Region — When Edgar Snyder changed the focus of his practice from criminal law to personal injury law and started advertising his services in the newspaper, he became a pariah to his colleagues. His wife Sandy deserves a lot of the credit for that, and also for his success.

One of three children of Russian Jewish immigrants, Snyder proudly graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1966 and landed his first job as Allegheny County public defender.

Although he was young and inexperienced, a 1963 landmark case led to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that each state had the obligation to provide an attorney to defendants in criminal proceedings, regardless of their ability to pay. Snyder later became a criminal trial lawyer in private practice.

In 1982, he opened his first law office in Duquesne, Pa. That year, he also married his second wife, Sandy, who owned a company that specialized in marketing professional services such as doctors and dentists.

As marketing director of Edgar Snyder & Associates, Sandy advised her husband to place a small ad in the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat, announcing that he represented people injured in drunk driving accidents, because this was a new area of business open to lawyers. Prior to 1983, all drunk driving cases were handled through the local magistrate’s office.

Within a year after placing his first ad, Edgar Snyder had the largest drunk driving law practice in Allegheny County and had to hire other lawyers to keep up with the caseload.

“Putting this little ad in the newspaper helped us gain insight into how powerful advertising could be for a law practice, but it also made me persona non grata with my colleagues who had no regard for lawyers that advertised, because they thought it was very unprofessional,” said Snyder.

Up until 1979, if a lawyer advertised, he would be disbarred. Even after the law changed, most lawyers didn’t advertise their services, fearing derogatory labels such as “ambulance chaser”.

Ignoring his colleague’s snubbing, Snyder kept advertising and expanded his practice to include all types of personal injuries except medical malpractice. In 1986, he opened a second law office in Johnstown and recorded his first commercial for WJAC-TV.

“One day, Sandy and I were experimenting with ways to sum up our TV ad, and I lifted some of the words from her ad copy and said, ‘There’s no fee unless we get money for you,’ and then I pointed my finger at the camera,” said Snyder.

“Sandy really liked that, and so did the people who watched our commercial, so it became the ‘tag line’ in every TV ad we ran after that.”

Because other lawyers didn’t advertise, people who watched his commercials didn’t know that all personal injury lawyers, not just Snyder, worked on a “contingent fee” basis. This made his law firm look more appealing especially to lower income clients.

“What we discovered through advertising is that lower income people were underserved by lawyers, because they didn’t think they had the same access to the legal system as people with money,” said Snyder. “There was a large, untapped clientele out there that lawyers weren’t serving.”

Snyder’s firm pays all the upfront costs, the largest of which is hiring expert witnesses such as doctors, accident investigators, and experts on automobiles, motorcycles, and roads. Experts can cost hundreds of dollars to a couple hundred thousand dollars per case.

If his lawyers lose the case, they lose all the money the firm invested in it, but if they win, the rewards can be great. Edgar Snyder & Associates receives 30 percent of their client’s settlements negotiated in mediation and 40 percent of settlements in cases that go to trial. Awards can range from a few thousand to millions of dollars in the cases of deaths or permanent disabilities.

After handling 30,000 personal injury cases, Edgar Snyder now has five partners, 30 lawyers, and more than 100 employees working at five locations in Altoona, Ebensburg, Erie, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh. Snyder’s resounding success has changed his image even among his colleagues.

He and his partners were named Pennsylvania Super Lawyers® from 2004 to 2009, an honor awarded to top five percent of lawyers statewide. Some were also selected as 2010 America’s Best Lawyers®, a distinction based on exhaustive peer reviews.

“Over the past 28 years, I went from a pariah to a highly regarded personal injury attorney who is considered a pioneer in legal advertising,” said Snyder. “I like to think that Sandy and I helped open the doors for other attorneys to become successful in marketing their practices.”

Today, every major law firm markets its services, and some such as Berger & Green, JG Wentworth, and Roni Deutch have also become household names because of their TV ads.

When Edgar Snyder was an undergraduate student at Penn State in the early 1960s, there was no public defender system, so the poor and indigent did not have the same access to legal defense as those who could afford an attorney.

Poor immigrants who fled persecution abroad were sworn in as U.S. citizens by reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance,” which ended with the line “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” but they didn’t receive the justice promised in that pledge, because they couldn’t afford it.

Lower income people who were injured on the job or in an accident were unaware that personal injury lawyers paid the upfront costs, because lawyers were forbidden to advertise their services, so the injured poor also didn’t receive justice.

“Where justice is not served is when people don’t get a lawyer or they don’t get a good lawyer who knows what he’s doing while the insurance company has good lawyers on their side,” said Snyder. “Fortunately, today, this doesn’t happen that often as it did in the past.

“If both sides in a lawsuit do their homework thoroughly and present their cases to the best of their abilities, you are seeing justice regardless of who wins, because their clients have had their day in court.

“I believe that there is such a thing as justice in America,” said Snyder. “Not just for some, but for all, and that’s what I’ve been fighting for my entire career.”