Research · August 5, 2026

Winner-take-most: how branded search demand concentrates in personal injury

Every month from July 2025 through June 2026. 641 personal injury firms. 59 markets where we track at least five of them. Recomputed 6 August 2026 after two data corrections: Google close-variant merge groups are now counted once, and one firm whose brand terms were city-generic was removed from the measured set. When we say share, we mean one thing: out of everyone who searched for a law firm by name in that market, how many typed yours. Before you quote a number from this page, read the audit — it explains what this data can and cannot tell you.

One firm gets a third of the market

A typical market has twelve firms competing. If people searched for them evenly, each would get about 8% of the name searches.

That is not what happens. The leading firm gets 30.4% — nearly four times an even split.

Some markets are a real fight, with the leader on 9.9%. Others belong to one name: the highest we found was 61.5%. In 11 of the 59 markets the leader is above 40%. In three of them, one firm gets more than half of everything searched.

Measure	Value
Average leader share (59 markets)	30.4%
Top three firms’ combined share of branded demand	63.8%
Combined share of the bottom half of firms	21.0%
Markets where the leader holds ≥ 40%	11 of 59
Markets where the leader holds ≥ 50%	3 of 59

Branded personal injury search is not a long tail. Three names absorb roughly two thirds of every branded search, and the entire bottom half of measured firms in a market — six firms, typically — divide about a fifth between them.

And they almost never lose it

We watched 118 markets for a full twelve months. In 62 of them — more than half — the same firm was number one every single month. Not once did anyone take the lead from them.

In 103 of those markets, only one or two firms ever held first place all year. Philadelphia is a good example: thirteen firms competing, and one of them sat at the top for eleven months out of twelve.

Whoever leads your market in January is probably still leading it in December. That cuts both ways. It is hard to take the lead. It is also hard to lose it once you have it.

The most dominated markets

The averages hide how lopsided this gets. In these markets one firm owns most of the category:

Market	Leader	Share	Firms
Louisville, KY	Hughes & Coleman Injury Lawyers	61.5%	8
Milwaukee, WI	Gruber Law Offices	60.9%	5
Washington, DC	Price Benowitz Accident Injury Lawyers	52.0%	8
Oklahoma City, OK	McIntyre Law	48.7%	5
Cincinnati, OH	Law Offices of Blake R. Maislin	48.2%	7
Jacksonville, FL	Morgan & Morgan	44.6%	9
Charleston, SC	Morgan & Morgan	42.3%	6
Tampa, FL	Morgan & Morgan	42.2%	14

Tampa is the one worth staring at. Fourteen firms measured, and one of them still takes more than two of every five name searches in the city.

And the most contested

At the other end, the big Texas and California metros are genuine fights — more firms competing, and no one running away with it.

Market	Leader	Share	Firms
Dallas, TX	Witherite Law Group	9.9%	30
Los Angeles, CA	Morgan & Morgan	12.0%	32
San Antonio, TX	Gamez Law Firm	17.5%	14
Houston, TX	Arnold & Itkin	18.5%	32
Austin, TX	Lorenz & Lorenz	18.6%	17
Charlotte, NC	Morgan & Morgan	19.3%	18

The pattern is not subtle: markets with more measured firms have weaker leaders. Louisville has eight firms and a 62% leader. Dallas has thirty and a 10% leader. Whether crowding weakens brands or weak brands invite crowding, this data cannot say — but if you operate in Dallas or LA, the ceiling above you is a lot lower than the national average suggests.

Two different ways to win

Only four firms lead more than one market, and they do it in opposite ways.

Firm	Markets led	Avg share where it leads
Morgan & Morgan	21	30.5%
Lerner & Rowe	2	32.0%
The Advocates Injury Attorneys	2	27.7%
TopDog Law	2	22.1%

Morgan & Morgan leads twenty-one markets — ten times anyone else — at roughly the national average share in each. Everyone else who leads more than one market leads exactly two. Breadth at this scale is, on this evidence, a strategy only one firm in the category has executed.

The comparison worth making is between the other three, all tied on two markets and separated only by how deeply they hold them: Lerner & Rowe at 32.0%, The Advocates at 27.7%, TopDog Law at 22.1%. Leading a crowded metro at 22% is a harder job than leading a thin one at 32%, and a table of leader shares alone would rank them in the wrong order.

Most firms have no brand at all

This is the part nobody puts in a pitch deck.

We track 856 firm-and-market combinations. In 564 of them — two out of every three — fewer than 150 people a month search for that firm by name. That is about five people a day. At that level we cannot tell a real change from Google rounding its numbers off.

Worse: 429 of the 641 firms we measure are below that line in every market they operate in. Not one city where their name gets searched enough to measure.

The honest way to say this is not “your brand is small.” It is that almost nobody is looking for you by name — while the firm across town collects a third of everyone who is looking.

When that demand arrives

Search demand has a calendar as well — quiet in February, busiest in late summer — but that comes from a different dataset asking a different question, so it lives on its own page: when people search for an injury lawyer.

What we are not telling you

We are not saying demand is going up or down. We have twelve months of data. With only one year, there is no way to tell a real trend apart from normal seasonal swings. Ask us again when we have two years.

We are not saying what built anyone's brand. We do not have anyone's advertising spend. So when a firm leads its market, we can show you that it leads — we cannot tell you whether TV, billboards, social, or thirty years of word of mouth put them there. Anyone claiming otherwise from this data is guessing.

We do not publish numbers finer than our tools can measure. Google reports search volume in rounded buckets, so we publish shares and rankings, never “this firm grew 12% last month.” Everything we got wrong on the way here is written up on its own page.

Source: BrandTerritory index panel, July 2025 – June 2026, brand-over-brand shares. Ownership shared with Mass Tort Ad Agency (which sells Meta advertising to law firms, including brand advertising since August 2026); inclusion in the index can be purchased, results cannot. Methodology.