NEW YORK, NY.- We must begin with the jingle.
Cellino and Barnes.
Injury attorneys.
800-888-8888.
Don’t wait.
Call eight!
It represents everything you probably know about Ross M. Cellino Jr. and Stephen E. Barnes: They were two New York personal injury lawyers reachable for years at 800-888-8888.
You may also recall hearing about trouble in paradise. The pair went to court in 2017 and, after an extended legal battle, officially split three years later. Then, just a few months following the divorce, Barnes and his niece died when a small plane he was piloting crashed.
Unlikely legal pioneers, Cellino and Barnes proved the power of advertising. From the 1990s through their breakup, they became billboard royalty whose influence expanded beyond western New York — where their original office was — to New York City and California, not only elevating the art of personal injury law but also enriching themselves in the process. Their firm made profits of more than $165 million from settling cases for its clients for $1.5 billion, according to court documents filed as part of the 2017 dispute.
Their story, including the demise of their empire, is now unfolding in the off-Broadway play “Cellino v. Barnes,” which is running through October at Asylum NYC. The show dates back to 2018, when it first played at Union Hall in Brooklyn.
The playwrights, Mike B. Breen, 35, and David Rafailedes, 34, said the broad outlines of the 75-minute play are basically true. But they condensed the timeline of events and took dramatic liberties as they saw fit.
Here is how the story made its way to the stage as a dark comedy.
Q: Are these lawyers worthy of a play?
A: Breen, who grew up in Buffalo, New York, does not remember a time without the Cellino & Barnes billboards. “Part of my life,” he called them. The idea of writing a play about the lawyers took hold when they split up, which was the talk of the town, he said.
Breen acknowledged that staging the story of two lawyers who became prominent for their advertising savvy is a little absurd. But when he and Rafailedes began digging into the history and interviewing former employees, they realized the story was also funny — and fascinating. The lawyers’ unusual bromance, multimillion-dollar empire, personal squabbles and spectacular breakup are dramatic enough for the theater, according to the writers.
“I had a tough time wrapping my head around the fact that this was such a successful firm, and our understanding was that it was on rails,” Rafailedes said. “Cellino could have more or less retired and kept making money. All he had to do was stomach the fact that his and Barnes’ name were side by side on the billboard.”
Q: How did Cellino and Barnes get together?
A: Cellino’s father, Ross M. Cellino Sr., founded Cellino & Likoudis in 1958, building it in part by leveraging billboards that asked a pertinent, straightforward question: “Injured?”
Barnes, a former Marine, was eventually hired there. And in 1994 he and Ross Jr. decided to open their own firm — one that would concentrate on personal injury cases.
Q: Where did the jingle come from?
A: The lawyers expanded the advertising — “Injured? Head-on? T-bone? Rear-end?” — and also stuck their faces on the ads after a salesman visited their office and showed Cellino a photo of a Texas billboard featuring a TV news anchor.
They also commissioned a jingle writer to develop their infectious advertising tune. It cost them just $500.
The phone number that critically came at the end of each ad would change incrementally over the years, evolving into the memorable succession of eights that the lawyers bought in 2012.
“Cellino and Barnes. Injury attorneys. 800-888-8888 — Don’t wait. Call eight!”
Q: How did the partnership dissolve?
A: In 2005, an appellate court censured Barnes and suspended Cellino for six months after an investigation found, among other things, that the firm had been lending clients money against potential settlements through a mortgage company it owned.
When Cellino returned from his suspension, relations between the two men reportedly took a turn, even though they were earning millions of dollars annually.
By 2017, Cellino filed court papers to dissolve their professional corporation and open his own family firm. Barnes countersued, charging trademark infringement. Thus began a legal battle in which the two men would bombard each other with filings for years.
“At the end of our relationship, there were some differences of opinion on how things should operate,” Cellino, now 66, said last week in an interview. He confirmed that one source of tension had been his desire to hire his daughter. “But that wasn’t the only thing,” Cellino added.
In the summer of 2020, Cellino and Barnes announced they had settled their case and were breaking the firm into two. Months later, in October, Barnes’ plane crashed.
“He honestly was a good partner,” Cellino said of Barnes, adding that they didn’t hate each other, as media reports at the time described.
“If I had to do it all over again,” Cellino added, “we should have stayed together.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
