Starr Injury Law
Eight Ads For A Texas Injury Firm, Not One Compliance Breach
A personal injury practice in McKinney sitting on 451 five-star reviews. We built advertising the firm can run without a call from the bar.
- Industry
- Lawyers
- Location
- McKinney, TX
- Period
- 2026 – August 2026
The challenge
Starr Injury Law handles personal injury work out of McKinney, across Dallas-Fort Worth. The practice holds 451 Google reviews at a straight 5.0 rating, which is the reputation most firms advertise their way toward rather than start from.
The constraint is what makes the account difficult. Texas regulates attorney advertising, and the rules bite hardest in injury work, because injury advertising sits nearest to the promise a client most wants to hear and a lawyer is least able to make. An ad that implies a payout is not a marketing problem, it is a bar problem. The usual response is to say nothing specific at all, which is why so much injury creative is interchangeable.
So the work was not to produce ads. It was to produce ads that say something particular about this firm and still survive a rule the writer has to know cold before the first line.
What the audit found
Two problems on the live site, neither of them created by this work, both surfaced by it.
The first is a number. The site’s own schema markup, the machine-readable block that search engines and AI assistants read rather than display, publishes a rounder and higher review count than the firm actually has. The verified figure, scraped directly from the live profile, is 451. The published one is a stand-in that nothing supports. It sits in the one part of a website nobody proofreads because nobody sees it, and it is read by exactly the systems a firm most wants to be accurate in front of.
The second is the testimonial carousel, which renders invented quotes under the label “Verified Google review”. A firm with 451 genuine five-star reviews is displaying invented ones in front of them.
Neither belongs on a live attorney website, and both were surfaced by this work and documented. No ad in this set uses either. The creative is built on the verified 451 and on nothing else.
What we built
The rule set, first. Before any creative existed, the constraints were written down as hard rules: never claim, imply or invent a case result, settlement figure or verdict amount. Never use “maximize your recovery”, “best results”, “win big” or “guaranteed”. Never reference a contingency-fee percentage, because it is not publicly disclosed. Never cross-reference the criminal-defence brand, a deliberate separation. Always carry the line that prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome wherever an outcome is implied. Only real photographs of the attorney, no stock people and no generated likeness.
Eight creatives, eight personas. One angle per ad and no repeats across the set: direct attorney access built as a split comparison, the warning against giving a recorded statement built as an SMS thread, the trial record presented as a credentials table, and the non-subscriber employer explained as a flow diagram, among others. Each persona carries its own stated objection, and each ad answers that one objection rather than restating the firm’s pitch.
A compliance record per ad. Every creative in the batch carries a four-column row filled in before release: outcome guarantee, banned phrase, invented result, disclaimer added. All eight came back clean. The record travels with the ad, so the answer to a question about any single creative is a document rather than a recollection.
The eight creatives were produced on 14 August 2026. None of them has been run as a campaign, so there is no cost per lead and no click-through rate to report for this account.
The deliverables
- Eight ad creatives across eight personas, one angle each, no repeats
- A written rule set drawn from Texas Rule 7.04, applied before the first creative existed
- A four-column compliance pass on every ad: outcome guarantee, banned phrase, invented result, disclaimer present
- Real photographs of the attorney throughout, no stock people and no generated likeness
- The disclaimer that prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome, carried wherever an outcome is implied
- A separate site for the injury practice, kept deliberately apart from the criminal-defence brand
- Two live-site problems surfaced by this work and documented
How it ran
- 2026The injury practice gets its own site, built on the same reputation as the criminal practice and kept deliberately separate from it.
- 14 August 2026Eight creatives produced across eight personas, each one cleared against the Texas rule set before release. Built, not run.
- 15 August 2026451 reviews at 5.0 confirmed directly from the live profile, against a rounder figure the firm's own site schema had been publishing unverified.
The results
- 451
- Google reviews at a straight 5.0 rating, taken directly from the live profileMeasured 15 August 2026
- 8
- Creatives produced, one per persona, no angle repeated across the setMeasured 14 August 2026
- 8 of 8
- Creatives clearing the four-column compliance passMeasured 14 August 2026
- 0
- Outcome guarantees and invented case results anywhere in the setMeasured 14 August 2026
What the numbers say
Starr Injury Law holds 451 Google reviews at a straight 5.0 rating, taken directly from the live profile in August 2026. That is the number the advertising is built on, because it is the only claim in the set that is entirely about the firm's past and entirely free of any promise about a reader's future.
Eight creatives were produced for Starr Injury Law on 14 August 2026, across eight personas, one angle each. Every one of the eight carries a filled four-column compliance row and every one came back clean: zero outcome guarantees, zero invented case results, zero banned phrases, disclaimer present wherever an outcome is implied.
What is deliberately absent: a cost per lead, a click-through rate, a signed-case count. None of the eight creatives has run. Publishing a performance figure for advertising that has never been served would undo the reason the compliance record is worth reading.
Why it worked
Because the rules came before the writing.
Most regulated advertising is written first and edited for compliance afterwards, which produces two bad outcomes at once. The strongest idea usually dies in review, and what survives is the version with every specific thing sanded off it. Writing inside the constraint from the first line means the ideas that reach the page are the ones that were always going to be allowed, so nothing good gets killed at the end and nothing weak gets shipped because the deadline arrived.
The second reason is the separation. The injury practice advertises on its own site, under its own brand, with no cross-reference to the criminal-defence side. A person searching after a crash and a person searching after an arrest are not the same person and should not land in the same place.
The takeaway
If you run a regulated practice, write your advertising rules down as a single page before you brief anybody, and make each finished ad carry its own compliance record rather than the campaign carrying one. When a complaint arrives it arrives about one ad, and a per-ad record answers it in a minute.
And check what your own website is publishing about you. The review count in a site's schema markup is invisible on the page and read by machines, which is exactly the kind of number that gets set once and never revisited.
What's live right now
Questions people actually ask
Can a personal injury firm in Texas advertise without breaking bar rules?
Yes, but the rules have to be written down before the first headline is, not checked afterwards. For Starr Injury Law the constraints were fixed in advance: never claim, imply or invent a case result, settlement figure or verdict amount; never use phrases like maximize your recovery, best results, win big or guaranteed; never reference a contingency-fee percentage; and carry the line that prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome wherever an outcome is implied. Eight creatives were written inside that box and all eight came out clean.
What is a four-column compliance pass?
Four checks run on every individual ad before it is allowed out: does it contain an outcome guarantee, does it contain a banned phrase, does it contain an invented result, and is the required disclaimer present. Every one of the eight Starr Injury Law creatives carries its own filled row. It is a per-ad record rather than a batch sign-off, which is the difference between being able to prove compliance on the one ad somebody questions and being able to describe your process.
Why can an injury ad not mention past case results?
Because a result tells a reader what to expect, and no lawyer can promise that. A settlement figure in an ad is read as a forecast, not as history. The workaround most firms reach for is vagueness, which produces advertising nobody remembers. The better route is to advertise the things that are true and checkable regardless of outcome: who answers the phone, what the trial record is, how many people have reviewed the firm and at what rating.
Did these ads run, and what did they cost per lead?
They have not run. The eight creatives were produced on 14 August 2026 and no campaign has been launched from this account, so no cost per lead, click-through rate or Ads Manager figure exists for Starr Injury Law. What can be shown is the work itself and the compliance record behind each ad.
