Ten firms spend $41.1 million every month on attorney advertising across the 35 designated market areas we track. That’s 29% of the $141 million monthly total. Everyone else, hundreds of firms across dozens of markets, splits the remaining 71%.
The concentration isn’t surprising. Legal advertising has always been a scale game. What’s surprising is where the money goes. The top 10 pour the overwhelming majority into broadcast television. They’ve built empires on a channel that now captures less than half of total TV viewing nationally. And the channel that’s growing fastest, CTV and streaming, sits almost empty in their biggest markets.
That gap is the whole story. Not the size of their budgets. The shape of them.
The Top 10 by Monthly Spend
Here’s who controls the 29%. Our tracking data across 35 DMAs, December 2025.
A few things jump out. Morgan and Morgan isn’t just the biggest spender. They’re the biggest by a factor of three. Nobody else cracks $6 million. And the concentration gets tighter at the top. Morgan alone accounts for 12.2% of all tracked spend. The next nine combined account for 16.8%.
Geographic concentration matters too. Seven of the top 10 operate in three or fewer markets. Montlick runs exclusively in Atlanta. The Barnes Firm concentrates on a single DMA. Even Jacoby and Meyers, at $5 million monthly, focuses on just two California markets.
Morgan is the outlier. Twenty-three markets. That breadth changes the math entirely.
The Morgan and Morgan Machine
Morgan and Morgan’s $17.2 million monthly budget spans 23 of 35 tracked markets. No other firm comes close to that geographic reach. Their model is simple. Enter a market. Establish broadcast dominance. Build the brand on frequency and repetition. Move to the next one.
Their top markets by spend tell the story. Atlanta at $2.24 million. New York at $1.92 million. Los Angeles at $1.41 million. Tampa at $1.33 million. These aren’t test budgets. They’re sustained, multi-year investments in broadcast infrastructure.
The strategy works at scale. Morgan holds 30%+ market share in Jackson, Washington DC, and Boston. They’re the top advertiser in seven DMAs. But the strategy has a specific shape. It’s built on broadcast television and radio. In most markets where Morgan dominates, CTV adoption sits below 15%.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s the architecture of their budget.
What the Giants Run
Across the top 10, the channel mix skews heavily traditional. The aggregate breakdown across all 35 tracked DMAs tells the story clearly.
More than half of every dollar goes to broadcast. That’s the gravitational center of legal advertising. The top 10 built their brands there. Their agency relationships are there. Their negotiated rates are there. Their creative libraries are built for 30-second broadcast spots.
CTV at 22.7% is growing. But it’s growing from a small base, and the adoption is wildly uneven. Some markets run 30%+ streaming. Others barely crack single digits. That unevenness is where the story gets interesting for everyone outside the top 10.
What Mid-Tier Firms Get Wrong
Here’s the pattern we see in market after market. A firm spending $75,000 to $200,000 monthly looks at the top advertisers in their DMA. They see broadcast dominance. They conclude that broadcast is where they need to be.
So they buy broadcast. And they get crushed.
Not because broadcast doesn’t work. It does. But broadcast is a frequency game. You need enough impressions, sustained over enough time, to build recall. Morgan and Morgan can run $1.3 million monthly in Tampa because their case volume supports it. A firm spending $150,000 monthly in the same market gets lost in the noise.
The mistake isn’t advertising. It’s channel selection. Mid-tier firms copy the giants’ channel mix without the giants’ budget. The result is the worst possible outcome. Enough spend to show up on an invoice, not enough to move the needle on brand recall.
Three specific errors show up repeatedly.
Broadcast at insufficient frequency. A firm needs roughly 150 to 200 gross rating points per week to build meaningful recall in a major DMA. At $50,000 monthly, you’re buying 30 to 40 GRPs. That’s background noise.
Radio without a personality. Jim Adler’s “Texas Hammer” works because it’s a character. Radio rewards distinctive voices and repetition. Generic legal spots on drive-time radio burn budget without building brand.
Zero CTV allocation. This is the biggest miss. In market after market, the giants leave streaming inventory almost untouched. Mid-tier firms follow them right off the same cliff.
The Streaming Gap Nobody’s Filling
The numbers here don’t require interpretation. They speak for themselves.
Six of the country’s most expensive legal advertising markets allocate 12% or less to streaming. Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that streaming accounts for 47.5% of all TV viewing nationally. The gap between where audiences watch and where legal advertisers spend is massive.
Washington DC is the most extreme case. Three percent. In a $2.6 million monthly market, that’s roughly $78,000 going to streaming across all advertisers combined. Morgan and Morgan holds 31.1% market share there, almost entirely on broadcast. The CTV inventory is wide open.
Boston tells a similar story. Morgan holds 30.4% of a $3.2 million market. CTV sits at 9%. The dominant advertiser built their position on broadcast. The emerging channel has almost no competition.
Compare those numbers to Atlanta, where 48% of legal ad spend goes to streaming. Or Las Vegas at 33%. Or Los Angeles at 33%. The markets where streaming adoption is high tend to be markets where a CTV-forward firm forced the shift. Thompson Law in Atlanta. Jacoby and Meyers in LA. Someone decided to go where the audience actually watches.
Where Smaller Firms Actually Win
The attorney advertising data points to a clear playbook for firms outside the top 10. Not a theory. A pattern visible across the markets we track.
CTV in broadcast-heavy markets. When the top advertiser in your DMA runs 0% streaming, you don’t need to outspend them. You need to out-position them with streaming campaigns for legal. CTV lets you target at the household level. A $50,000 monthly CTV budget in Dallas reaches specific households that Thomas J. Henry’s $2.4 million broadcast budget treats as statistical noise.
Markets the giants skip. Morgan and Morgan isn’t in every DMA. Neither is Thomas J. Henry or Jacoby and Meyers. The top 10 concentrate in 25 to 30 markets combined. That leaves 180+ DMAs where the biggest national brands have minimal or zero presence. Regional firms that own their home market face fundamentally different competitive math.
Streaming-first creative. The top 10 built creative libraries for 30-second broadcast spots. Their CTV creative, when it exists, is often a repurposed broadcast ad. Purpose-built streaming creative, designed for completion rates and targeted audiences, performs differently than a broadcast spot crammed into a pre-roll slot.
The concentration data reveals something counterintuitive. The top 10’s dominance is actually narrow. They control 29% of spend, yes. But they control it on one primary channel, in a limited number of markets, with creative built for a specific medium. Every dimension of that dominance has a corresponding gap.
The 71% Opportunity
The $141 million monthly total will keep growing. Legal advertising has increased every year for over a decade, and the trend shows no signs of slowing.
The question for firms outside the top 10 isn’t whether they can compete. It’s whether they’ll compete on the giants’ terms or their own. Copying Morgan and Morgan’s channel mix with 1% of their budget is a recipe for invisibility. Finding the channels, markets, and targeting strategies that the top 10 leave open is where the math starts working.
Twenty-nine percent concentration sounds intimidating. But the other 71% flows through markets and channels where the biggest names are either absent or underinvested. That’s $100 million monthly in space the giants aren’t filling.
The data doesn’t lie. It just waits for someone to read it.
References
- ATRA. "Legal Services Advertising Report, 2020-2024." 2025.
- Nielsen. "Streaming Shatters Multiple Records in December 2025 with 47.5% of TV Viewing." 2026.
- eMarketer. "US TV and Connected TV Ad Spending Forecasts, H2 2025." 2025.
- IAB. "2025 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy Report." 2025.
- Taqtics. "Legal Advertising Market Intelligence, Q1 2026." 2026.
