Originally Posted by Gargoyle

Speaking as one who has used Google adwords for site promotion, It's most likely the law firm in question are unaware that their ads are running in connection to these newsstories. They set up their ad campaign to be triggered by certain keywords (such as "accident", "crash"), and when those keywords appear in a search then their ads are shown.

It's just like the ads that appear on the non-paid version of FT... when a thread gets on a strange topic, ads related to that topic start appearing.

I'm not trying to defend the lawyers, but we shouldn't jump to conclusions about their intentions or attitude. (or about their ability to quickly shut off the ads- if they hired an outside web design and promotion firm, they'll have to get that firm to log in to their google adwords account to shut it down).