According to their own boasting, Morgan & Morgan is “America’s largest injury law firm”. They have offices in all 50 states, and advertising to match.1 In recent years, they’ve spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars on their utterly inescapable marketing.2 It’s a nationwide scourge.
But let’s set aside the obnoxious oversaturation of these ads, as well as their generally low quality. Even given that, one particular Morgan billboard I recently saw was still notably awful. Have a look:
If you’re thinking that photoshopping founder John Morgan as Paul Revere and then having him announce himself really doesn’t make a lot of sense, you’re right. But even that is not the biggest problem with this dreck.
No, the biggest issue is that Paul Revere’s pronouncement was not a positive thing! The phrase “The British are coming” is used to sound the alarm.3 Wiktionary defines it as “a warning that enemies are about and a battle is about to begin” or “a statement of impending doom”. It’s certainly no way to introduce a law firm.4
How can someone be historically literate enough to know about Revere’s ride, yet ignorant of why this ad flat-out does not work?
Footnotes:
I can’t fathom why on earth I would care that they have lawyers in, say, Alaska, but they appear to view this as a point of pride. ↩︎
The aforelinked article includes this quote:
Morgan also takes pains to dismiss any suggestion he lives or spends like a billionaire. “The truth of the matter is, I don’t live like I earn. All our homes are paid for. It’s probably two million a year that I live on. And that’s taking care of seven houses. Most of the money I live on is spent on paying the HOA, gardeners, and [stuff] like that. I don’t live extravagantly.”
Oh, no, that’s not living extravagantly. He just has a modest seven houses. ↩︎
Though very much beside the point, it’s also not what Revere would have said. Instead, he would have said something more like “The Regulars are coming”. At the time, everyone in America was “British”. ↩︎
While thinking about this far, far more than the marketing team seems to have, I considered the notion that the warning might work if it were given to the defense attorneys against whom the Morgans will square off. That interpretation has its own host of problems, however, including the fact that it would cast the Morgans as the tyrannical (and eventually defeated) British, even as John Morgan is pictured as revolutionary Paul Revere delivering the warning. ↩︎
