On April 9, 2020, Canadian Lawyer published a feature on advertising practices in the Canadian personal injury bar under the headline “Personal injury lawyers warn that some advertising is poisoning the public perception of lawyers.” The article addressed the practice-management tension that the modern PI bar has been working through for years: changing auto insurance regimes have reduced the supply of viable claims at the same time as the number of lawyers competing for those claims has grown, and advertising is one of the levers by which firms compete. Paul was quoted at length in the article alongside Richard Parsons, a partner at Collette Parsons Corrin LLP in Vancouver.
The Canadian Lawyer feature was framed as a warning. The headline did most of the framing: some advertising practices in PI, the article argued, were poisoning the public’s view of the profession. The two practitioners interviewed for the piece agreed with the framing while distinguishing between categories of advertising and explaining why some forms of marketing are not just acceptable but necessary in the modern PI practice.
The problem the article identified
The PI bar’s advertising landscape has shifted considerably over the last decade. Changes to the Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule in Ontario, the introduction of the BC government’s enhanced care model in 2021 (after this article was written), and the broader regulatory reshaping of auto insurance have all narrowed the pool of viable tort claims at the same time as the supply of PI lawyers has continued to grow. In that environment, getting in front of prospective clients is harder than it used to be. Mass-market advertising, including transit ads, television spots, billboards, and the firm-name brand campaigns that dominate Toronto’s PI marketplace, has become a default response.
The article’s argument was that this response has costs that the firms running the campaigns may not be internalizing. Persistent direct advertising shapes public attitudes toward the PI bar as a whole. Where those attitudes harden into a stereotype of the PI lawyer as opportunistic or undignified, the effect is felt by every plaintiff bringing every PI case in front of every jury, regardless of which firm is running the ads.
Paul’s contribution
Paul’s perspective in the article was that mass direct advertising creates a meaningful risk of bringing the profession into disrepute. The concern is not abstract. If members of the public come away from the ads thinking PI lawyers are filing suits for plaintiffs who are not seriously injured, that perception flows into the broader jury pool. Jurors in PI trials arrive with views formed in part by the advertising they have seen between the matter giving rise to the claim and the trial. The plaintiff who appears in court has to overcome whatever picture the jury has already formed of the kind of lawyer who would have brought her case in the first place.
The article makes clear that Paul does not regard advertising as inherently problematic. PI work performs a critical function: advocating for people who have suffered grievous injury and have been thrown into an adversarial relationship with an insurer they were not prepared to confront. The plaintiffs need lawyers; the lawyers need to be findable. With insurance regimes changing and the pool of viable claims narrowing, advertising is now part of how the work gets done.
The distinction in Paul’s contribution, as set out in the article, was between mass-market saturation and targeted reach. The approach he described, which was Will Davidson’s at the time, was to use targeted online advertising and search engine optimization to put the firm in front of prospective clients at the moment those clients began searching for help. That is a different proposition from building name recognition through saturation advertising before any injury has occurred. The targeted approach answers a question the prospective client has asked. The saturation approach plants a name before any question has been asked.
Paul indicated to the journalist that he did not take issue with the saturation strategy as a means of reaching clients, but worried about the side effects when the advertising started to look “cheap” or “sleazy.” Those side effects are felt in the perceptions of juries and in the broader public’s view of the bar.
Parsons’ perspective from BC
Richard Parsons brought the British Columbia perspective to the article. He described having seen large-advertising Ontario PI firms move into the BC market following the Law Society of Ontario’s regulatory changes in early 2017, which capped referral fees and imposed some limits on advertising. Parsons observed that many of the biggest advertisers in the Ontario market did not perform the work themselves; they referred out the cases they generated through advertising. The arrival of those firms in BC, in his account, corresponded with a measurable decline in the public perception of PI lawyers in that province.
The article also touched on the constitutional context. Parsons referenced past Supreme Court of Canada precedent recognizing that restrictions on legal advertising can raise free speech considerations. He suggested that the LSO’s decision to target referral fees, rather than advertising directly, may have been informed by the constitutional risk attached to sweeping advertising restrictions.
The framing point
Underneath the practitioner perspectives is a question that the PI bar has not collectively answered. The bar regulates its members individually. Each firm makes its own advertising choices and lives with the regulatory consequences of those choices if any arise. But the public perception of the bar is a collective good that no individual firm is accountable for. The advertising that one firm runs affects the jury pool that every other firm draws from. The economics of that externality are not symmetric: the firm running the saturation campaign captures most of the benefit, while the costs in eroded public trust are spread across the whole bar.
The article did not resolve that tension, and the bar has not resolved it since. What the article did do was make the practitioner concern visible. Paul’s contribution, taken with Parsons’, amounted to an argument that the PI bar should think harder about the cumulative effect of its advertising practices, and that the regulatory framework around marketing of legal services should be understood as serving the public’s interest in trust in the profession, not just as a constraint on individual firms.
Context
At the time of the Canadian Lawyer article, Paul was a partner at Will Davidson LLP. The firm restructured later, and Paul is now a partner at Davidson Cahill Morrison LLP. The targeted approach Paul described in 2020 has continued to inform the firm’s marketing practices. The argument about jury perception remains a live concern in plaintiff PI work.
The full Canadian Lawyer article is available at canadianlawyermag.com.
