Cellino & Barnes, Injury Attorneys, 800-888-8888

Speaker 1 Before we begin, this episode contains some adult language.

Speaker 1 When Katie Shepard, Dakota Rings producer, moved to New York City about 10 years ago, she watched a lot of cable TV.

Speaker 2 And the thing about cable is commercial breaks. Lots of them.

Speaker 1 Over time, she found that she remembered the commercials more than the shows.

Speaker 2 And their jingles got stuck in my head. There was the coffee one.

Speaker 2 The best part

Speaker 2 awakened up. The soldiers in your cup.
And the fast food one.

Speaker 2 And even one for cough drops.

Speaker 2 But there was one I'd never seen before moving to New York. And then I saw it all the time.

Speaker 4 Suveno and Barnes, injury attorneys, 800-888, 8888. Don't wait, call 8.

Speaker 2 This commercial was simple. It featured two smiling, white, middle-aged personal injury lawyers offering their services.
Head-on, T-bone, rear-ended, don't wait, call eight.

Speaker 2 Walking around the city, I suddenly noticed Seleno and Barnes everywhere, on billboards and subway ads and in bus shelters, always asking the same thing. Injured?

Speaker 2 They felt like a part of New York to me. I thought of them as a kind of certainty, a reliable package deal, always together, with, of course, that catchy jingle.
And it wasn't just me.

Speaker 6 It was a jingle stuck in my head for years. It went, Seleno and Barnes, injury attorneys, 800, 888, 8888.

Speaker 2 That's Tariq Trotter, also known as the musician Black Thought from the Roots on The Tonight Show.

Speaker 6 I mean, it had all the pertinent information and no filler. I mean, who are these guys anyway? Seleno and Barnes.
I mean, what do they do? They're injury attorneys, fool.

Speaker 6 What's What's their number? 800 and all eights. Come to find out, these jokers are breaking up.
Now nobody wins.

Speaker 2 In 2017, after 25 years of working together, Ross Salino had sued Steve Barnes to dissolve the firm. And this annoyed Trotter and other New Yorkers who vented online.

Speaker 7 You're not truly from New York if the breakup of Seleno and Barnes didn't totally fucking upset you. Am I the only one who didn't know New York's most famous couple broke up?

Speaker 4 No!

Speaker 4 No!

Speaker 4 Selena!

Speaker 2 These personal injury lawyers were known and liked and lamented. But why did I, why did anyone, care?

Speaker 1 This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willip Haskin.

Speaker 2 And I'm Katie Shepard. Seleno and Barnes were two Buffalo-based lawyers who became the literal posterman for personal injury advertising.

Speaker 2 They poured millions of dollars into ads that did more than just bring in clients. It turned the duo into household names and faces, at least in New York.

Speaker 2 In this episode, we're going to look at their rise and everything that happened after. It's a bumpy ride full of ambition, accidents, and tragedy.

Speaker 2 And at its center are two men who for 25 years wanted to be at the front of our minds when we got hurt, but who we didn't really notice until it all fell apart.

Speaker 2 So today on Dakota Ring, who are Seleno and Barnes and why do I miss them so much?

Speaker 1 Hey, Dakota Ring listeners, you know how much I love a good deep dive. And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too.

Speaker 1 This holiday season, you can give the gift gift of endless exploration to like-minded friends and family with Apple Gift Card.

Speaker 1 They can use it for research apps on the App Store, documentaries on the Apple TV app, or even ad-free podcasts. It's the perfect present for the curious mind.

Speaker 1 Visit applegiftcard.apple.com to learn more and gift one today.

Speaker 2 Rossalina became a lawyer because it ran in the family.

Speaker 9 My dad also was a a lawyer, and when I saw my dad in particular interact with clients, they really looked up to him.

Speaker 2 Ross Salino Sr. had worked a steel job during the day to pay for law school at night before starting his own firm in Buffalo, New York.

Speaker 9 He was solving problems for them, and that was exciting for me to think, hey, maybe I can do that too.

Speaker 2 Ross Jr. also went to law school.
And after graduating, he started his own practice, renting space out of his dad's office.

Speaker 9 $175 a month rent. They had a receptionist that would answer my phone.
But I was one of the first ones to have a computer. They use these IBM Selectric typewriters.

Speaker 9 I bought myself a $6,000 Wang computer that had a little green screen.

Speaker 2 And he was also the only one in the office to advertise.

Speaker 9 I put a little ad in the yellow pages, business card size ad, and it worked for me. And I got enough business to cover the cost of the ad and make a little bit of money.

Speaker 2 A few years later, Salino joined his dad's firm. And pretty soon, he had them them advertising too.

Speaker 8 You can work as a lawyer for 40 years and you develop a reputation over 40 years that you're pretty good at what you do.

Speaker 9 Or you could do good work and also let the public know that you do good work.

Speaker 2 In the early 1990s, Salino's father retired. The firm went looking for a new partner to replace him.
Another lawyer, Rich Barnes, who had an office right down the hall from Salino, had a suggestion.

Speaker 2 His younger brother, Steve Barnes.

Speaker 10 Steve was looking for a change and they were looking for a trial lawyer.

Speaker 2 Steve Barnes had been a Marine in the First Iraq War, rode motorcycles and climbed mountains. He'd almost made it to the top of Everest.

Speaker 10 Steve was always very

Speaker 10 passionate and enthusiastic about everything he did and the law was clearly Steve's calling.

Speaker 2 Seleno liked Barnes immediately.

Speaker 9 It seemed like it was a match made in heaven. Steve just seemed like an aggressive young guy.
He was my age, and that we could have him join the firm.

Speaker 2 So the firm became Seleno and Barnes. And if you're unclear as to which one is which, there's one easy way to distinguish between them.

Speaker 12 One of them is bald and one of them isn't.

Speaker 2 Jeremy Kuttner is a lawyer himself and the author of a lengthy New York magazine article about Seleno and Barnes.

Speaker 2 While reporting that piece, he learned about other differences besides Barnes's baldness.

Speaker 12 From actually talking to Ross, most of his outward personality is kind of cuddly family man, and people will say, you know, he just, he loves his family and he's just a really, really, really nice guy.

Speaker 2 And when you talk about Steve, they just say he is a really intense guy very very smart just really intense but Seleno and Barnes were both very ambitious for their firm at first they tried to grow as a general interest practice they did criminal cases real estate deals adoptions all kinds of litigation but then Steve Barnes saw a way for them to get bigger faster Steve's the one that really convinced me let's just focus on personal injury and so I agreed with him and we did lawyers don't have the best rap in general, but few have a worse one than the personal injury lawyer.

Speaker 14 They call us ambulance chasers, bottom feeders, vultures who prey on the misfortunes of others.

Speaker 2 That's John Travolta in the movie A Civil Action. You can also think of the character Jimmy McGill, aka Saul Goodman, from the TV series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

Speaker 15 Yeah, a lawsuit sounds good, Saul, but who can I sue?

Speaker 15 Who can you sue? Try police departments, libraries, construction companies, school officials, cleaning services, farmers.

Speaker 2 And there are plenty of real-life personal injury lawyers whose ads make them seem like real characters.

Speaker 16 It ain't pretty when you face a bad truck wreck. Greedy insurance companies play dirty.

Speaker 4 Bring it on.

Speaker 9 Don't urinate on my leg and tell me it's raining.

Speaker 17 Insurance companies, we're going to court. If your car gets crashed and you get smashed, we'll work hard to get you the cash.
Try that.

Speaker 2 But before the personal injury lawyer was an archetype, people didn't think about them much at all.

Speaker 2 Plaintiffs have long been able to bring torque claims or injury claims to court, but the cases tended to be small, to go after small defendants for small rewards. That was the norm.

Speaker 2 But then, starting after World War II, three things happened that would ultimately lead to the phenomenon of Salino and Barnes.

Speaker 2 First, some lawyers realized the suits didn't have to stay small, and one of them was a lawyer in California named Melvin Bellai.

Speaker 18 Everybody can get a lawyer that needs one. And I don't think we're out for the bucks as much as we used to be.

Speaker 14 You saying anybody can afford Melvin Belli?

Speaker 18 Well, if their case is serious enough, and the case is bad enough, Bellai would wear flashy suits and drove fancy cars.

Speaker 2 He represented people like Chuck Berry, Muhammad Ali, and the Rolling Stones.

Speaker 2 But he made his name early in his career when he represented a restaurant manager who had a Coca-Cola bottle explode in her hand at work.

Speaker 20 She'd suffered pretty bad injuries to her wrist and hand.

Speaker 2 John Fabian Witt is a lawyer and historian at Yale Law School.

Speaker 20 She was probably eligible for workers' comp from her employer, but Bellai's creative idea was to bring a lawsuit against Coca-Cola.

Speaker 2 The case ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court in 1944 and became a landmark ruling in liability law.

Speaker 2 When it was decided, yes, you could sue Coca-Cola and other companies for accidents like this.

Speaker 2 You can draw a direct line between this ruling and future famous lawsuits like the the McDonald's hot coffee case.

Speaker 2 So now personal injury lawyers could go after bigger targets. But the second thing that was happening around this time was that there was more money to go after.

Speaker 2 And that's thanks to the rise in insurance.

Speaker 12 If no one has any insurance and I hit you on the street, whether or not I can get any money from you depends on whether or not you have any money to get.

Speaker 2 Jeremy Kuttner again.

Speaker 12 And most people don't have a ton of money.

Speaker 2 But insurance companies do.

Speaker 12 When you have insurance everywhere, suddenly you have a reliable thing behind the people who are hurting you and a sort of large pool of dollars that you can draw from.

Speaker 2 When everyone's insured, the guy in the rental car isn't just a guy in the rental car. He's connected to Hertz or Enterprise, companies with a ton of insurance.

Speaker 12 If you talk to personal injury lawyers, you know, when you sort of do a cold call, they're really interested if you get hit by like a delivery driver.

Speaker 2 Back in the 1940s and 50s, lawyers were just beginning to see what all this insurance could mean for their clients. They hadn't typically sought huge damages.

Speaker 2 But as I said before, that was just a norm. There were no legal caps on damages in a personal injury case.
The sky was the limit. And lawyers like Bellai started to fly higher.

Speaker 20 And the thing that he and his generation of plaintiffs lawyers figure out how to do is to increase the damages available by telling charismatic stories about the kind of injuries that people had suffered.

Speaker 18 I've got two cases to go Monday. One of them we've been offered four and a half million dollars on.
That's out of court settlement.

Speaker 2 This is Belle Eye on the Mike Douglas Show, talking about a college student at Stanford who broke his neck doing a somersault off of a trampoline.

Speaker 18 Yes, but we're not going to take it because I've got to get more than that because the boy needs more. Paralyzed from here down.
He can only move his head. Costs him $200,000 a year to live.

Speaker 2 Before the 60s, a million-dollar award for a personal injury case just didn't happen.

Speaker 2 After Bellai and others like him, personal injury claims increased in both the amount of claims and the awards granted.

Speaker 2 Over the course of his career, Belli alone received verdicts and settlements totaling over $600 million.

Speaker 2 And part of the reason he made so much has to do with how personal injury lawyers are paid. They take clients on without getting paid up front in the hopes that they'll get paid at the end.

Speaker 12 And if you get a settlement, the lawyers get a third and the rest goes to you, but critically subtracting costs.

Speaker 2 The lawyers are the ones initially footing the bill for the case. So even if it doesn't work out, there's no risk to the individual.

Speaker 2 But because lawyers are taking the risk, when the payout comes, they get a good chunk of it.

Speaker 12 But the lawyers only get paid when there's a settlement or where there's a jury verdict. And so there's a heavy incentive to settle.

Speaker 2 This is why personal injury law is so lucrative, but it's also why personal injury lawyers have developed a reputation as slick, opportunistic settlement seekers.

Speaker 2 And this pay structure is also why they need a lot of clients, like book publishing or the record industry. They need cases that succeed to pay for the ones that don't.

Speaker 2 And this is why they chase ambulances to get more volume. But another way to do it is through advertising.

Speaker 2 This is the third thing that led to the rise of Seleno and Barnes. Trish Rich is a partner at Holland and Knight.

Speaker 2 She represents other lawyers as they navigate complex regulatory issues, including advertising.

Speaker 22 So historically, it used to be the case that lawyers were barred from doing any sort of advertising.

Speaker 2 It was prohibited for two reasons.

Speaker 22 Number one,

Speaker 22 that

Speaker 22 We as a profession were above advertising, right? It was seen as the sort of thing that like, you know, shoe salesmen did, but not lawyers. We were, we were loftier than advertising.

Speaker 2 If the first reason lawyers couldn't advertise was that they were too genteel for that, the second reason was that they were considered too manipulative.

Speaker 22 This idea that lawyers are so clever

Speaker 22 and wily that if we let them advertise, they will be able to take advantage of lots of people that aren't nearly as smart as lawyers are.

Speaker 2 For most of the 20th century, advertising for lawyers was banned. And then in 1977, a law firm in Arizona ran an ad in a newspaper.

Speaker 22 It's just a little business-sized thing in a corner of a newspaper that says, do you need a lawyer? We do trust in estates.

Speaker 22 It's like, you wouldn't even look at it today.

Speaker 2 But when the Arizona state bar sought to discipline the lawyers, the case, again, went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 23 Nearing the end of its term, the Supreme Court today issued a number of major decisions. It ruled that lawyers may advertise.

Speaker 2 It would be decades before personal injury advertising became the billion-dollar a year industry it is today.

Speaker 2 But now the door was open for a pair of up-and-coming personal injury lawyers from Buffalo.

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Speaker 2 Soon after 1995, Seleno and Barnes decided to go full throttle into personal injury law, but they needed clients.

Speaker 2 Some personal injury lawyers around the country had taken to regional television markets to find them. Salino and Barnes heard about one lawyer in particular.
Morris Bart got me my check.

Speaker 23 One call, that's all.

Speaker 2 Morris Bart is based in New Orleans and now spends $25 million a year on advertising.

Speaker 2 When Salino and Barnes reached out to him about his strategy, he invited them down to visit and gave them some advice. Jeremy Kuttner again.

Speaker 12 You know, the major strategy is to find out what your nearest competitor is spending on on ads and double it and just keep doing it.

Speaker 2 They took his guidance. They took it so seriously, they did something law firms didn't usually do.
They hired a non-lawyer, a guy with an MBA, to help them develop a business strategy.

Speaker 2 It all started with a billboard. Actually, several billboards.

Speaker 13 We're talking about you're driving down God knows what street, turn the corner, and there on the side of that delicate Tussan is Seleno and Barnes.

Speaker 10 They're everywhere.

Speaker 2 Ken Kaufman is a commercial composer who lives near Buffalo. He's talking about the ad I mentioned earlier, Seleno and Barnes, their phone number, and that one simple question in all caps.
Injured?

Speaker 13 You couldn't open your eyes in western New York without seeing these two guys.

Speaker 2 And for those guys and their families, being everywhere took some getting used to.

Speaker 9 When I first started billboarding in Buffalo, my one daughter, who was probably at the time eight years old, she was in school and one of the kids was harassing her about it, oh, is that your dad on the billboard?

Speaker 9 And she said, no, that's my uncle, because she was embarrassed about it.

Speaker 2 But Seleno and Barnes weren't so easily embarrassed. More than just billboards, they also wanted a jingle.

Speaker 9 The jingle is what really gets embedded in your brain.

Speaker 2 Selena really liked one for the grocery chain Top Supermarket.

Speaker 9 Tops never stops, saving you more.

Speaker 25 Never stops,

Speaker 25 saving you more.

Speaker 2 Turns out the guy who had written it was Ken Kaufman, who already knew about Seleno and Barnes from their billboards.

Speaker 2 One day, an executive at the radio station he worked at told him that Steve Barnes wanted to meet.

Speaker 13 He knew precisely what he wanted to say.

Speaker 13 And he told me precisely.

Speaker 13 Seleno and Barnes, he said, the injury attorneys. Now he said, it's not the injury attorneys.
He was trying to give me a bit of an English lesson. It's the injury attorneys.

Speaker 13 and then we simply want our phone number.

Speaker 13 Seleno and Barnes, injury attorneys, calling for

Speaker 13 2020.

Speaker 2 Ken sold the jingle to Salino and Barnes outright.

Speaker 13 Well, it was for $2,500.

Speaker 13 If I had gotten even two cents for all the airplay that it got, it would have been worth a lot of money.

Speaker 2 And that's because Salino and Barnes flooded the airwaves.

Speaker 25 At Salino and Barnes, we have helped thousands of clients clients put their lives back together and recover what they deserve.

Speaker 24 That dedication to each client has helped make us the area's largest personal injury law firm.

Speaker 24 So if you've been injured, call Salino and Barnes today and let us put our strength and experience to work for you.

Speaker 2 When they started these ads, they were scrappy. It was still early enough that they could be the guys with the ads that stood out.
Rich Barnes, Steve Barnes' brother again.

Speaker 10 You know, neither one of them went into the creation of Salino and Barnes as wealthy guys.

Speaker 10 They didn't, and realized that they were going to have to build it first and profit from it once they got to the right point.

Speaker 2 And the ads were going to get them to that point.

Speaker 9 That was part of our modus operandi to be able to handle serious cases. You need to let the public know who you are and also let the public know that you do good work.

Speaker 2 For Salino and Barnes, the publicity and good work were supposed to go together.

Speaker 9 We can't repair a broken leg or

Speaker 9 a ruptured disc in a back.

Speaker 9 Doctors do that, but sometimes if they're out of work for three years because they can't go to work or they're permanently disabled, they need to get a lawyer that can get them fair compensation to offset the loss of income.

Speaker 2 But they also wanted to make money and helping clients and seeing financial returns seemed like two things that could go together.

Speaker 2 For example, Salino says one of his most memorable cases involved an 87-year-old man who was struck by a tractor trailer backing up and had to use a wheelchair.

Speaker 2 Because of the man's age, the insurance company didn't offer to pay out what Salino and Barnes felt was appropriate.

Speaker 2 When Salino got to trial, the defense attorney offered to settle at $200,000, which he rejected.

Speaker 9 The jury gave me $1.1 million in a verdict, which was really, really heartwarming to me because this man ultimately lived to age like 94.

Speaker 2 Salino and Barnes wanted to resolve more cases like this so they could get a payout for them and a payout for their clients.

Speaker 2 To get those cases, they put their offices in prime locations, like a second one in Buffalo, Jeremy Kuttner again.

Speaker 12 So it's literally across the street from a huge trauma hospital. It's got big red light-up sign.
So, you know, the term ambulance chaser, they didn't have to chase anything.

Speaker 2 They also invested in all that advertising. the billboards and radio and TV spots.
By the late 90s, the Buffalo News was writing about how people couldn't escape Seleno and Barnes' smiling faces.

Speaker 2 But that's what you want if you're personal injury lawyers. To be so pervasive, you just pop into people's mind when something goes wrong.

Speaker 2 The whole strategy seemed to come together when a man named Mark Rappold reached out to the firm after a neighbor who'd seen the ads recommended he do so.

Speaker 2 Rappold hired Seleno and Barnes to represent his son David after a horrible accident. David, who was a law student at the time, was left permanently brain damaged.

Speaker 2 Insurance carriers for a Rochester-based car rental company and two motorists were ordered by a jury to pay the family a very large sum.

Speaker 9 And obtained the largest verdict ever in Western New York: $47 million verdict.

Speaker 2 Seleno and Barnes had done exactly what they set out to do: get a family the money they deserved and get paid themselves. But this apparent triumph was about to get more complicated.

Speaker 1 Hey, Dakota Ring listeners, you know how much I love a good deep dive. And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too.

Speaker 1 This holiday season, you can give the gift of endless exploration to like-minded friends and family with Apple Gift Card.

Speaker 1 They can use it for research apps on the App Store, documentaries on the Apple TV app, or even ad-free podcasts. It's the perfect present for the curious mind.

Speaker 1 Visit applegiftcard.apple.com to learn more and gift one today.

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Speaker 2 After the huge settlement in the Rappold case, Seleno and Barnes hired outside lawyers to make sure the large amount didn't decrease on appeal, but they billed Mark Rappold $300,000 for doing this.

Speaker 2 He felt deceived. Rappold filed a complaint and an investigator looked into the case.
When he did, he discovered a number of other irregularities.

Speaker 2 For one thing, Salino and Barnes were loaning money to clients against future winnings, which is not permitted because of the conflicts of interest it creates.

Speaker 2 For another, Salino appeared to have filed inaccurate paperwork with the state. The firm stopped the loans immediately, but Salino's license was suspended for six months in 2005.

Speaker 2 Steve Barnes was censured, and Steve's brother, Rich Barnes, was brought in during Salino's suspension to keep a familiar name on the door.

Speaker 21 The Salino and Barnes billboards are changing by the day as local billboard companies take down pictures of the two most recognizable lawyers in town.

Speaker 2 All told, it would be a year and a half before Salino was reinstated. And in that time, the company temporarily became known as the Barnes Firm.

Speaker 2 When Ross returned, the firm reverted to its old name, Salino and Barnes. But while on the surface it was back to business as usual, Rich Barnes says on the inside, things had changed.

Speaker 10 Ross Salino was suspended from practice.

Speaker 24 And during that time,

Speaker 10 Steve, who had a very large role in the operation of the firm, but basically took over the whole firm, he really, really embraced the role as the leader.

Speaker 12 According to Steve,

Speaker 12 Ross, when he came back, just wasn't the same Ross. If yes, Ross, you know, Steve got power hungry.
Once he got control, didn't want to relinquish it.

Speaker 2 But if there was emotional friction inside the firm, it didn't seem to matter to the company's fortunes. Profits rose exponentially.

Speaker 2 They opened that second office in Buffalo, which soon had 40 lawyers, and they started expanding to Rochester and Long Island. And then in 2010, they took Manhattan.

Speaker 9 When we moved to New York, there wasn't a lot of lawyer advertising the way we did it. So I think we became known as, you know, the guys that

Speaker 9 opened up the field of lawyer advertising in New York City.

Speaker 2 This is around when I moved to New York and started seeing their faces and hearing their jingle nearly every day. It was a bustling few years for the firm.

Speaker 2 In 2012, Seleno and Barnes bought the familiar 888 number for $1.8 million.

Speaker 2 That same year, they each took home nearly $6 million.

Speaker 2 Then the LA office opened, followed by Oakland and San Diego. By 2016, $12.6 million a year was spent on advertising.

Speaker 2 A year later, they had more than 55,000 intake calls annually from prospective clients.

Speaker 9 It's the accumulation of all these cases that we have helped all these clients. I mean, it's not too many lawyers can say we've recovered over $2 billion

Speaker 9 of settlements or verdicts for clients, and that's a big number. There's a big difference between a billion and a million.

Speaker 2 But while Salino and Barnes' earnings were on the rise, so apparently was the internal tension. Because in May of 2017, Salino did something that shocked just about everyone, including Steve Barnes.

Speaker 27 Salino and Barnes, the area's largest personal injury firm, might be coming to an end. Court documents show Ross Solino is suing his longtime legal partner, Stephen Barnes, to dissolve the firm.

Speaker 2 It is hard to pinpoint exactly when and why things tipped over, but most observers believe it had something to do with succession.

Speaker 2 Salino had six kids, Barnes had three, and Barnes' girlfriend, a successful lawyer in her own right, worked for the firm. So there was some disagreement about who would take over eventually.

Speaker 2 For his part, Salino says he wanted to have something of his own.

Speaker 9 Sometimes in life, though, you get to the point in life and you say, you know, I just want to steer my own ship my own way. And I think that's really what happened.

Speaker 2 According to Jeremy Kuttner, none of this made much sense to Barnes.

Speaker 12 He's like, and you can see this in all his emails, basically,

Speaker 12 what the fuck is wrong with you? We are making 12 million a year each. We have a whole system.

Speaker 12 Why on earth? Like, even if you hate my guts, Even if you think I'm the worst person in the world, you are making so much money. Go buy an island.
Go on a meditative retreat. Do whatever you want.

Speaker 12 Just leave it the fuck alone, please.

Speaker 2 After 25 years of working together and fighting for every dollar for them and their clients, Salino and Barnes turned on each other.

Speaker 12 They're in court, savaging each other, just going after each other in like ridiculous ways.

Speaker 2 But as these two lawyers were ripping each other apart in court, something actually surprising happened. People seemed to care.
Their split put Salino and Barnes front of mind.

Speaker 2 Like wallpaper, you stop noticing until someone suggests changing it. And the people who noticed also happen to live in the nation's media capital.
So they end up spoofed on Saturday Night Live.

Speaker 10 Jingle-based attorneys, Salino and Barnes.

Speaker 4 Serena and Barnes, Injury attorneys. Happy to be here on short day.

Speaker 2 And Broadway performers started an online challenge performing the jingle. Now entire casts are joining in.

Speaker 4 Injury attorney, 880,

Speaker 4 8888.

Speaker 2 New Yorkers who had grown accustomed to seeing the two swiped the remaining subway posters, which now go for thousands each.

Speaker 2 A t-shirt emerged and sold out with an airbrushed image of the two reading, Legends Never Die, 888s, and Heartbreak. I have tried desperately to find one, but no luck, if anybody has any leads.

Speaker 2 Seleno and Barnes' divorce fight lasted for three years before the case came to its logical conclusion.

Speaker 12 It ends like almost every other personal injury case, which is they settle. You know, they decide, all right, we're going to each set up our own separate firms.

Speaker 12 They have this really awkward kind of session where they present, you know, to the attorneys and say, will you go with Ross or will you go with Steve? And all the lawyers have to like decide

Speaker 12 who they're going to go with.

Speaker 2 Plans were made on both sides to start fresh with new advertising and new clients in a new world. There would be Seleno and there would be Barnes, but they wouldn't be together.

Speaker 2 And then days before the launch of the new firms, the unimaginable happened.

Speaker 28 It was just one day ago when the news of a deadly plane crash shocked Western New Yorkers. Prominent attorney Steve Barnes and his niece Elizabeth were both killed in that crash.

Speaker 2 Steve Barnes was piloting a single-engine aircraft with his niece Elizabeth, traveling to his mother's 90th birthday in Buffalo when the plane crashed.

Speaker 2 Steve's brother Rich Barnes had been waiting in his office for him and his daughter, also a lawyer, who was 32 at the time.

Speaker 10 A couple of the lawyers from the firm came in

Speaker 10 very grim-faced and asked me to come to the next office and advised me that the sheriffs had contacted us and the plane had crashed and was identified as Steve's plane.

Speaker 10 They did not know my daughter was on that plane and

Speaker 10 I literally collapsed to the floor.

Speaker 10 We learned shortly thereafter

Speaker 10 there were no survivors. So

Speaker 10 it was a very rough day.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it was just an immensely tragic thing.

Speaker 12 The king of

Speaker 12 personal injury, Crash Law, himself died in a crash. It was just

Speaker 12 so

Speaker 12 freaky and... awful and everyone was really devastated.

Speaker 2 Right after it happened, Salino told the Buffalo News, it's funny how all the crap that Steve and I went through over the past three years, all the posturing, arguing, and insults just disappeared from my mind when his plane crashed.

Speaker 9 In hindsight,

Speaker 9 yeah, Steve and I should have worked things out and talked to each other a little bit more, but I guess it was the, you know, stubborn Italian in me and the stubborn Hungarian Irish in Steve.

Speaker 9 But the truth is, up until that point, we really had a very good relationship.

Speaker 2 In the immediate aftermath of Steve's death, both firms decided to pause the ads that had been ready to roll out, but only for a couple of weeks.

Speaker 2 When the Barnes firm began advertising again, the new ads they put out featured not Steve Barnes, but his brother Rich.

Speaker 2 Rich looks a lot like Steve, but his hair is gray and he has a little more of it. At first I was confused by the ads.
Was that still Seleno and Barnes?

Speaker 2 When I realized these new ads were a result of not just the firm splitting up, but of Barnes' sudden death, I was out of sorts.

Speaker 2 But the change was a sign of how important these ads are to the business. For the business to survive, to thrive, there have to be ads.

Speaker 2 So Rich Barnes, now the president of the Barnes firm, stepped up.

Speaker 10 I was a little self-conscious when I first started doing it. I'd never done a commercial before,

Speaker 10 but

Speaker 10 I understand the importance of it to the firm. And so, Not unlike my brother, I embrace it very much as well.
I know how important it is.

Speaker 2 Today, when you visit SelenoandBarnes.com, it reads, Seleno and Barnes is now two separate law firms.

Speaker 2 Please select one of the websites below with an image of Rich Barnes on the right and Seleno on the left. They both have new jingles, though they're not that different from the old one.

Speaker 4 The Barnesman,

Speaker 4 injury attorneys, Carl 800, Car Crash, Consolino.

Speaker 2 And despite continuing on with his new firm, Seleno is aware that he and Barnes somehow made a singular impression.

Speaker 9 There was some magic with Steve and I, I think, that we had. I think the public,

Speaker 9 for whatever reason, you know, they love the jingle and they love seeing the two of us together on our TV commercials.

Speaker 9 There was that bit of special mojo between the two of us.

Speaker 2 But what was all that mojo, really?

Speaker 2 I had been interested in Salino and Barnes since I moved to New York. Before I came here, I'd never really encountered personal injury lawyers like these two.

Speaker 2 In my mind, the 888 number was the number. They had the billboard.
I felt like Seleno and Barnes were somehow special, local celebrities, key to the mythology of the city and state.

Speaker 2 And I wasn't the only one.

Speaker 9 Earlier on, when we became somewhat well-known, I'm at Kmart with my wife and I have six children and I was just looking for a pair of boots.

Speaker 9 I'm sitting on the floor putting on this pair of boots and this guy walks by and he sees me and he runs to get his wife. And then he points to me, goes, That's Seleno.

Speaker 9 And he's basically, basically, saying, I can't believe you're buying a pair of boots from Kmart. I mean, wouldn't you be at some high-end store buying a pair of boots?

Speaker 9 And I, you know, said to myself, Look at, I'm no different than you. I just happen to be on a billboard or I happen to be on TV.

Speaker 2 I identify with this guy in Kmart, and yet I take Seleno's point. He is just a lawyer in an ad and a pretty low-key ad at that.

Speaker 29 The jingle is

Speaker 29 is so boring the phone number is one number that's just repeated they've had that same smile on both of their faces on that billboard for a long time mike breen is an actor comedian who grew up in a suburb of buffalo they don't have a gimmick or a shtick it's like

Speaker 2 they're the most norm core guys and yet despite finding seleno and barnes so normcore mike was fascinated he and his friend actor comedian david raffalides couldn't look away either They wrote a whole comedic play called Seleno v.

Speaker 2 Barnes.

Speaker 3 It's like a celebrity breakup, but with celebrities, you have like their body of work, you have their albums, you can have an emotional connection to something.

Speaker 3 Your connection to them is a jingle and the fact that they've just paid to be inside your head for so many years.

Speaker 2 All Seleno and Barnes did was put their faces out there. All they did was advertise.
So long as they were up on those billboards, larger than life, we could do the rest.

Speaker 3 Oh, these two people on a billboard, I can assign values to them. That's the smart one.
That's the dumb one. So I think like, after a while, they merge like they're part of your living room.

Speaker 2 But if Seleno and Barnes were wallpaper, towards the end of their partnership, it got peeled back. And underneath was pathos, contradictions, and drama.

Speaker 2 When Seleno and Barnes started, they were just two lawyers based in Buffalo, unafraid to put their names and faces out there with no idea of what would come next.

Speaker 2 And then they became the lawyers who made a career out of lawsuits and ended up in one. They became the kings of personal injury who ended up personally injured.

Speaker 2 They became the stars of an advertisement that was everywhere until it disappeared. There are lots of personal injury ads up around New York City and plenty of other jingles on TV.

Speaker 2 But I don't know if they'll ever have the special appeal of Seleno and Barnes.

Speaker 2 I think that's why, whenever I catch some cable TV these days, I'm still hoping, somehow, I might get to hear that familiar sound.

Speaker 4 Seleno and Barnes, injury attorneys, 800-888-8888. Don't wait.
Call 8.

Speaker 2 I'm Katie Shepard. This is Decodering.

Speaker 1 And I'm Willip Haskin. This podcast was written by Katie Shepard.
It was edited by Andrea Bruce and me, Willip Haskin, who also produces Decodering with Katie.

Speaker 1 Derek John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts. Merit Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
Thank you to to Meryl Scheinman, the host of Prank You.

Speaker 1 If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends.

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Speaker 1 So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today. We'll be back next week, and we'll see you then.

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