Next time you drive to a job site, count the billboards. I counted billboards on my way to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport recently. There were 12 in less than 2 miles. I didn’t count all the billboards; I didn’t count the beer or fast food ones. I counted the ones with a lawyer’s face, catchy slogan and a phone number big enough to read at 70 mph.
You know the ones I am talking about and for good reason: $45 million was spent in Las Vegas alone on personal injury billboards in one year. But that isn’t even the maximum; $165 million was spent in Los Angeles; $70 million in Dallas; $88 million in Atlanta and $80 million in Orlando. A personal injury lawyer in Connecticut spends more than $1 million per year rotating her billboards every eight weeks, posing with Vanilla Ice, Mike Tyson and an NFL quarterback while pitching the same pitch: Get hurt, call me.
It’s easy to laugh at silly ads, but it’s a lot less funny when you find out who these firms are actually hunting. I recently came across a jaw-dropping piece written by Adam Rosen in The Hustle about the billboard lawyer boom, and one line from a marketing consultant stopped me cold: “Everybody wants that truck wreck.” Not a slip-and-fall. Not a parking-lot fender bender. They want a commercial vehicle, ideally one owned by a business with real insurance behind it.
That’s us. Roofing runs on trucks of all sorts, shapes and sizes that haul crews, materials and equipment to job sites every day in every U.S. market. That puts our industry squarely in the crosshairs of a legal environment that has changed dramatically during the past several years. And it’s showing up on every insurance renewal notice you get.
What’s causing this spike? Start with the lawyers themselves. There are now more than 1.3 million practicing attorneys in the U.S., which is roughly one for every 260 Americans, and the personal injury bar spent north of $541 million on billboards and outdoor advertising in 2024 alone, up nearly $200 million in just two years, according to the American Tort Reform Association. And just like the roofing industry, consolidation and rollups are happening in the legal world, too. Legal shops are getting larger and more sophisticated. Morgan & Morgan, the country’s largest personal injury firm, reportedly spends $350 million per year on marketing.
When our family moved to Illinois eight years ago, I was excited to see a local bakery from my hometown in Nevada had taken private equity money and franchised across the nation. Nothing Bundt Cakes are the best! I was less excited to see that local Las Vegas trial attorney Glenn Lerner also had now expanded into 10 states and had billboards along Chicago’s highways just like he had back home in Las Vegas.
This isn’t a cottage industry. It is a massive enterprise with, increasingly, outside investors. Private equity and litigation-funding firms are now bankrolling lawsuits the way venture capital bankrolls startups, betting on a big payout down the road. Think about that a moment: The private equity firms that are likely reaching out to you to buy your shop also are reaching out to law firms saying: “We’ll fund the costs; you file the suit.”
Willie Sutton, one of the most notorious bank robbers in U.S. history, famously answered the question “Why do you rob banks?” with “because that’s where the money is.” If Sutton were alive today and used his wiles slightly differently, he’d probably be a personal injury lawyer because that’s where the money is, and the payouts have gotten enormous.
A LexisNexis review of 73,000 federal cases found the average jury verdict hit $16.2 million in 2024—nearly double what it was two years earlier and almost four times the 2019 average. The industry has a name for the really big ones: “nuclear verdicts,” generally anything more than $10 million. Those surged 52% in 2024 alone, totaling $31.3 billion in payouts nationwide with the median nuclear verdict climbing to $51 million. Verdicts more than $100 million, once vanishingly rare, hit 49 cases that year, more than doubling the 2023 number. Trial lawyers have also gotten sharp about a courtroom tactic called reptile theory. This is when attorneys argue a case not just on the facts but on triggering a juror’s gut-level fear that “this could happen to my family,” which reliably drives up awards.
Contractors who take fleet safety seriously will weather this market
You may think your insurance will cover these costs. And it will, but how have your premiums been in recent years? Insurance carriers don’t eat these losses quietly. They price them into the next year’s premiums. Commercial auto liability has been unprofitable for insurers for 14 years running, and it shows: Industry brokers are projecting auto liability rate increases of 8% to 20% for construction fleets in 2026 with some placements seeing excess trucking coverage jump as much as 75%. Roofing gets hit particularly hard because underwriters already view the roofing industry as being high-frequency and high-severity. With lots of vehicles on the road and lots of exposure, there is litigation risk stacked upon litigation risk.
If you have noticed your commercial auto renewal costs creeping up regardless of your own claims history, this is a big reason why. It is probably not because your crews are driving worse. The entire system pricing your risk has repriced itself around a number of much larger verdicts that increasingly are funded by outside capital with every incentive to push a case to trial instead of settling it.
But pushback is building. Many states have introduced tort reform this year that would tighten how damages get awarded and regulate litigation funding. A new group backed in part by the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, a trucking trade association, has committed millions of dollars to fighting what it calls predatory personal injury practices and is pushing Congress to tax third-party litigation funding.
Wherever you land on the broader tort reform debate, this trend line matters, and trade groups across construction and transportation are showing up in these battles. NRCA has been fighting for tort reform measures in Congress for years with our coalition partners. But we also are working to help individual companies protect themselves because no one wants to wait for legislators to fix your insurance premium.
NRCA’s Fleet Safety Playbook is a new best-practice guide for you and your company to try and take control of the risk you face on the road and courtroom.
Some of the best practices get some pushback (dash cams most of all), but the math doesn’t lie. Dash cams help. Insurance underwriting is all about statistics, risk and costs. And underwriters are explicitly rewarding contractors who can document a real safety program with dash cams, GPS and telematics, documented driver training and hiring standards, and clean paper trails if something does go wrong.
One insurance industry leader summed up dash cams succinctly during a conversation: “You’re assumed guilty in a work truck. So if dash cam footage comes back showing someone on your team at fault, at least you know that and can minimize the fight and move on. But otherwise, that footage is likely the only thing to prove your innocence. Without it, you’re assumed guilty and paying regardless.”
I was recently with a contractor whose cell phone pinged with a real-time telematics report. One of the company trucks was in an accident. The dash cam footage clearly showed the driver was not at fault. Tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills and potentially millions in payments were saved. In a world where the other side is going to argue your driving record to a jury using every emotional lever available, having the boring stuff like logs, footage and training records in order is what could keep a fender bender from turning into a nuclear verdict with your company’s name on it.
The billboards aren’t going anywhere because Wall Street smells money in exploiting life’s accidents. But contractors who take fleet safety and documentation as seriously as the plaintiff’s bar takes marketing will be the ones who weather this market and keep their insurance bill from eating their margin.
MCKAY DANIELS
CEO
NRCA
