertiser in the market behind Henry.
This isn’t an experiment. Thompson runs 68.7% CTV in Atlanta, where they’ve built a $1.4 million monthly presence. Streaming is their playbook. Dallas is the expansion.
Every other firm in the top 10? Zero or near-zero streaming. Mullen & Mullen spends $344K monthly. All radio. Not one dollar in CTV. Witherite Law Group at $162K. All radio. Erika N. Salter at $124K. All radio. Godsey Law Firm at $104K. All radio.
That pattern repeats across the entire bottom half of the top 10. Radio-only advertisers stacking frequency on AM/FM without touching streaming, cable, or even broadcast television.
Why Dallas Runs So Much Radio
Dallas-Fort Worth is 9,286 square miles. It’s not one city. It’s a constellation of cities stitched together by highways. Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Irving, Frisco, McKinney, Denton. The commutes are long, the sprawl is relentless, and the car is everything.
The Texas A&M Transportation Institute puts DFW commuters among the most congested in the state. Edison Research confirms that AM/FM radio commands 86% of all ad-supported in-car listening nationally. For drivers 35 to 54, radio captures 60% of in-car audio.
That explains the 34.4% radio allocation. It’s the second-highest among major legal ad markets, behind only Houston at 34%. New York allocates 29%. Los Angeles barely reaches 2%.
Radio works in Texas because Texans drive. Firms like Mullen & Mullen and Witherite have built their entire advertising strategy around it. They own drive-time inventory. Morning commute. Evening commute. Weekend errands. It’s effective for frequency.
But radio doesn’t reach the 47.5% of TV viewing that’s migrated to streaming. Different channel, different screen, different audience behavior entirely.
The CTV Gap in Dollar Terms
Here’s where the math gets interesting.
Dallas has $665K monthly flowing through law firm streaming advertising. Across 148 firms. The entire market’s CTV spend is less than what Jim Adler puts into broadcast alone.
A firm spending $75K monthly on Dallas CTV would capture 11.3% of all legal streaming inventory in the DMA. Not 11% of all advertising. 11% of legal streaming specifically. That kind of category dominance doesn’t exist on broadcast, where $75K barely registers against $3.8 million in competing spend.
Compare that to Atlanta, where a legal CTV market nine times larger makes the same $75K worth less than 1.3% of streaming inventory. Or Houston, where $1.3 million in legal CTV means $75K buys 5.8% share. Dallas offers disproportionate ownership per dollar.
At a $30 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), $75K monthly buys 2.5 million household impressions. Dallas has 2.8 million TV households. That’s nearly one unskippable impression per household per month. Completion rates on CTV run above 90%. The ads play on the biggest screen in the house.
Why 9.7% CTV Persists
Three forces keep Dallas locked in traditional channels.
Henry’s gravity. When one firm controls 35% of the market and runs 78% broadcast, it drags the aggregate CTV number down. If Henry shifted from 8.5% to 25% streaming, the market average would jump several points overnight. His weight distorts everything.
The radio-first culture. Seven of the top 10 Dallas advertisers run 100% radio. That’s not a trend. That’s an entrenched buying pattern. These firms have negotiated long-term radio contracts. They know their drive-time performance. Changing channels means changing measurement, relationships, and creative. It’s friction.
Texas expansion patterns. Several of Dallas’s largest advertisers entered the DMA from other Texas markets. Henry came from San Antonio. Thompson came from Atlanta. United Firm expanded from California. They imported existing media strategies. The locals learned from radio incumbents. Nobody built a Dallas-specific streaming strategy from scratch.
CTV Opportunity Score: 85 out of 100
We score every market on CTV opportunity using three factors. Current adoption (lower is better for new entrants). Total market spend (higher means more to capture). And competitive concentration (higher concentration means fewer established streaming competitors).
Dallas scores 85 out of 100. Only Washington DC and Boston score higher, but neither matches Dallas’s combination of a $6.9 million market with sub-10% CTV.
In practical terms, there are exactly two firms spending meaningful money on Dallas streaming: Thompson Law at $177K and Thomas J. Henry at $202K. Everyone else combined contributes roughly $286K. That’s it. That’s the entire competitive field in Dallas CTV.
A firm entering with $100K monthly in streaming TV services for law firms would immediately become the third-largest CTV advertiser in the market. In Dallas. DMA number five. $6.9 million in total spend. Third place in streaming for $100K.
That doesn’t happen in Houston, where $1.3 million in CTV means you’re fighting for position. It doesn’t happen in Atlanta, where Thompson and others have already staked out streaming territory. Dallas is the only top-10 DMA where a mid-range budget buys top-tier streaming share. The math isn’t complicated. It’s just that nobody’s done it yet.
The inventory is there. The audience is there. The competing spend isn’t. Every month that stays true is another month of runway for whoever moves first.
What Changes in the Next 18 Months
Every major market trends toward higher CTV adoption. Dallas won’t stay at 9.7% forever.
Thompson Law is the catalyst. If they bring their full Atlanta playbook to Dallas, scaling from $177K to something closer to their $1.4 million Atlanta presence, the market’s streaming share doubles or triples within a year. eMarketer projects national CTV ad spend growth of 16% annually through 2028. Legal follows that curve with a lag.
ATRA’s 2024 national report documents the broader shift: $2.5 billion in annual legal advertising across 26.9 million ads, up 39% since 2020. The money moves. Slowly in Texas, but it moves.
The firms that establish streaming presence before the inflection point lock in favorable inventory rates and build audience data. The firms that wait enter a crowded, more expensive market.
Dallas is the largest untapped CTV opportunity in top-10 legal advertising. $6.9 million monthly. 148 firms. 9.7% streaming. One firm owns the market on broadcast. Everyone else fights over radio.
That window won’t stay open.
References
- Nielsen. "2024-2025 Local Television Market Universe Estimates." 2024.
- Nielsen. "Streaming Shatters Multiple Records in December 2025 with 47.5% of TV Viewing." 2026.
- KUT Austin (NPR). "How Does Thomas J. Henry Make Any Money When He Spends So Much on Ads?" 2024.
- eMarketer. "US Connected TV Ad Spending Forecast, H2 2025." 2025.
- ATRA. "Legal Services Advertising in the United States, 2020-2024." 2025.
- Edison Research. "Share of Ear, Q4 2024." Via Inside Radio, 2025.
- Texas A&M Transportation Institute. "2025 Urban Mobility Report." 2025.
