High priestess of the personal-injury legal scene Anh Phoong knew something was wrong Monday when backlash started flooding in about her billboard design contest — the prize was simply too low for a multimillionaire lawyer to be paying out.
In an Instagram post Monday that has since been deleted, Phoong announced a first-place prize of $500 for the designer whose work would be featured on one of her billboards. Runners-up would get $300 and $150. When San Francisco’s National Public Radio affiliate KQED reported on the competition that day via Instagram, dozens took to the comments to criticize Phoong.
“Reasonable prizes would be 10x these amounts,” one user wrote. “Practically asking for free work. Not a great look.”
Phoong heard the criticism and took to the comment section of KQED’s Instagram post to apologize. “We never meant to offend anyone as we truly do appreciate the creatives of the world,” she wrote from her Phoonglaw account.
On Wednesday, the billboard barrister deleted her original post and published an update to the competition.
“After taking your comments into consideration, we’ve decided to increase the prize to $5,000!” she wrote on Instagram.
In a phone interview, Phoong told The Standard she has held ticket giveaways and small contests since the pandemic to build her following. The prizes are usually $150 to $500.
“It goes in line with what I’ve been doing for years,” she said. “In no way was I trying to be offensive or disrespect them, which I feel like I did, so we changed the amount to $5,000, because it sounded like that’s the amount people were saying was fair.”
Since 2017, Phoong’s face and slogan have been ubiquitous across California. “Something wrong? Call Anh Phoong,” her billboards say.
As the head of Sacramento-based Phoong Law Group, Phoong first put up billboards in her home city before taking advantage of cheap advertising rates and expanding across the Bay Area. In 2023, she dipped into SoCal, putting up more than 400 billboards in the Los Angeles area.
In April, Phoong told SFGATE that her billboards cost at least $3 million per year.
“something was wrong, so we called anh phoong,” commented one user on the KQED post. “Thanks for being receptive.”