The Eaton Fire burned through Altadena in January 2025, destroyed thousands of homes, and killed 19 people. Within months, Southern California Edison, the utility whose equipment sparked the fire, was sending representatives door to door in the burn zone. They came with a compensation program and a pitch: sign here, skip the lawyers, and we'll take care of you.
The offers were a fraction of what survivors stood to recover in court. Edison was using its size, its speed, and people's exhaustion to close claims before anyone could tell them what those claims were worth. The company that burned down the town was now knocking on what was left of its doors, promising to make things right.
LA Fire Justice needed to reach survivors before they signed. A lawyer in a suit was not going to earn their trust. Survivors had been hearing from suits for months. What they had not heard was one of their own.
Terry Kilgore is a musician who bought his 1885 Altadena house with the proceeds of a record deal and lost it, along with his studio, in the fire. We put a camera on him in the ruins and let him tell it: the house, the Edison representative who came up the hill, the offer that did not begin to cover what he had been through. He ends with four words: "Edison, see you in court."
The goals: warn survivors before they took Edison's deal, earn their trust through a real voice rather than production polish, and turn attention into qualified client inquiries at a rate that outperformed our entire ad portfolio.
The idea came from a survivors event. Terry Kilgore stood up and talked about Edison's offer, and he wasn't sad about it. He was disgusted. It was raw and real. No other law firm was saying anything that sounded like that.
The plan was to get out of the way. No script, no narrator, no lawyer on camera. One survivor, on his own property, saying what he had said in that room. Terry had written a song about the fire, and his music, made on the lot where his home used to stand, runs underneath the whole ad.
We shot in the RV Terry now lives in, parked on the lot where his 1885 house and his studio stood before the Eaton Fire took everything. He walked us through what's left and we let him talk: "Nagasaki Flats," the record deal that bought the house, the Edison representative who came up the hill personally to make an offer, the number, and why it didn't come close. He ended with "Edison, see you in court." That became the last line of the ad.
The edit was the hard part. Terry gave us far more than fifty seconds and most of it was usable. We cut for one thing: a man describing what happened to him and what he intends to do about it, without pity and without a pitch.
The risk was making an angry ad that looked like it was using a grieving man to sell legal services. We handled that by adding nothing. Everything in the ad is Terry's. It isn't a legal ad dressed up as a survivor story. It's a survivor telling his story, and the lawsuit is where the story goes.
The objective was to reach Eaton Fire survivors before they signed Edison's deal, and to do it with a voice they would trust. The results say it worked.
Terry Kilgore is the largest ad LA Fire Justice has ever run. Over eleven months it drew 6.4 million impressions and 283,200 link clicks at a 4.46% link click-through rate, more than double the legal industry average on Meta, at a cost per click of $0.27 against an industry average above $4. It did that with no celebrity, no production gloss, and no lawyer on screen. Every submission it generated qualified.
The number we care most about is comments: 1,523, double the next-highest ad in a portfolio of 144. Survivors weren't just clicking. They were tagging neighbors and telling their own Edison stories under Terry's. The ad became a place where people who had been offered pennies on the dollar found out they weren't alone. It also produced 247 on-Facebook leads, the most in the portfolio, and picked up organic views on YouTube we never paid for.
Then the last line left the ad. "Edison, see you in court" became a campaign. LA Fire Justice printed it on yard signs, and clients planted them on burned lots across Altadena. Drive through the town today and Terry's four words are standing where houses used to be.