If the suit fits.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Personal injury lawyers

A Charlotte cyclist was surprised to receive letters from three personal-injury lawyers within 24 hours of breaking his leg in a collision with a motorist last summer. He shouldn't have been.

"You don't just sit in an office cube and wait for clients to come to you," says Michael DeMayo, one of the three lawyers.

DeMayo's letter and similar ones from Paul Whitfield and the firm of Downer, Walters and Mitchener aren't unprecedented, says Campbell College law professor Leary Davis. "Abraham Lincoln once wrote offering to represent both sides in a railroad dispute," he notes.

"The lawyers who scream loudest that letters are distasteful are the same ones who spend three or four hours a day at the health club entertaining corporate clients," says DeMayo, who graduated from UNC law school in 1990.

Like Lincoln, personal-injury lawyers are lured by the potential for nearly unlimited earnings -- contingency fees of 25% to 40% in cases such as a $6.5 million negligence award in Wake County in 1992. Law scholars estimate these fees amount to $10 billion a year nationwide, and Forbes magazine says 62 U.S. plaintiff lawyers earned $2 million or more each in 1992.

But anything that lucrative tends to be very competitive, prompting aggressive marketing. "There are 700,000 lawyers now, and there'll be a million by the year 2000," says Anne Bruce, whose Sacramento, Calif.-based company, AnneBruce/TreverCartwright Inc., conducts marketing seminars and workshops. "The lawyer who doesn't market will perish."

Heeding that advice, about 50 lawyers paid $400 a head last year for Bruce's nine-hour session at Raleigh's Capital City Club. Typical topics: "Outgunning Competition With Identity and Positioning," "Keeping Clients in a State of Euphoria," "Top 10 Practice Development Strategies Essential to Your Survival." The vanguard of North Carolina's personal-injury trade are such virtual assembly-line practices as Tim L. Harris & Associates in Gastonia. The firm argues 15 cases a week with a staff of seven lawyers, 26 paralegals and others, organized into five departments.

An accident victim's file travels through an intake department and progresses to processing and investigation departments. It will end up in the settlement department if negotiations with insurers succeed. Failing that, the file heads to the trial department.

About 80% of the company's $230,000 annual marketing budget buys broadcast-television commercials, with the remainder split among direct...