The best legal ad in America has no lawyer in it. James Helm is a real Philadelphia injury lawyer, and he handed over total creative control to an actor with no script.

A lawyer showed a jury a jar of M&Ms. Each piece = $1 billion of Meta's net worth. Five months later, Meta paid ~$18 billion to make a lawsuit disappear. Here's how 🧵

Are you using AI at your law firm?

The actor is Terrell "Lucky" John. No lines. He just hits play in a home studio and improvises whatever the beat pulls out of him. "I don't even know what's going to come out of my mouth." - Lucky, to WaPo

The trick: he never argued about a single post. Platforms almost always win these cases. Section 230 shields them from liability over user content. So he skipped content entirely.

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It worked. Lanier showed the jury what Meta was already thinking and doing. And it cost Meta $18 billion. Now we’re about to see this play out with AI companies.

The result: Arguably the most heard voice on American radio. A contract north of $1M/year. DJs riffing on it live. TikTok duets by the hundreds of thousands.

Instead, he argued about how the machine was built: → beauty filters → growth targets → internal strategy docs

Get more candid commentary for plaintiff trial lawyers written by Adam Ramirez on The Tort Report. eve.legal/blogs/best-lega…

The ad that makes you cringe a little is the one people remember. Playing it safe is the expensive option. You just don't see the bill.

And it almost didn't happen. Helm bet $187K of savings and credit on this in 2019. Took zero revenue for nine months. Almost named it "Philly Law Dog," which would've capped it at one zip code.

Meta's defense: "Teen mental health is complicated. You can't blame one app." His counter: the eggshell-plaintiff rule. Doesn't matter if a kid was already vulnerable. Question is: who made it worse, and did they know?

Here's a pattern we see constantly in this industry: Top plaintiff attorneys, nearly all of them, say the same thing about advertising: "Felt beneath the practice." Then they did it anyway. It unlocked their firms.

Attorney Mark Lanier’s method never changes: Take the company's own documents. Read them back slowly. Let the jury feel what the company was comfortable writing down.