Do car crashes predict who searches for a lawyer?

Every fatal crash the federal government recorded in 2024 — 36,297 of them — assigned by its coordinates to the television market it happened in, then set against a year of measured injury-lawyer search demand in 202 markets. Crash volume explains about two-thirds of search demand. The other third is advertising, brand, and market habit — and it is not evenly distributed.

What we measured

The numerator is the same generic demand layer used across this site: 17–18 non-branded injury search terms (“car accident lawyer,” “personal injury attorney” and kin), Google Ads volume at metro scope, trailing twelve months. The denominator is new: NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) 2024 file — a census of every fatal crash in the country, each with police-reported coordinates — assigned point-by-point to Nielsen DMA boundary polygons (99.1% of crashes assigned). Fatal crashes alone would bias the comparison, because urban roads produce nearly twice the non-fatal crashes per fatality that rural roads do. So each market’s total-crash figure is estimated from its own rural/urban fatal mix using severity ratios computed from NHTSA’s CRSS microdata: 201.7 total police-reported crashes per fatal crash on urban roads, 106.0 on rural. The CRSS weighting check reproduces NHTSA’s published national total — 6,138,359 crashes in 2023 — to the digit.

Across the measured markets that yields an estimated 5,837,784 police-reported crashes per year against 35,740 fatal crashes. On a log scale, estimated crash volume and search volume correlate at r = 0.82 (r² ≈ 0.67) — stronger than fatal crashes alone (r = 0.80), which is the check that the severity adjustment adds signal rather than noise.

Where injured people don’t search: the most under-searched markets

These markets have the crashes. They do not have the search habit. Whatever moves injured people to look for a lawyer — decades of advertising, a famous local name, urban word-of-mouth — has not happened here. (Markets with at least 30 fatal crashes in 2024; smaller markets are excluded from ranking as statistically noisy.)

Where the search habit outruns the crashes: the most saturated markets

The Buffalo effect

The most search-saturated market in America is Buffalo, NY — roughly 7,800 injury-lawyer searches per 1,000 crashes, nearly double the second-place market — and it is joined in the top ten by Rochester and New York City, making New York the only state with three entries. Western New York is where saturation personal-injury advertising was practically invented: this is Cellino & Barnes country, the home of 444-4444 and 888-8888, and the search habit those decades of advertising built is now directly measurable against crash exposure (see the vanity-number study for that history). Ohio’s long-advertised markets — Youngstown and Cleveland in the top ten, Columbus and Toledo just behind — show the same conditioning. We present this as an observation, not a causal claim; but the map of heavy historical TV advertising and the map of search-saturated markets are hard to tell apart.

What this data cannot tell you

Read these limits before quoting a number. First: fatal crashes are a census; total-crash figures are modeled estimates from national severity ratios applied to each market’s rural/urban mix — a market’s true all-severity count requires its state DOT’s crash file, which is a planned refinement. Second: crashes are a proxy for injury volume, not a measure of it; nothing here says how many injured people exist, only how crash exposure compares across markets on a consistent method. Third: one market — Zanesville, OH — is excluded from every table above: Google reports head-term volumes for this very small city that are implausible against its population and crash exposure, a known Keyword Planner small-geography artifact that persists even when the query is pinned to the exact city geotarget. Buffalo, NY was excluded from this page’s first publication for the opposite reason — its collected volumes turned out to reflect a broader geography than the city — and was re-measured on 7 August 2026 with its Google geotarget pinned; the corrected figures appear above and rank Buffalo first among saturated markets. Five further markets with high ratios on thin crash bases (Lafayette IN, Cheyenne WY, Lima OH, Grand Junction CO, Charlottesville VA) are held out of ranking pending the same verification. We would rather publish a shorter table than a wrong one.

Cite as: Malherbe, J. “Do Car Crashes Predict Lawyer Search Demand?” BrandTerritory / Mass Tort Ad Agency, August 2026. Reuse permitted with attribution and date. Believe a number is wrong? Email jacob@masstortadagency.com — we will re-run the measurement and publish the correction.

Sources: NHTSA FARS 2024 Annual File (fatal crash census); NHTSA CRSS 2023 (severity calibration); Google Ads search volume, Jul 2025–Jun 2026. Methodology · The measurement audit