38 newyork| september14–27, 2020
“Wehavemade10+eachforthe last few years, with nothing
butblueskyinthefuture.What part of THAT are you unhappy
with?”Barneswrotehispartner. (That “10+”: That’s millions of
dollars,each.)“Youknowany other lawyers who are making 10
a year?I don’t.”
Notlikely.NotinBuffalo,forsure. And almost nowhere else in
the vast legal netherworld of personal-injury firms, where deco-
rum gives way to inescapable billboards, catchy jingles, and blunt
commercials that trumpet a better-than-any-rival’s ability to get
you money. That’s where Cellino & Barnes presided: Barnes, the
former Marine with the gravelly voice and startling intensity, and
Cellino, the cuddly-looking Everyman with nerdy glasses. TV.
Radio. Bus stops. Subway entrances. Everyone knew Cellino &
Barnes—most people even knew that Barnes was the bald one
with the strained smile, staring at the camera for just a bit too
long, and that Cellino was, well, not the bald one.
And the jingle. Good God, the jingle. Even if you would never
dream of trusting your legal representation to a commercial, it
set up camp in your brain and never left. Eight hundred, eight,
eight, eight, eight, eight, eight, eight. In New York City, Cellino
& Barnes was as familiar as yellow cabs, halal carts, or a subway
“Showtime!”
Yet largely out of sight of their legions of potential clients, the two
men had been sparring for years about the need for autonomy and
decision-making power, about family, about the quest to expand,
and about respect. When their feud was made public later that
spring, after Cellino filed a petition to dissolve the firm, it exposed
Cellino & Barnes’s tightly controlled innards and drew countless
rubberneckers. There would be lawsuits, appeals, affidavits— so
many affidavits—and, of course, billboards (and a lawsuit involving
billboards). There were stories in the tabloids about how Cellino
accused Barnes of being “dictatorial,” about how Cellino said the
staff should follow him, the first name in the duo, because “no one
ever calls their motorcycle a Davidson.” Colleagues would testify. So
would life partners, assistants, and accountants.
The fight revealed more than just financial dirty laundry and
wounded feelings. It captured the birth and boom of what has
become one of the most caricatured areas of the law—a pop-culture
staple that often earns its reputation as ambulance chasing but also
delivers on its promise as one of the most direct ways to bring justice,
and fair compensation, to the least powerful members of society. It
is a world that isn’t going away anytime soon, even if the men who
elevated the New York car-crash lawsuit to a kind of high art have
themselves joined the ranks of the injured.THE TWO MEN CAME TOGETHER by chance. Cellino’s father, Ross Sr.,
had hung out a shingle back in the more staid legal world of 1950s
Buffalo. He was the son of a poor farmer and desperate to climb to
stability. When he died last year, his memorial Mass program in-
cluded a bullet-point list of jobs he’d held as he scrapped: box-factory
laborer, bowling-alley pin sticker, waiter, income-tax preparer, and
worker “at Bethlehem Steel on the big cold saw, this caused his par-
tial hearing loss from the high pitch noise.”
The steel job was at night to help finance law school during
the day. The firm he launched with a local lawyer took anything
that came in the door: real estate, criminal cases, trusts, some
personal injury. Whatever paid the bills for Cellino Sr.’s growing
brood of nine children.
When Cellino Jr. (brawnier than you might expect, ruddy, an
eventual father of six) graduated from law school, Buffalo wasn’t
exactly a golden land of opportunity. As he told me over his dining-
room table before the pandemic, he worked DWI and real-estate
cases on his own his first year out in the early ’80s—80 hours a week
for $9,000 a year. He became intrigued by the ads some attorneys
were placing in the local Yellow Pages. Full-page displays, the back
cover for about $100,000. He took a few of the lawyers behind the
ads out to lunch, but when he started asking questions, they tried to
steer their young competitor away, downplaying the approach. No,
they told him, it’s not really worth it. Don’t bother.
The brush-off only encouraged him. Cellino bought a business-
card- size ad. Then a half-page and more. Nothing too snazzy. If the
ads brought in just one $300,000 case, he reasoned, that’s $100,000
in attorney’s fees. “It encouraged me to become more aggressive,” he
told me. His competitors, he said, had lied. Ads worked.
Eventually, Cellino started working with his father. When it came
time for his father to retire in the early ’90s, Cellino and his father’s
partners were eager to find some young blood. A local lawyer named
Richard Barnes reached out with a suggestion: How about his
younger brother, Steve?
Steve Barnes was the kind of guy who finished law school then
signed up for the Marines. He served as a military lawyer and
briefly saw action during the Gulf War in a tank battalion in
Kuwait. Barnes says his decision to enlist was a primal compul-
sion. “Almost analogous to a woman’s desire to give birth,” heteve barnes was furious. Over the past 25 years,he had helped turn a small-time Buffalo per-sonal-injury law firm into a New York institu-tion, one with eye-popping profits and an empireof advertisements so widespread you wonderedif everyone who got into an accident in the statewould end up as its client. But now everythinghe’d built was at risk of falling apart. How couldanyone, especially his own partner, Ross Cellino,want to turn off the rivers of green that flowedinto their coffers? It was April 2017, and Barnes’semails boiled with frustration, each one a verbal roundhouse to the partneryokedtohimbyanampersand and thousands of TV, radio, and billboard spots.