Who will be New York City’s next Cellino & Barnes?

It’s been five years since the once-ubiquitous injury law firm Cellino & Barnes ceased to exist as more than a persistent earworm — (800) 888-8888 — and a memory.

In the half-decade since its dissolution after a contentious professional breakup, a number of local law firms have begun jostling to succeed Cellino & Barnes as the new personal injury lawyer kings of New York.

Contenders for the crown have mounted aggressive marketing campaigns on the city’s subways, featuring photos of suited men and promises of large settlements.

They include Harris, Keenan & Goldfarb (a firm locally famous for its “Yo, Pain Law, Yo” ads), The Barnes Firm (run by the brother of Cellino's former partner Steve Barnes, who died in 2020) and Michael “The Bull” Lamonsoff (whose ads feature a cartoon version of himself standing next to a bat symbol of his initials and the words “let the bull take charge”). Bronx-based Adam “Lawbulldog” Oremland maintains a 2 million follower Instagram account promoting his personal injury firm, often through politically charged memes that occasionally cite Trump and Kanye West. Even Cellino is now doing TikTok dances.

But none have come anywhere close to the “Saturday Night Live” spoof-worthy, household name-status that Cellino & Barnes attained.

Ross Cellino, who founded Cellino & Barnes in 1998, said even he didn’t think much about his legacy. But the secret, he said, was simple: good timing.

“We were the first in the market to use billboarding and radio and TV to really inform the public,” said Cellino, who still practices under Cellino Law. “ I think it's very difficult to stand out today. It's more, much more, difficult.”

But a crop of new-ish injury attorneys are trying: Harris, Keenan & Goldfarb have run a series of attention-grabbing ads on the subway with all-caps messages, including the following statements seen in the past year:

YO, PAIN LAW, YO

I’M DOWN WITH NYC. YEAH, YOU KNOW ME.

THINK YOU’RE TIRED OF SEEING MY FACE? IMAGINE THE DEFENSE LAWYERS.

NOTHING EASES THE PAIN LIKE A BIG, FAT CASH SETTLEMENT

Some of these tactics struck city commuters as “cringe.” Pictures of the “Yo, Pain Law, Yo” ads were shared on Reddit, X and Instagram, with thousands of people weighing in.

Harris, Keenan & Goldfarb and the Barnes Firm did not return multiple requests for comment by press time.

Larry Chiagouris, a professor of marketing at Pace University, said that because most people don’t pay attention to law firm advertisements, firms need to be creative.

“Offer up language that has not been seen 100,000 times before,” he said. “I think it's important to know that law firms typically won't use this language in court or before a judge.”

Following a playbook Cellino & Barnes created

In-your-face injury attorney advertising has become a fact of life, but decades ago, Cellino & Barnes was paving a road untraveled with its ads.

The attorneys began advertising their Buffalo-born firm on the radio and on billboards in the 1990s at a time when many in the industry considered it a "grubby practice, a medical malpractice attorney once told The Buffalo News.

At that point, lawyers had only been allowed to advertise on TV and radio for about 10 years, and only on a state-by-state basis. Until 1977, they weren’t allowed to advertise in the United States at all.

Today, many firms are following a playbook Cellino & Barnes created, said Victoria Mottesheard, the vice president of New York marketing at Outfront Media, which specializes in billboard advertising.

“You'd be hard-pressed to be driving through any major market and not see several attorneys using billboards to bring more awareness to their firms,” Mottesheard said.

But that's a relatively recent development.

“What they did was not advertising in an interesting way, but advertising, period. Like, it wasn't as common, and it was considered very gauche to do something like that in the mid-'90s, especially the way they were doing it,” said Mike B. Breen, who co-wrote a play about Cellino & Barnes that closes its current off-Broadway run at the end of the month. (Cellino saw it with his mother — he said he was amused, but she was not.)

It’s the same phenomenon occurring across Hollywood, the music industry and beyond: As culture further fragments and more platforms and mediums vie for our attention, it becomes increasingly rare to achieve the same level of global fame many stars found in their fields a generation ago.

“The monoculture is dead. We’re all fractured now,” said David Rafailedes, Breen’s co-writer. “You have niche lawyers that have popularity, but no one’s going to break through to everybody. You’d have to be something special.”

Perhaps Cellino & Barnes reached the kind of peak that never comes again.

At least one man, however, disagrees.

“Set the mark? I’ve already passed it,” wrote Michael “The Bull” Lamonsoff in an email. “The bottom line is that if Cellino has set some sort of mark in personal injury, we will crush it. A jingle might get attention, but The Bull gets results.”

Ryan Kailath contributed additional reporting.