Trial lawyers and aggregators increasingly spend large sums of money on television, digital, and print advertising to recruit new clients. In 2025, it is estimated that $4 billion was spent on more than 30 million legal services ads across television, radio, print, digital, and outdoor ads, soliciting legal claims across the United States — a spending increase of approximately 44% compared to these types of local ads in 2024. Much of this advertising is conducted by aggregators: businesses that recruit potential plaintiffs and then sell their information to law firms.
New York City has vaulted to the top of the American Tort Reform Foundation’s annual Judicial Hellholes® report in large part due to rampant fraud plaguing the state’s civil justice system. From trip-and-fall schemes to staged accidents and fabricated construction injuries, New York’s legal environment has enabled plaintiffs’ lawyers to cash in while small businesses and unsuspecting residents are left to pick up the pieces.
Insurance companies and small businesses face a wave of lawsuits built on phantom accidents and fabricated injuries. The state’s no-fault insurance system — which holds insurers fully liable regardless of fault — has created fertile ground for abuse. Unscrupulous plaintiffs’ lawyers and medical practitioners exploit the system for maximum payouts, often at the expense of their own clients and New York taxpayers. In some cases, patients are even subjected to unnecessary surgeries to bolster these fraudulent claims.
Some schemes reportedly targeted “foreign-born workers who lack proficiency in English,” encouraging them to file claims for fabricated or exaggerated injuries. In some cases, the injuries — a simple trip and fall, for example — would be exaggerated on paper into multi-million-dollar permanent disability claims.
Sensing the opportunity, plaintiffs’ attorneys are pouring millions of dollars into advertisements aimed at recruiting potential claimants for personal-injury lawsuits. Between 2023 and 2025 spending on local legal services ads increased more than 84% — from $97 million in 2023 to nearly $179 million in 2025.
