Larry H. Parker Is His Own Dream Team

Little guys need a champion. So it’s comforting to know that fighting for us is Larry H. Parker’s job.

You know the sneering Parker from his peculiarly aggressive television ads. Mr. Warmth, he isn’t. But he’s memorable.

Parker is the Long Beach personal injury attorney with the dark-rimmed power glasses who says with authority, “You need someone to fight for you!” He also says, “You don’t have to go it alone!” And most indelibly, he says, “Fighting for you is my job !” When he lands on job , his upper lip seems to quiver slightly.

It’s not what he says, but how he says it that’s such a hoot. His snarly tone is almost threatening, as if his sales pitch is a menacing command and what he really means is, “Hire me or I’ll break your legs.”

You’d think he was angry.

“I am angry,” said Parker, a 1973 Southwestern Law School graduate who called back on his car phone in response to a message left for him. “I really am angry. I am damn angry.”

At insurers, not viewers, he explained.

Lawyers have been viewed with skepticism through the ages, an image problem surely exacerbated by the conduct of attorneys in the O.J. Simpson trial. Personal injury attorneys in particular are widely regarded as being shabby--witness their growth as objects of ridicule in movies and television. A new RAND Corp. study finds that nearly two-thirds of auto injury medical claims by Californians are either exaggerated or phony.

Parker blames this bad P.R. on insurance-industry smear campaigns and a few high-profile cases that captured the media’s attention. In one, he said, a woman collected $100,000 in damages after claiming that falling from a San Francisco cable car turned her into a nymphomaniac. And another found a man recovering worker’s compensation after suffering a heart attack during sex with a prostitute during a business conference.

To Parker, though, the real shiny suits are the insurers he battles on behalf of his clients. “If the insurance companies would just treat these people fairly,” he said, “they’d put guys like me out of business.”

And put his ads out of business, too? That would be something to sue about.

*

Regular viewers of the Simpson trial see Parker almost as often as they do the attorneys in the courtroom. That’s because daytime is Parker time, and a favored marketplace for other lawyers and legal services whose 800-number TV ads target a select audience of little guys with big problems.

Reportedly the biggest spending of these advertisers is Legal Rights Defenders, a San Pedro referral service. Also highly visible is Beverly Hills attorney David A. Grey, who claims to be the father of California’s legal advertisers on TV with ads dating to 1977.

In contrast to Parker, Grey presents an image of silken, soft-spoken benevolence in his traditionalist ads, which conclude with him on the edge of a desk beside a leaded glass lamp in a swanky office, promising that all injured parties have to do is provide the facts, and “the rest is up to us.” You want to sit on his lap.

Asked for his opinion of Parker’s commercials, Grey replied about TV’s daytime ghetto of 800-number ads: “I never watch that kind of television. I mostly watch the Discovery Channel.”

He’ll find nothing on the Discovery Channel with the visceral kick-in-the-teeth of Parker. Even before the Simpson trial, Parker was on his way to overtaking Southern California’s commercial cowboy, car dealer Cal Worthington, as the most distinctive self-promoting entrepreneur on local television.

Parker has been advertising on TV for 13 years, and his ads would be running anyway. But high viewership for the trial has increased his exposure, even though stations that regularly cover it are clustering their commercials at court breaks to avoid breaking away from testimony.

“It helps and it hurts,” Parker said about the live trial coverage. “It helps because there are a lot more people watching. On the other hand, it hurts because you can’t run your ad because the coverage preempts you.”

Parker’s persona is tattooed all over his ads. Who writes them? “I do it, and an (ad) agency helps me,” he said. But he won’t provide details, wary of industrial espionage.

Why doesn’t he hire an actor as main pitchman for his ads instead of doing his own sneering? “I wanted the consumer to see someone who cares about their rights,” he said. “They’re seeing me, the real guy.”

The “real guy” is angry not only at insurance companies but also at framers of a new California law that severely restricts how lawyers can advertise. Ah, for the good old days. That was when a typical Parker ad co-starred his former clients making such boasts as: “Larry Parker won me $2.1 million, and I’m sure enjoying it.”

*

More than Parker is enjoying the new law, which he takes personally, blaming it on a “good old boy network” within the Consumer Attorneys of California (formerly the California Trial Lawyers Assn.) that “didn’t like me taking away cases from them.” The law’s backers claimed they wanted to end deceptive hyperbole in legal ads. The new law bans bragging about courtroom victories and re-enacting auto accidents without providing details of such cases--details not easily squeezed into a 30-second spot. For example, one of Parker’s old ads touting a multimillion-dollar settlement for an accident victim did not disclose that the beneficiary lost part of one leg, which may have influenced the award.

In Parker’s current ads, accident victims are played by actors who mention no money in their testimonials, and there’s a fleeting small-print disclaimer that warns, “No actual results are portrayed or implied.”

Thus, prospective clients now won’t know how well he has done for injury victims, Parker laments. “And you can’t even show an accident in your ad anymore. That’s what I do for a living, accidents, and I can’t even depict an accident in a commercial.”

Obviously, there are drawbacks to being Larry H. Parker and having a job fighting for us. When it comes to the image of his profession, however, Parker is more philosophical.

“We’re always going to be attacked,” he said. “But in the end, in a lifetime, everyone needs a lawyer.” That definitely was a threat.