The New Philadelphia Lawyer

I’ll bet I’m not the first to write about this.

Is Philadelphia the most dangerous town on earth? Is there something about the place? Is it on a little-known fault line? Maybe it got left in the 19th century, early days of the Industrial Revolution, before “work safety” was even a thing? Before the gods created OSHA? I mean is it for sure that if you work somewhere in Philly  you’re going to get an on-the-job, sue-your-employer-type of injury? I may lead a sheltered life, but I don’t believe I know anybody who’s ever sued their employer for getting hurt on the job. I know something about this stuff, too. I used to work in a factory with 350 people, and I spent a college summer carrying wrongful injury briefs to courthouses for the Port of New York Authority. Nothing ever suggested to me that injury lawsuits could underwrite a major industry.

We’ve found that Philadelphia airport is easier and friendlier than Newark. (Shhh! It’s less crowded.) So we go there to fly anywhere, like I did yesterday. I was driving so I couldn’t count, but I’d bet there are at least 25 major-league, full-size billboards along 95, starting up around Bristol, maybe, going right through the city and over the river to the airport. Pond Lehocky is one name that stands out, since it conjures a winter sports scene, and since theirs are the most tasteful (and numerous.) The others, like Morgan and Morgan and Top Dog Law are more hysterically urgent, an advantage in appealing to the traumatized, industrially-injured driver. There are at least a dozen others, with eye-catching graphics at odds with their lawyerly sounding names. Rosenbaum, for instance. Stern and Cohen. No match for Top Dog. Some, like Leonard Hill, seem to be aimed at a specific group of injured folks.

I think it’s interesting to suggest that “ambulance chasing,” once anathema in the ethics handbook of the legal profession, is now not only okay, (and how did that happen, by the way?) but it’s as if it’s a sport. Not chasing the ambulances, they’re heading them off at the underpass. It’s the Road Sign Derby on the banks of the Delaware. Right?

I don’t have any idea what those billboards cost, but it has to be more than a couple of sprained ankles or a slipped disc. What makes this new sport more impressive, though, is the paradox, the contradiction of the prototype. What used to be a more straight-laced  image – I mean full on three-piece suit-wearing, fountain pen-wielding, Union League-attending – than the “Philadelphia lawyer”? You can imagine one sniffing, “Billboards? That’s below our standard, Arthur.”

Not any more, eh, “Top Dog”?