The Two Wars
AI now answers the question before anyone clicks, and it names one firm. The brand it cites wins the market. Yet personal injury firms still pour fortunes into two older wars, the airwaves and the search auction, while the front that decides who gets named sits wide open, and almost no one is on it.
19 of 35 markets sit at or below 20%.
350,630 injury searches a month, fought click by click.
Sources: ad spend and channel mix, AdImpact, September to December 2025. Search demand and cost-per-click, Google Ads Keyword Planner, December 2025. The search auction is modeled as monthly searches times the volume-weighted cost-per-click, a directional measure of auction size, not reported spend.
A note on scale. Every dollar figure in this study is measured across the 35 markets we track: $141.6M a month across broadcast, cable, streaming, and radio, of which $87.7M is television. Firm-level share comes from the top five advertisers by spend in every market, and we hold the complete advertiser roster in 9 of them. Unless a figure says otherwise, it is the measured 35-market all-channel number.
The click no longer closes the loop.
For fifteen years, a firm's growth plan ran on one assumption: rank for "car accident lawyer [city]," collect the click, answer the phone. Search prices climbed to match that demand. Houston, the largest paid-search market here, runs a volume-weighted $193 per click across 79,690 monthly searches. Dallas sits at $232 blended, with a single keyword reaching $692.52. Firms paid those prices because the click closed the loop.
That loop is breaking. Google's AI Mode now answers the question before the user reaches a result. Semrush tracked roughly 69 million sessions between May and July 2025 and found that 92 to 94 percent of Google AI Mode searches on U.S. desktop ended without a visit to an external domain. A firm bidding $692 per click competes for a shrinking cohort, while most of the audience already has its answer.
$141.6M a month, measured.
This is instrumented spend across all four measured channels, market by market. Television, broadcast plus cable, takes $87.7M of it. The dollar does not distribute evenly. It stacks.
Spend-weighted share (bar) and simple market average. Source: AdImpact, 35 DMAs.
54% of every measured dollar is still on broadcast. CTV sits at 23% spend-weighted, roughly $32.1M a month, concentrated in the markets that moved fastest. Los Angeles runs 33% CTV on a $22.5M base. Atlanta runs 48% on a $12.9M base. The holdouts are just as sharp: Washington DC at 3%, Boston at 9%. They are still buying the 2015 media plan while their audiences have moved.
Where broadcast is already won.
In the most concentrated markets, one firm owns the airwaves and the top three control more than half of every measured ad dollar.
| Market | Ad spend / mo | Top firm | Top-1 | Top-3 | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jackson, MS | $2.3M | Morgan & Morgan | 38.0% | 61.7% | 18% |
| Biloxi-Gulfport, MS | $868K | Morris Bart Attorney | 36.4% | 54.5% | 18% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth, TX | $6.9M | Thomas J. Henry | 34.7% | 56.4% | 10% |
| Washington, DC | $2.6M | Morgan & Morgan | 31.1% | 54.0% | 3% |
| Boston, MA | $3.2M | Morgan & Morgan | 30.4% | 53.5% | 9% |
| Little Rock-Pine Bluff, AR | $2.6M | Morgan & Morgan | 29.5% | 50.7% | 18% |
| Savannah, GA | $2.9M | Morgan & Morgan | 26.3% | 54.6% | 18% |
| San Antonio, TX | $2.5M | Thomas J Henry Law | 26.3% | 37.4% | 22% |
Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
Every locked market shares one trait: CTV at 22% or below. The dominant firm saturated broadcast and left streaming untouched. The incumbent is not on CTV. The audience is.
Where no one holds the room.
These markets are structurally fragmented. No incumbent owns the frame, and the top spender runs a number a coherent campaign can match or beat.
| Market | Ad spend / mo | Top firm | Top-1 | Top-3 | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salisbury, MD | $277K | Dimopoulos Injury | 5.2% | 14.9% | 22% |
| Charlotte, NC | $2.4M | C R Legal Team | 6.0% | 15.8% | 22% |
| Seattle-Tacoma, WA | $2.6M | Dubin Law Group | 8.1% | 19.9% | 27% |
| Greensboro-High Point-Winston Salem, NC | $1.6M | Daggett Shuler Attorney | 8.3% | 19.4% | 21% |
| Wilmington, NC | $396K | Horton & Mendez | 8.5% | 19.4% | 21% |
Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
In a fragmented market the constraint is not cost or concentration. It is consistency. Five firms spending scattered dollars with scattered messaging produce no one the audience can name. One firm running a coherent campaign at the same spend becomes the firm people recall.
Same dataset, three different problems.
Both wars at once. Thomas J. Henry holds 34.7% of a $6.9M ad market, search runs $232 per click, and the truck-accident keyword peaks at $692.52. CTV sits at 10%. A flanking play, not a frontal fight.
Large and surprisingly open. $14.5M a month, yet top-1 share is 13.3% and top-3 is 26.8%, among the most fragmented in the dataset for its size. The barrier here is budget, not concentration.
The fight already moved to CTV. Morgan & Morgan leads at 17.4% of a $12.9M market, but 48% of it is already on streaming, the highest in the dataset. Broadcast share is a trailing signal here.
December moved two markets at once.
Ad spend heating, search still cheap. The entry window before the auction follows.
Source: AdImpact (ad spend change), September to December 2025; Google Ads Keyword Planner (CPC), December 2025.
Los Angeles and Atlanta together added $19.2M in a single month. That is a market-structure event: incumbents lock inventory ahead of a surge, and firms entering after it pay the premium. DC moved the other way, the deepest pullback in the dataset. The audience did not leave. The competitive pressure did.
The most expensive clicks in America.
Real costs-per-click on legal search terms, by city. A single click, not a case. Among the priciest keywords in any industry on earth.
Top-of-page bids in several of these markets peg the $1,000 ceiling. The auction is maxed out. Source: Google Ads Keyword Planner, December 2025.
Where the money is vs where the fight is.
Each market, side by side: dollars committed to measured advertising against the modeled size of its search auction. When the teal dot sits right of the dark dot, the digital fight is bigger than the measured ad market.
Two markets already fight harder online than on air.
Here the modeled search auction is larger than the entire measured ad market, yet streaming adoption stays low. The attention has moved. The money has not.
Expensive in two completely different ways.
79,690 monthly searches, a $193 volume-weighted CPC, roughly 3,984 modeled paid clicks a month. "houston car accident lawyer" alone runs 33,100 searches at $213.92 per click, a paid market larger than many cities' entire ad budgets.
12,390 monthly searches at a $232 volume-weighted CPC, topped by "dallas truck accident lawyer" at $692.52 on 1,900 searches. Owning that one keyword for a year runs about $1.32M, in a market where one firm already holds 34.7% of measured ad spend.
The 20 most expensive credible clicks
| Keyword | Vol / mo | CPC |
|---|---|---|
| dallas truck accident lawyer | 1,900 | $693 |
| san antonio truck accident lawyer | 1,000 | $547 |
| new orleans truck accident lawyer | 880 | $498 |
| tampa accident attorney | 720 | $478 |
| atlanta truck accident lawyer | 3,600 | $440 |
| las vegas accident attorney | 880 | $356 |
| san antonio accident attorney | 480 | $330 |
| richmond car accident lawyer | 590 | $309 |
| houston accident attorney | 590 | $268 |
| houston truck accident lawyer | 22,200 | $268 |
| las vegas motorcycle accident lawyer | 2,400 | $266 |
| los angeles truck accident lawyer | 2,900 | $245 |
| houston car accident lawyer | 33,100 | $214 |
| atlanta motorcycle accident lawyer | 3,600 | $212 |
| san francisco car accident lawyer | 1,600 | $196 |
| wilmington car accident lawyer | 390 | $193 |
| dallas accident attorney | 390 | $192 |
| los angeles accident attorney | 1,900 | $188 |
| new york truck accident lawyer | 3,600 | $184 |
| new york accident attorney | 3,600 | $180 |
Seven of the top ten are truck-accident queries. Truck cases carry higher settlement values, so firms pay more per click, which bids every other PI keyword in the city upward. Source: Google Ads Keyword Planner, December 2025.
Where the machine cites instead of ranks.
Search and TV are the paid auctions. A third surface is forming underneath them, and it does not price by click. When AI answers a question, it does not serve ten blue links. It gives one answer, sourced from whatever it already trusts. Ranking does not appear. Citation does.
What earns a place in that pool is structural. Researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi, publishing at ACM SIGKDD 2024, found that content built with cited sources, added statistics, and attributed quotations improved AI visibility by 30 to 40% over content without them. So the firm whose own site carries original data, real authorship, and claims that trace to a source is the one the model cites. The firm with a thin "we fight for you" page, spending $693 a click in Dallas and nothing on its own authority, is invisible to the surface that now decides who gets named.
Three positions, all readable before the spend.
Jackson, Biloxi, and Dallas are broadcast-locked. LA and Atlanta just repriced upward by $19.2M in a month. Entering on broadcast today means fighting incumbents who have held 25 to 38% share long enough to own the memory.
Charlotte (6.0% top-1, $68 CPC), Seattle (8.1%, $87), Greensboro (8.3%), and Baltimore (10.5%) have no firm above 11% and no consistent brand signal. CTV already runs 22 to 27%, so the audience is built and waiting.
Savannah ($49 CPC), Spokane ($69), Birmingham ($46), and Little Rock ($81) are heating up on air while search stays cheap. The awareness goes in and the auction has not followed yet. That arbitrage closes.
The bridge between the broadcast wars and the search auction is a 23% channel that 19 of 35 markets have not seriously contested. CTV builds the recall that makes someone name a firm when they are hurt. A citable website is what puts that firm in the AI answer. The firms funding only broadcast frequency and paid clicks are building neither.
Find your market.
Every metro in the dataset, with its full read: measured ad spend and the month's move, the channel mix, who holds the room, and the search auction beneath it. The position is computed from measured concentration and momentum.
160 firms compete. Top five hold 60%. Cracking the top ten takes about $467K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jacoby & Meyers | $4,407,367 | 19.6% | 68% |
| 2 | Sweet James | $3,036,342 | 13.5% | 25% |
| 3 | Morgan & Morgan | $2,331,544 | 10.4% | 15% |
| 4 | Law Offices Of Larry H Parker | $1,874,725 | 8.3% | 41% |
| 5 | Law Brothers | $1,757,542 | 7.8% | 20% |
| 6 | Barnes Firm | $869,250 | 3.9% | 43% |
| 7 | Law Offices Of Jacob Emrani | $638,679 | 2.8% | 49% |
| 8 | Los Defensores | $630,415 | 2.8% | 0% |
| 9 | DTLA Law Group | $471,940 | 2.1% | 39% |
| 10 | Allied Injury Group | $466,764 | 2.1% | 98% |
Full board, top 10 of 160. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
151 firms compete. Top five hold 66%. Cracking the top ten takes about $220K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Morgan & Morgan | $2,237,884 | 17.4% | 37% |
| 2 | Montlick Injury Attorneys | $2,110,945 | 16.4% | 54% |
| 3 | Thompson Law | $1,400,970 | 10.9% | 69% |
| 4 | Law Offices Of Gary Martin Hays & Associ | $1,398,467 | 10.9% | 51% |
| 5 | Kenneth S Nugent | $1,294,253 | 10.1% | 60% |
| 6 | John Foy & Associates | $953,393 | 7.4% | 62% |
| 7 | Dennis Law Firm | $650,620 | 5.1% | 75% |
| 8 | Dozier Law Firm | $413,538 | 3.2% | 81% |
| 9 | Law Offices Of Julian Lewis Sanders & As | $323,798 | 2.5% | 0% |
| 10 | My 25% Lawyer | $220,398 | 1.7% | 0% |
Full board, top 10 of 151. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
108 firms compete. Top five hold 52%. Cracking the top ten takes about $197K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Malman Law | $997,651 | 13.7% | 34% |
| 2 | Lerner & Rowe | $948,877 | 13.0% | 34% |
| 3 | Postman Law | $768,328 | 10.6% | 14% |
| 4 | Allen Law Group | $550,486 | 7.6% | 0% |
| 5 | Ankin Law | $523,491 | 7.2% | 7% |
| 6 | Horwitz Horwitz & Associates | $431,100 | 5.9% | 67% |
| 7 | Davis Law Firm | $381,589 | 5.2% | 1% |
| 8 | Consumer Law Group | $352,629 | 4.8% | 0% |
| 9 | Witherite Law Group | $205,800 | 2.8% | 0% |
| 10 | Law Offices Of Jeffery M Leving | $197,327 | 2.7% | 0% |
Full board, top 10 of 108. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
162 firms compete. Top five hold 43%. Cracking the top ten takes about $170K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jim Adler & Associates | $1,208,806 | 16.8% | 6% |
| 2 | Terry Bryant Accident & Injury Law | $848,638 | 11.8% | 28% |
| 3 | Allied Injury Group | $390,043 | 5.4% | 50% |
| 4 | Smith & Hassler | $384,149 | 5.4% | 26% |
| 5 | Asbestos Cancer-Victims Justice Group | $223,409 | 3.1% | 97% |
| 6 | Attorney Brian White Personal Injury Law | $201,959 | 2.8% | 28% |
| 7 | Domingo Garcia Law Office | $196,306 | 2.7% | 0% |
| 8 | Nava Law Group | $192,529 | 2.7% | 0% |
| 9 | Gomel & Associates | $188,033 | 2.6% | 0% |
| 10 | Justinian & Associates | $170,437 | 2.4% | 100% |
Full board, top 10 of 162. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
148 firms compete. Top five hold 68%. Cracking the top ten takes about $104K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thomas J Henry | $2,387,627 | 34.7% | 8% |
| 2 | Jim Adler & Associates | $865,538 | 12.6% | 2% |
| 3 | Ben Abbott & Associates | $627,378 | 9.1% | 1% |
| 4 | Thompson Law | $462,792 | 6.7% | 38% |
| 5 | Mullen & Mullen Law Firm | $343,983 | 5.0% | 0% |
| 6 | Frenkel & Frenkel | $254,862 | 3.7% | 12% |
| 7 | United Firm-La Liga Defensora | $194,596 | 2.8% | 0% |
| 8 | Witherite Law Group | $161,716 | 2.4% | 0% |
| 9 | Law Offices Of Erika N Salter | $123,516 | 1.8% | 0% |
| 10 | Godsey Law Firm | $103,589 | 1.5% | 0% |
Full board, top 10 of 148. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
87 firms compete. Top five hold 55%. Cracking the top ten takes about $121K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sweet James | $786,794 | 16.9% | 11% |
| 2 | Jacoby & Meyers | $639,960 | 13.7% | 38% |
| 3 | Law Brothers | $490,341 | 10.5% | 3% |
| 4 | Barnes Firm | $367,286 | 7.9% | 26% |
| 5 | Berg Injury Lawyers | $282,766 | 6.1% | 7% |
| 6 | Walkup Melodia Kelly & Schoenberger | $212,708 | 4.6% | 39% |
| 7 | Venardi Zurada | $190,398 | 4.1% | 0% |
| 8 | Arash Law | $164,519 | 3.5% | 0% |
| 9 | Los Defensores | $147,422 | 3.2% | 0% |
| 10 | Scranton Law Firm | $121,031 | 2.6% | 0% |
Full board, top 10 of 87. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
92 firms compete. Top five hold 66%. Cracking the top ten takes about $114K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Morgan & Morgan | $985,953 | 21.4% | 12% |
| 2 | Kline & Specter | $631,200 | 13.7% | 20% |
| 3 | Spear Greenfield | $627,741 | 13.6% | 32% |
| 4 | Lundy Law | $392,190 | 8.5% | 0% |
| 5 | TopDog Law | $384,706 | 8.4% | 0% |
| 6 | Gilman & Bedigian | $221,226 | 4.8% | 11% |
| 7 | Pond Lehocky Giordano | $154,526 | 3.4% | 1% |
| 8 | J Fine Law | $148,518 | 3.2% | 0% |
| 9 | Messa & Associates | $140,551 | 3.1% | 41% |
| 10 | Stern & Cohen | $114,070 | 2.5% | 9% |
Full board, top 10 of 92. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
78 firms compete. Top five hold 69%. Cracking the top ten takes about $64K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Morgan & Morgan | $970,679 | 30.4% | 19% |
| 2 | Jason Stone Injury Lawyers | $432,010 | 13.5% | 0% |
| 3 | Keches Law Group | $306,103 | 9.6% | 0% |
| 4 | Sweeney Merrigan Personal Injury Lawyers | $283,520 | 8.9% | 14% |
| 5 | Jim Glaser Law | $223,706 | 7.0% | 21% |
| 6 | Michael Kelly Injury Lawyers | $151,592 | 4.7% | 0% |
| 7 | Rob Levine Law | $145,657 | 4.6% | 3% |
| 8 | TopDog Law | $118,090 | 3.7% | 0% |
| 9 | Law Offices Of Barry Feinstein & Affilia | $94,028 | 2.9% | 0% |
| 10 | Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers | $64,206 | 2.0% | 0% |
Full board, top 10 of 78. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
82 firms compete. Top five hold 69%. Cracking the top ten takes about $82K a month.
| # | Firm | Spend / mo | Share | CTV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Morgan & Morgan | $810,030 | 31.1% | 5% |
| 2 | Marks & Harrison | $319,140 | 12.2% | 3% |
| 3 | Cochran Firm | $277,940 | 10.7% | 0% |
| 4 | Saiontz & Kirk | $224,599 | 8.6% | 1% |
| 5 | Mike Slocumb Law Firm | $165,779 | 6.4% | 0% |
| 6 | Price Benowitz | $145,412 | 5.6% | 0% |
| 7 | G&B Greenberg & Bederman | $126,071 | 4.8% | 0% |
| 8 | Law Office Of Richard R Klein | $91,763 | 3.5% | 0% |
| 9 | TopDog Law | $82,642 | 3.2% | 1% |
| 10 | Azari Law | $81,848 | 3.1% | 0% |
Full board, top 10 of 82. Source: AdImpact, September to December 2025.
Answered from the data.
How much do law firms spend on advertising?
Across the 35 metros in this study, personal injury firms spend $141.6M a month across broadcast, cable, streaming, and radio, of which $87.7M is television. We measure the top firms by name in every market and the complete advertiser roster in 9 of them. The national category runs into the billions a year.
How much do lawyers pay for TV ads?
Total measured ad spend ranges from about $193K a month in the smallest market tracked to $22.5M in Los Angeles, and 61.9% of that goes to television. In the most concentrated markets a single firm holds 25 to 38% of all measured ad spend.
Why are there so many lawyer ads on TV?
Case economics. A signed injury or truck case can be worth enough that firms pay up to $693 for a single search click and millions a month on TV. The returns reward saturation, so the airwaves fill up.
How are AI Overviews changing law firm marketing?
92 to 94% of Google AI Mode searches now end without a click (US desktop, mid-2025), so the rank-and-click path that funded legal search for fifteen years is closing. What replaces it is citation. When we measured what an AI actually cites for "best lawyer" queries, two-thirds of it was firms' own websites, not earned media.
How does AI decide which lawyer to recommend?
We measured it directly: 236 citations across 26 "best lawyer" searches in 8 metros. About 67% of what the AI cited was firms' own websites, 21% legal directories, and 11% earned press. The machine reads your own site first, so the firm with the most authoritative site tends to win the answer.
How do I get my law firm cited or recommended by AI?
Build the site the model wants to cite. In our study, 67% of AI legal citations went to firms' own websites, not press or directories. Original data, clear authorship, and claims that trace to a source are what a model treats as citable. The work you own is what gets cited.
What is generative engine optimization (GEO) for law firms?
GEO is earning citations inside AI answers instead of rankings in a list of links. For legal it is concrete. Our study found AI cites firms' own sites about 67% of the time for "best lawyer" queries, so the move is making your site the most citable source in your market, not chasing a blue-link rank that increasingly ends in no click.
How much of legal ad budgets go to streaming (CTV)?
23% of measured legal ad spend goes to streaming across these 35 markets, from 3% in Washington DC to 48% in Atlanta. 19 of 35 markets sit at or below 20%, which is the open lane this study maps.
Which legal TV market is the most concentrated?
Jackson, MS. One firm holds 38.0% of measured ad spend and the top three control 61.7%.
What is the most expensive personal injury search keyword?
"dallas truck accident lawyer" at $693 per click (Google Ads Keyword Planner, December 2025).
Every figure tagged to its source.
Ad spend, channel mix, and market concentration: AdImpact, December 2025 for ten of the largest markets and September to October 2025 for the rest. 35 DMAs. Every spend figure covers all four measured channels, broadcast, cable, CTV, and radio, so it is not a television-only number. Firm-level attribution and share are AdImpact's measured panel data: the top five advertisers by spend in all 35 markets, and the complete advertiser roster in 9 of them.
Search volume and cost-per-click: Google Ads Keyword Planner, December 2025. 35 markets, 175 keyword rows across five keyword types per city. Volume-weighted CPC weights each keyword's CPC by its monthly volume within the city.
Modeled figures (the search auction size, modeled clicks at a 5% blended paid CTR, and top-firm dollar amounts derived from share times total) are computed from those measured inputs and labeled as modeled wherever they appear. The Shreveport and Harrisonburg single-keyword peaks sit on sub-300 monthly volume and are treated as noise, not market pricing.
External research is cited to its primary source. No finding here appears without a source.
- AdImpact. Legal ad spend and channel allocation across broadcast, cable, CTV, and radio, 35 DMAs, Dec 2025 / Sep to Oct 2025.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner. PI search volume and CPC, 35 markets, Dec 2025.
- Taqtics legal AI-citation study. 236 grounding citations parsed across 26 "best lawyer" queries in 8 metros, June 2026 (firm sites 67%, directories 21%, earned press 11%). Full study.
- Muck Rack, "What Is AI Reading?" Generative Pulse, May 7, 2026 (cross-industry benchmark, 17 industries).
- Semrush, "Google AI Mode's Early Adoption and SEO Impact," July 30, 2025 (U.S. desktop, Google AI Mode).
- Aggarwal et al., "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," ACM SIGKDD 2024 (Princeton University and IIT Delhi).
Taqtics, "The Two Wars: What $141.6M in Legal Advertising Reveals About Where Firms Can Still Win." Market Intelligence, December 2025. https://taqtics.com/industries/legal/the-two-wars/