Ep. 61 - Why AI Could Be Hurting Your Law Firm Brand

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, I break down the growing impact AI is having on law firm SEO, branding, and online visibility — and why simply ranking #1 on Google may not be enough anymore.

As Google continues rolling out AI-generated overviews at the top of search results, law firms are facing a major shift in how content gets discovered, cited, and trusted online. But instead of panicking about algorithms, I explain why the real opportunity is actually much simpler:

Write for humans first.

We talk about the dangers of over-optimizing for search engines, why clear and authoritative content matters more than ever, and how firms can position themselves as trusted sources that both clients and AI systems recognize.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How AI overviews are changing Google search
• Why rankings alone may no longer guarantee visibility
• The difference between writing for humans vs. writing for algorithms
• How law firms can become authoritative sources in their practice areas
• Why clarity and plain English matter in legal marketing
• The risks of relying too heavily on AI-generated content
• How to analyze competitor content without copying it
• Why good content is still “worth its weight in gold”

If your law firm is investing in SEO, content marketing, or digital visibility, this episode is an important conversation about where search is heading next — and how to stay ahead without losing the human element that actually builds trust.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

Hi and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. For my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Crow Springs. You may not know this, but because of AI, your brand could already be in trouble. Now you remember we've talked about this in the past of how Google last year quietly started rolling out AI overviews that they use at the top of search engine results, especially for questions that have a single answer or topics that are trending. What they do is they aggregate information from a lot of different websites to use in these blurbs. There are some questions as to whether or not that's legal and a valid fair use application by search engines, which of course we're still probably at least a couple years from getting any definitive answers on from the courts. In the meantime, however, what this means is it's no longer enough just to be number one at the top of Google search results. You need to be creating content that AI finds worthy of including into those blurbs for citation and sourcing. So how do you do that? Well, one way you do that is to write complex, in-depth pieces that really delve into a given issue or the legalities surrounding that issue. Of course, I'm speaking to attorneys for law firms, so it only makes sense that you're probably not going to care much about what the new hot Hollywood diet trends are. Unless, of course, you happen to be in the personal injury vein or it has something to do with food safety, which is a stretch. But in that case, it would make perfect sense for an attorney to weigh in. So the first thing we need to understand is that Google and the other major search engines are moving towards this kind of AI overview content. Is it going to affect you right now? Not necessarily, but you need to be prepared to pivot to a more AI-centric strategy for your SEO. So what would that look like? Well, like I said before, the first thing you need to do is focus on content. You're not chasing keywords at this point. What you're trying to do right now is create content that when Google or other search engines scrape it, it becomes the definitive voice in your sphere about whatever the issue is. Now that sounds very simple. Um, oh well, of course. I'll go ahead and blast something out right now. But that doesn't always work the way you expect. You can spend days composing a white paper. Maybe five people read it over uh in its entire active lifespan. But a throwaway treat uh tweet that you put up on X 17 months ago all of a sudden gains traction and you start getting contacts that you never expected that way. There's a science to this, but in the end, it all comes back to emphasizing your authority, your presence, and your knowledge base and applying those in a way that makes AI and human readers alike think this is great stuff. Why are we not using this? And I'm sure you want to be thinking about that. You're targeting the top page of Google is fine. Going above the fold is fine. And if you can pull that off, absolutely by all means do so. However, it may not be the best approach for your particular type of law to prioritize getting the top of Google SERPS versus going for the AI overview. One of the key problems with deciding whether to go for the AI overview versus getting the top ranking in SERPs is that there are a few different routes you can use to get there. Sometimes, no matter what you do, those routes don't always pan out the way you'd expect. Maybe you end up reaching the top ranking on Google, but AI largely ignores you, or vice versa. If you can get both, that's wonderful, but there's no guarantees you'll even get one. And even if you do catch the AI overview, the sources of the information are not always clearly stated right there. You may have noticed that sometimes you have to click on things and you have to uh pick around the icons and see what came from where. Google, for all its power and all its apparently human-seeing intuition about what humans are looking for, has not been great so far about making citations clearly visible. Sometimes they will, in fact, call out the source in question right in the text, but the majority of the time you have to go and do some digging to find it. Now, this is bad for your brand because you need to be able to associate your brand readily and seamlessly with a given piece of content, whether it's top of Google search or whether it's an AI overview. You don't want people to have uh to click around going, well, wait, who said this? This is good stuff that we need. If they can't find it, what are they going to do? They're probably going to kick the ball back to Google and say, thanks, Google, instead of thanks, Mr. or Mrs. Attorney. And this has a lot of people looking at AI in a very skeptical way. And I can't blame them. I truthfully happen to be one of these people who takes a rather jaundice view of AI generally at this time. And I don't think that should surprise anybody. I've never been much one to really cheerlead AI, uh, especially when it's misused or overly relied on. The most I've ever recommending regarding AI is a sort of uneasy coexistence. Use it as a tool by all means, but remember that quick rollouts have caused a lot of problems for users and marketers alike. And that's not likely to go away anytime soon. So please keep that in mind as we go on. And remember, I'm not necessarily saying that AI is better or worse or anything else. It's just a tool. It has a purpose and it has a reason for being. But I'm by no means convinced that it does as much or as well as its programmers and designers seem to believe it does. And that's why I'm skeptical of AI. And I expect that you've probably got your own reasons. I'm sure we've all heard about these attorneys who are getting uh popped in court with contempt proceedings and sanctions uh because they didn't double check the cases that AI has produced. And in many situations, those cited cases turned out to be complete fabrications, or as they call it an AI hallucinations. It's not really a lie. The computer just didn't understand what it was doing. Okay, fine. Well, call it what you like. It amounts to the same thing, and judges uh tend to be testy about being lied to in open proceedings. That's how they see it, particularly when the lying in question comes from an attorney. So there's good reasons to be skeptical of AI. There's good reasons to be concerned about it. Does this mean we should completely abandon it, uh, even if that was possible at this point? No, because AI is so integrated uh into every facet of our lives already. No, it didn't make sense to try and eliminate AI altogether. The only way to do that would be to be to take us basically back to the beginning of the industrial revolution and pray that we've learned our lesson. But since we can't do that, I take more of a if you can't beat them, join them approach. And that means this stuff isn't going away. So we have to figure out how to work with it and within its paradigm and its idiom and all of its parameters. So I argue AI isn't going away, but neither are keywords. So they're still both important and you still need to prioritize keywords. But at this point, your goal should be to be the go-to source of information. When Google scrapes for something dealing with this particular area of the law that you happen to be knowledgeable in because you practice it every day, it says, oh, we need to pull from this firm right here because these people know what they're talking about. Yes, you get enough of those and you eventually become the authoritative, trustworthy source. You're giving out good information that's resonating with people, and AI recognizes that, at least to the extent that a series of algorithms can recognize anything. So let's not get too hung up on that aspect. Now the point is you're not writing for a machine. And if you've been writing primarily for search engines, you're missing much of the human element that makes so much of the information uh that you have uh relevant to human beings. So you see how this becomes a little bit touchy in some respects, but you've got to prioritize the human and put the human first. The machines will still be there. And based on what the machines do versus what the humans do, that gives you some room and bandwidth for calibration. But the key is always and will always be to put the human first. Put your clients first. Put your humanity and your intelligence and your training and your emotional palate into play. Because again, we have that image that attorneys uh don't have or are not supposed to be emotions. Uh the life of the law is some say is logic. Uh, and we're not supposed to care about anything except getting paid and winning for our clients. And granted, again, I said this before, I'll say it again, we've largely brought that upon ourselves, and that perception has existed since before the Magna Carta in some form in the version of law, which we as Americans brought over from England and adapted to our own designs. So, okay, there's no problem there. But you want to keep the human in mind first because algorithms aren't clicking on anything. They may scrape, they may crawl, they may index, but they can't think and they can't decide. So even if the process that they use to determine which websites and which blogs and which uh snippets from Twitter, for example, are going to be part of the AI overview, uh, it has to look like human thought. And it's not really a decision, so much as evaluating points of congruency between what you're saying and what the end user is looking for. And algorithms are how they determine that. So again, I say hand wave the AI. Forget about that. Don't worry about it, don't think about it. It's not that big of a deal right now. First and always, prioritize the human, not the machine. And now that we know that, you're probably thinking, okay, so uh how do I do that? Well, if you're writing about, let's say, uh rental law, you could do a case study of somebody whose landlord was being outrageous or fining them over uh ridiculous things or basically harassing them. So you don't go deep into the weeds on legal terms. Instead, you write it out very clearly, very precisely in a way that lay people can readily understand. They may not know what stere decisis is, but they'll understand the idea of injustice and precedent in court. And there's other ways to explain that to somebody where they'll understand the underlying principle, even if the term itself is literally Greek to them. And yes, never fear, I know we all know stereo decisis is a Latin phrase. So be human, be clear, don't bury what you have to say under a whole bunch of legal jargon. Use uh legal terminology only when it's necessary, and then define it as it's appropriate. And you don't have to keep coming back to it now and saying, now remember, stereo decisis means letting the matter stand as decided. You don't need to do that, and you don't want to do that. If you have to introduce a new term or a term that your audience may not be familiar with, identify it once and move on. And after that, uh you don't have to use the term again unless you absolutely must. By doing that, you build a picture of your knowledge and your experience and your skill. This is important because clients like knowledge and experience and skill. They're like attorneys who can explain things to them in plain English. And anytime you can give a clear, resounding yes or no to a question rather than the ever-dreaded, ever-loathed, it depends, the better off you're going to be. And when you look through AI overviews for various fields of law, one of the things you're going to notice is that somehow, somewhere, you probably have at least two law firms whose work is buried in that AI overview. And so it's worth your while to do the research and find out what they're doing right. What's getting them out of these page views? Why are they not getting presented in AI overviews? Uh, what are we doing differently than they are? And what is leaving us behind? And of course, you should be doing that with your Google positioning as well. If you're on Google at position number three on the first page and your primary competitor is at position number one, it is worth your while to take some time to look through their website and see what they're doing that's different from what you're doing. Now, some people may feel like that's that that's a little sketchy or maybe it's illegal, but the truth is you're not learning anything about this company that you can't find out using public-facing interfaces and tools. So as much as somebody may want to scream corporate corporate espionage or uh whatever, it doesn't apply here unless you're doing something really strange and maybe engaging in uh uh hacking or uh or getting information that your competitor does not put on their publicly facing websites, uh, this shouldn't create a problem for anybody, uh, provided you don't plagiarize or or spin their content in an unfair way. But you can look at it and you can say, hey, they've got a stronger SEO keyword game than we do. Uh look at that. They ranked for this one keyword, or they're pretty much have a monopoly on this keyword, or they're writing about X, Y, and Z. These things do happen, but having a stranglehold on one keyword is not the same as having a stranglehold on the information attached to it. If you can present that information better, if you can present it cleaner and clearer and in a way that the average lay person will understand and walk away feeling like they're better informed about the subject, then you're on your way to winning. And I'm not saying you shouldn't be concerned about AI. Uh I'm not saying you shouldn't use AI to a degree in your marketing. But what I am saying is I've said before, and I'll continue to say this over and over again: good content is literally worth its weight in gold. Good content beats computer tricks and algorithms any day of the week, twice on Sunday and three times on St. Patrick's Day. I don't just make up these numbers, folks. I go with them. So write for the human, write down to earth. Talk to people in their language. You can't assume that everybody you're dealing with uh is a jurisdoctorate. Uh you can't assume that these people have done the clerking and internships and law school and uh the endless study treadmill uh that you're jabbering about when you start speaking in Latin. Go ahead and help your clients, but help them uh get better acquainted with the legal process in plain English, the legal questions that they want answers to, and they want to know how to navigate them successfully. Now, granted, every case is different, every case is unique. You have to avoid giving the appearance of offering legal advice off of your website. That's a clear no-no, and you don't want to do that. Anyway, you are talking about a case where things align this way, and this was the outcome, and then you delve into it and you explain how the different pieces fit together. And you ask your client, your prospective clients, what they need to look at in a situation like this uh in order to get an outcome that they want. If you know that and you understand your target audience and you understand how they talk, and you understand what they think about, what they worry about, then you understand everything you need to meet this machine and feed it the type of information it wants to present to viewers. Or at least rather than beat it, work with it, not necessarily join it unless you feel uh like that's what you want to do. You want to uh use AI and get in a way that gets you onto the AI overviews and gets them within your reach, and then it gives you another way to get to the top of Google. So keep that in mind and be thinking about how to write for the human being reading your content, not search engines, not AI or robots or machines. Let the machines chase you and your content and not the other way around. Again, I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any updates from this channel. And don't forget to share with your friends, colleagues, other attorneys who may find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today, and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and ideas on making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you next week.