A new study ranks Florida in 3rd place for the highest average of internet searches related to motor vehicle law.
Floridians conducted an average of 1,180 searches per 100,000 residents each month and averaged 53,899 monthly searches for terms such as ‘car accident lawyer’ and ‘car accident attorney,' according to High Rise Financial data.
“As state laws vary and can differ even between neighboring states, it’s important to be aware of what the law says,” said a spokesperson for High Rise Financial, a pre-settlement third party litigation lender. “The legal system is not only hard to understand but also a lengthy process that can be unclear.”
Professor Jarvis
| Jarvis
Colorado and South Carolina landed in first and second place with average monthly search volume per 100,000 citizens of 1,361.35 and 1234.50, respectively.
“The internet has replaced the next-door neighbor of the olden days,” said Bob Jarvis, Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law professor. “The way that you found a restaurant, a lawyer, a doctor, a car repair service or whatever you were looking for was by word of mouth, but we don't have those kind of communities anymore. So, it is not surprising that people are turning to the internet for legal services because they turn to the internet for everything.”
High Rise Financial analyzed more than 1,700 legal and law-related search terms before normalizing the figures per 100,000 residents and compiling a list of the states that are searching the most for legal funding or legal advice.
“When we talk about personal injury wrongful death cases, there really are only two times that Americans are involved in such cases,” Jarvis told the Florida Record. “One is if they're in a driving accident, or two, if a doctor has committed or potentially committed malpractice. There are obviously other ways that you can die or be injured but cars and doctors are where the bulk of these sorts of cases come from.”
The second most searched practice type in the Sunshine state is immigration law, which has 37,298 average monthly searches with wording such as ‘immigration lawyer’ and ‘citizenship lawyer.’
“In Florida, we have a large foreign population so you would expect there to be lots of searches for immigration, citizenship and that type of law,” Jarvis said in an interview. “The study, in that respect, is perfectly consistent with what we know about the average American and their interaction with lawyers."