september14–27, 2020| newyork 39says. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons that man has been involved
in so many wars over so many millennia, because of this innate
desire on the part of men to fight each other and kind of have
that experience in their lives.” Rich Barnes once told the Buffalo
News that his brother can be a driven guy: “He trains to make
himself physically fit to the extreme. He will hike 50 miles from
Buffalo to Ellicottville with a 60-pound weight strapped to his
back. He’s done it many times.”
Steve was working at a large corporate-defense office when the
Cellino firm approached him about joining forces. It was a tiny
operation, but it wasn’t just a job, it was a shot at a share of the pot:
a chance for something big. Cellino remembers Barnes called asking
if the firm had made a decision the day after their initial conversa-
tion. Cellino loved the raw aggression. “This has got to be the right
guy,” Cellino says he thought. “I was like that too. I wanted to grow.”
Though Cellino would later cultivate an image as a family man,
his early hunger was palpable. Michael Beebe, a former Buffalo
News reporter, remembers meeting Cellino right when he was tak-
ing over from his father. “He got a list of all the people that owed his
father and his father’s firm money and went after them,” Beebe says.
“I had a case involving a poor guy over on the East Side of Buffalo
that claimed this lawyer was after him to pay his past rent and past
water bills and things like that. So I met with Ross very briefly, and
he says, ‘Look, they owe my father money. I’m here, and I’m going to
get the money back.’ He was just matter-of-fact. It didn’t matter how
poor this guy was.”
Barnes signed on. Eventually, the Old Guard left. As Cellino &
Barnes, the pair made a critical decision: From then on, it would be
all injury law, all the time. That meant taking cases on contingency—
the client paid no money up front, and the attorneys
kept one-third of whatever was won, minus costs. But
injury clients aren’t usually repeat customers (unless
they’re really unlucky or terrible drivers). So to grow, the
firm needed a lot of cases.
EARLY ON, Cellino and Barnes heard about a lawyer in
New Orleans, Morris Bart, who was beginning to domi-
nate the local airwaves. They flew down to see him. His
advice was simple and profound: If you want to suc-
ceed, find out how much your biggest competitor is
spending on ads and double it.
Bart, whose practice now spends upwards of $25
million a year on advertising, stands by that wisdom.
“It was pretty easy in hindsight,” he says. “You cobble
together money, make the ads, and the phone rings.”
But when Bart started, it was revolutionary. Traditionally, the
practice of law had had an aura of public service; that lawyers
didn’t advertise was an ethical cornerstone of theprofession.
Then, in the ’60s and ’70s, a series of changes meanttogivemore
people access to the legal process—the right to counselforpoor
defendants, expanding use of powerful “class actions”tobringbig
lawsuits, and a rising consumer-focused mindsetingovern-
ment—created an environment that opened thedoortolegal
advertising. In 1977, the Supreme Court heard thecaseofa “legal
clinic,” a law practice that specializes in low-cost,routinelegal
help. The clinic’s lawyers wanted to advertise theirratessothe
average Joe could make a wise decision. The court agreed, on First
Amendment grounds, and the advertising restrictions on lawyers
came crashing down. “No one thought attorney advertising would
be used by personal-injury lawyers,” says Stanford Law School
professor Nora Engstrom, “including the Supreme Court.”
But by the ’90s, thanks to pioneers like Bart, legal advertising
had become an obvious path for hustling lawyers, and Cellino and
Barnes were all in. Following Bart’s advice, they plowed much of
their profits from big settlements back into advertising.
In 1997, five years after Barnes was hired, their practice had just
three lawyers. Then they decided to bring on a nonlawyer with an
M.B.A., Daryl Ciambella, who was charged with writing a busi-
ness plan and developing some television commercials.
“That showed the balls they had,” says Mark Cantor, a local attor-
ney who worked with Rich Barnes. He recalls hearing that the firm
had taken the entirety of its fee for a $3 million settlement and used
it to make ads. “At that time, when lawyers settled cases for lots of
money, you take the money. They didn’t take one penny of it. That
was incredible to have that much faith in advertising.”
Cantor wasn’t the only Buffalo lawyer to take notice. Other local
attorneys griped that their clients were being lured away by Cellino
& Barnes’s aggressive advertising. “That’s what sticks in the craw of
most lawyers in western New York,” griped one personal-injury
attorney. “They are financially successful not because of the good job
done on previous cases but because of advertising on cases.”
The firm’s draw only expanded after the partners commis-
sioned their jingle: grand but gentle, enthusiastic but sweet.
Undeniably catchy, despite having no rhymes and nothing all
that distinctive about it, aside from how relentlessly it has
appeared on television and radio. “Cellino & Barnes. The Injury
Attorneys,” and then the phone number. (In later renditions,
they dropped the “the.”) The jingle has sparked a singing chal-
lenge among Broadway casts and a spoof on Saturday Night
Live. When the spread of covid-19 led to public-health warn-
ings to wash your hands for the length of time it takes to sing
“Happy Birthday” twice, the Cellino & Barnes Twitter account
suggested a much more enjoyable tune. When Chrissy Teigen
tweeted her devastation at the news of Cellino & Barnes’s
breakup, the reason was clear: “The song
sucks now. We must reunite them.”
Barnes is a bit less romantic about it. “Jin-
gles work,” he says. “Is there a great magic to
it? I don’t know. I think there’s been more said
about our jingle because lawyers weren’t
doing jingles and now lawyers do jingles.”VEN WITH THE ADS, the firm probably never
would have reached the heights it did with-
out one person: a tool-and-die-maker named
Mark Rappold.
Rappold doesn’t trust easily. He had seen
some of the firm’s commercials on TV. He’d
seen the billboards, too. But he wasn’t think-
ing about any of that when, in 1998, he and
his wife heard their son David had been horribly injured in a
high-speed car crash. David had just finished his first year of law
school. His friend was driving, hustling up the New York State
Thruway, with David in the passenger seat; the friend switched
lanes, cutting off the car behind him. Incensed, the guy in the
other car flashed his lights and tailed closely. The trailing car
then raced ahead in the other lane, and the friend sped up, keep-
ingpace behind. The police would call it “road tag.” At 85 miles
anhour, the other car sliced back in front, then hit the brakes.
The friend swerved, lost control, and spun into the median. The
carslammed into a tree.
David had a massive brain injury. “He is for the most part para-
lyzed on the left side of his body,” an appeals court wrote in 2001.
“He cannot feed or groom himself, walk, or use a motorized
wheelchair because of his cognitive and/or physical limitations.
He can speak only a few words, and he communicates by blinking
his eyes, making hand gestures, and shaking his head.”
Rappold didn’t know what was in store for David or the rest of his
family. But he knew he needed a lawyer immediately. Without justice
for his son, there would be nothing to pay for the towering medical