7 ms·

The Breakup of the Cellino and Barnes Law Firm

62 points by laurex 6y ago

onecommentman 6y ago
OK, I’ll bite. How is this article about an NYC accident law firm of general interest outside of the Tristate area, much less the HN community?
- dang 6y ago
  It looks like a good story about a weird corner of that industry. That seems on topic to me. I posted a related explanation in an unrelated thread if interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594315.
- busterarm 6y ago
  C&B handled Mass Tort cases, which can be anywhere. Also, look at the profits from that firm operating in just NY & LA. Now consider a similar firm like Morgan & Morgan except they have roughly 40 offices all over the southeastern/eastern US. Injury law is big-league stuff. Intakes come from 4 of the Top 10 most expensive keywords. It's a national interest and affects a lot of our careers at this point.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    I remember at one point (and they may be higher or lower now) that cost per click on adWords was around $35 for lots of personal injury attorney related terms. Kind of crazy go think that google can make that much for a single search and click. And crazy that firms will pay that.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Lol, there's a lot of variance by case type. I used to do martech development specifically in this space. Average spend a couple years ago was ~$55/click. Targeted ad campaigns can cost a lot more or a lot less per intake depending on case type. A lot of work was done to drive the cost of minor accident case marketing down but things like Mesothelioma would costs hundreds in targeted marketing campaigns for a single qualified case (the number is seriously dwindling). I'm glad that I left that industry, but I still have mixed feelings about it. The environmental mass tort cases, like some of the gas leaks in California, were seriously good, rewarding work. Having to listen to calls and optimize ads for people who were molested by priests or scoutmasters made me lose sleep for months. The final straw there was when the Church negotiated with the mass tort firms to limit cases by an extremely restrictive geography and 99% of the incoming calls became "sorry, we can't help you".
- asveikau 6y ago
  They're not NYC, they're very far upstate. I used to hear their ads in Rochester, 5 or 6 hour drive from the city. They have an interesting and sketchy history, though I can't remember a lot of details, it has been a while since I knew anything of that. They recently went national I think. I saw their ads on buses in San Francisco.
  - scrumbledober 6y ago
    i've been hearing their commercials in the bay area for years
scrumbledober 6y ago
will we be getting a two new jingles out of this?
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
After Celino came back from his ambulance chasing suspension the firm should have been Barnes and Celino.
ykevinator 6y ago
These are the grossest human beings you will ever meet (Buffalo native)
sushshshsh 6y ago
Cellino and Barnes, injury attorneys, 800 888, 8888! Glad I'm doing better in life than these veritable celebrities!
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Their ads are so pervasive here in upstate NY that my kids were involved in a fender-bender as toddlers and one chanted "don't wait, call eight!" in the aftermath.
  - agency 6y ago
    It’s no wonder they got into an accident, their feet can’t even reach the pedals!
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    I'm actually really surprised that toddlers were able to associate the key "I'm in a car accident and I'm 5 years old" with "Cellino and Barnes are the first people I will call because I realize I need an injury attorney" because I only have the key "Cellino and Barnes" in my head, associated with "[play Cellino and Barnes jingle in my head" I was rear ended by a big Raptor Truck in my little crappy car and had a little bit of whiplash. I skipped the doctor and everything was luckily fine in a few days and I never called an attorney and never even thought about it. Now I'm wondering if I was stupid :)
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      I believe their rough slogan being pushed at the time was "Car accident? Don't wait, call eight!" at the time. Our babysitter was mortified, haha.
      - vivekd 6y ago
        I'm mortified too, this is a very good case for laws against ads targeting kids
SkyMarshal 6y ago
Is there something hacker-related to this story? I read the first few paragraphs, but didn’t see anything, and couldn’t force myself to go any deeper into this lawyer drama mind candy.
- kbenson 6y ago
  No, it's just a bit of interesting writing. If you truly want to tie it to some of the common themes of this site, you could say it's a case and character study of founders making it big and then breaking up. But that's not really needed. The only real rule about something being appropriate here is that people (the type that frequent here) have to find it interesting, and there's quite a lot that people here find interesting.
- sergers 6y ago
  It is one of the reasons I frequent hn. I like to unwind on weekends, tech free (outside of using my phone for browsing articles like this, and maybe some mindless TV/streaming). These articles are intriguing
- tsomctl 6y ago
  > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  I personally hate reading stories about NYC, but I imagine this appeals to all the hackers in NYC so that they feel just a little bit better about their $5000/mo midtown apartments
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't post regional flamebait to HN. It just leads to worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
seibelj 6y ago
> The former Cellino & Barnes attorneys I spoke with generally loved the firm and are proud of their time with it. Many lawyers stayed there for years. The chief motivation was clear: You could make a lot of money. “When I first went in, they didn’t have to sell me. I knew I wanted to work there,” one former staff attorney says. “But they bring out the book showing what everybody made the year before, and you’re like, Holy fuck. These guys are making 300, 400, 700 [thousand dollars]. It’s a pretty unique possibility in the context of a personal-injury law firm.” > The lawyers on staff split up the calendar. On their assigned intake day, they answered all the calls — a lawyer would actually pick up the phone after a quick screen — and basically kept all the cases that happened to come in. They could be valuable; they could be dog shit. This is the correct way to scale a firm. Be very organized and document everyone’s jobs to a T. Then allow as many people as possible to be incentivized with profit-sharing when putting in effort that benefits the firm. So many businesses treat their employees like cogs when they should be seen as partners in revenue generation and growing the business.
draw_down 6y ago
The resentment of the other lawyers is so ridiculous and pathetic. If all it took to win your clients over was advertisements, what does that say about you and your firm?
the-rc 6y ago
Hah! In the slideshow, you can even see the evolution of their logo in ads. I always wondered if the resemblance to Crate&Barrel was just a coincidence.
throwawaysea 6y ago
It’s interesting to hear that you can scale your income at a firm like this very deterministically, by adjusting how hard you work. I wonder how people at the firm chose their input/output balance, given the lack of a pay ceiling like most others in society face. Did many practice discipline to reserve time for personal pursuits, health, and family? Or did they go as hard as they could? Is it different by age?

62 points by laurex 6y ago

OK, I’ll bite. How is this article about an NYC accident law firm of general interest outside of the Tristate area, much less the HN community?

dang 6y ago
It looks like a good story about a weird corner of that industry. That seems on topic to me. I posted a related explanation in an unrelated thread if interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594315.
busterarm 6y ago
C&B handled Mass Tort cases, which can be anywhere. Also, look at the profits from that firm operating in just NY & LA. Now consider a similar firm like Morgan & Morgan except they have roughly 40 offices all over the southeastern/eastern US. Injury law is big-league stuff. Intakes come from 4 of the Top 10 most expensive keywords. It's a national interest and affects a lot of our careers at this point.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I remember at one point (and they may be higher or lower now) that cost per click on adWords was around $35 for lots of personal injury attorney related terms. Kind of crazy go think that google can make that much for a single search and click. And crazy that firms will pay that.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Lol, there's a lot of variance by case type. I used to do martech development specifically in this space. Average spend a couple years ago was ~$55/click. Targeted ad campaigns can cost a lot more or a lot less per intake depending on case type. A lot of work was done to drive the cost of minor accident case marketing down but things like Mesothelioma would costs hundreds in targeted marketing campaigns for a single qualified case (the number is seriously dwindling). I'm glad that I left that industry, but I still have mixed feelings about it. The environmental mass tort cases, like some of the gas leaks in California, were seriously good, rewarding work. Having to listen to calls and optimize ads for people who were molested by priests or scoutmasters made me lose sleep for months. The final straw there was when the Church negotiated with the mass tort firms to limit cases by an extremely restrictive geography and 99% of the incoming calls became "sorry, we can't help you".
asveikau 6y ago
They're not NYC, they're very far upstate. I used to hear their ads in Rochester, 5 or 6 hour drive from the city. They have an interesting and sketchy history, though I can't remember a lot of details, it has been a while since I knew anything of that. They recently went national I think. I saw their ads on buses in San Francisco.
- scrumbledober 6y ago
  i've been hearing their commercials in the bay area for years

scrumbledober 6y ago

will we be getting a two new jingles out of this?

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

After Celino came back from his ambulance chasing suspension the firm should have been Barnes and Celino.

ykevinator 6y ago

These are the grossest human beings you will ever meet (Buffalo native)

sushshshsh 6y ago

Cellino and Barnes, injury attorneys, 800 888, 8888! Glad I'm doing better in life than these veritable celebrities!

ceejayoz 6y ago
Their ads are so pervasive here in upstate NY that my kids were involved in a fender-bender as toddlers and one chanted "don't wait, call eight!" in the aftermath.
- agency 6y ago
  It’s no wonder they got into an accident, their feet can’t even reach the pedals!
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  I'm actually really surprised that toddlers were able to associate the key "I'm in a car accident and I'm 5 years old" with "Cellino and Barnes are the first people I will call because I realize I need an injury attorney" because I only have the key "Cellino and Barnes" in my head, associated with "[play Cellino and Barnes jingle in my head" I was rear ended by a big Raptor Truck in my little crappy car and had a little bit of whiplash. I skipped the doctor and everything was luckily fine in a few days and I never called an attorney and never even thought about it. Now I'm wondering if I was stupid :)
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    I believe their rough slogan being pushed at the time was "Car accident? Don't wait, call eight!" at the time. Our babysitter was mortified, haha.
    - vivekd 6y ago
      I'm mortified too, this is a very good case for laws against ads targeting kids

SkyMarshal 6y ago

Is there something hacker-related to this story? I read the first few paragraphs, but didn’t see anything, and couldn’t force myself to go any deeper into this lawyer drama mind candy.

kbenson 6y ago
No, it's just a bit of interesting writing. If you truly want to tie it to some of the common themes of this site, you could say it's a case and character study of founders making it big and then breaking up. But that's not really needed. The only real rule about something being appropriate here is that people (the type that frequent here) have to find it interesting, and there's quite a lot that people here find interesting.
sergers 6y ago
It is one of the reasons I frequent hn. I like to unwind on weekends, tech free (outside of using my phone for browsing articles like this, and maybe some mindless TV/streaming). These articles are intriguing
tsomctl 6y ago
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
tomc1985 6y ago
I personally hate reading stories about NYC, but I imagine this appeals to all the hackers in NYC so that they feel just a little bit better about their $5000/mo midtown apartments
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post regional flamebait to HN. It just leads to worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

seibelj 6y ago

> The former Cellino & Barnes attorneys I spoke with generally loved the firm and are proud of their time with it. Many lawyers stayed there for years. The chief motivation was clear: You could make a lot of money. “When I first went in, they didn’t have to sell me. I knew I wanted to work there,” one former staff attorney says. “But they bring out the book showing what everybody made the year before, and you’re like, Holy fuck. These guys are making 300, 400, 700 [thousand dollars]. It’s a pretty unique possibility in the context of a personal-injury law firm.” > The lawyers on staff split up the calendar. On their assigned intake day, they answered all the calls — a lawyer would actually pick up the phone after a quick screen — and basically kept all the cases that happened to come in. They could be valuable; they could be dog shit. This is the correct way to scale a firm. Be very organized and document everyone’s jobs to a T. Then allow as many people as possible to be incentivized with profit-sharing when putting in effort that benefits the firm. So many businesses treat their employees like cogs when they should be seen as partners in revenue generation and growing the business.

draw_down 6y ago

The resentment of the other lawyers is so ridiculous and pathetic. If all it took to win your clients over was advertisements, what does that say about you and your firm?

the-rc 6y ago

Hah! In the slideshow, you can even see the evolution of their logo in ads. I always wondered if the resemblance to Crate&Barrel was just a coincidence.

throwawaysea 6y ago

It’s interesting to hear that you can scale your income at a firm like this very deterministically, by adjusting how hard you work. I wonder how people at the firm chose their input/output balance, given the lack of a pay ceiling like most others in society face. Did many practice discipline to reserve time for personal pursuits, health, and family? Or did they go as hard as they could? Is it different by age?