Ep. 64 - Why Authenticity Beats AI in Legal Marketing

Everyone is talking about AI, but are law firms focusing on the wrong trend?

In this episode, I explore why authenticity may be the most valuable marketing asset in an increasingly automated world. While many businesses are rushing to adopt AI-generated content, emerging research suggests that younger consumers—especially Gen Z—are becoming more skeptical of content that feels artificial, generic, or disconnected from real human experience.

We discuss why chasing trends can sometimes weaken your brand, how law firms can build stronger trust by showing personality and humanity, and why clients ultimately want to work with people—not algorithms. I also share practical ways attorneys can create more meaningful connections with prospective clients by speaking to their fears, challenges, goals, and emotions rather than simply showcasing credentials.

Technology will continue to evolve, but trust remains timeless. The firms that learn how to combine expertise with authenticity will be the ones that stand out in a crowded marketplace. 

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

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came in 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 revenue from our 10,000 square foot headquarters here in Coral Springs. Now we all know that Google is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the search engine world. We don't say Bing this or Yandex it. We don't say Yahoo it. We say Google it for a reason. And this makes sense. Google has by far the broadest array of tools and has invested the most in a search engine that really tries to anticipate what users are looking for. We all know this. There's no surprises here. None of this should be a revelation to anybody. But like any other device, machine, mechanism, or process, Google does have its limitations. Until recently, if you ask, if you put a search query into Google and there wasn't a good answer, you were stuck. You were out of luck. AI, of course, is changing the playing field once again. And this shouldn't be a revelation either. At this point, it should be obvious. What it has changed is Google's AI assistant, Gemini. That has changed the search engine game significantly because people voice to text their queries into the AI assistant and Google populates answers if answers are available. But what happens if there are no good answers to this particular query? Until recently, you're stuck. You just had to keep checking back and hoping that at some point the answer you needed would show up. However, just recently, the US Patent and Trademark Office, from here on out, I'll call it the USPTO, they published a continuation of an existing patent that Google holds, which allows AI assistants to save queries for which they either cannot deliver an answer or cannot deliver a quality answer to a user. What happens in this process is you ask your AI assistant a question. In this case, we're talking about Gemini, of course. When you ask Gemini a question, Gemini searches the web, scours everything that Google has indexed, and says, there's not a good answer to this query, or I cannot find your answer at this time. But it stores the query, and then if a good answer populates later, a quality answer, an answer that hits the criteria that the user has specified, Gemini will then automatically deliver corresponding information to the user. Now, that's pretty cool. And it's one of the few places where I look at AI and I can absolutely categorically say, okay, this is a good thing and this is helpful. This is useful. I'm skeptical about AI on a lot of levels. I've made no bones about this, and I will continue to be skeptical of AI for most applications, especially when it seems like people check their brains out at the search bar. However, in this situation, I do see value and I do see its uh uh incredible usefulness. Now, of course, as a patent attorney, naturally, I would be interested in this. But what does it mean for marketing and how does that help SEO? And how does that help your law firm? Well, the answer is it gives you a chance to check in on the ground floor for your potential clients and check for answers that are relevant and that fulfill a genuine need for them. Now you remember I've talked about getting into Google's AI overview as a way of gaining traction with your SEO and getting above-the-fold coverage for your website. This gives you that avenue. So it's important to know that if you experiment and you have an idea of what queries are not being adequately addressed in your particular sphere of legal practice, then you wouldn't it be great to have this opportunity, an opportunity to step into the spotlight and get yourself onto Google's AI overview sooner. And even better, you could possibly be in line ahead of larger, longer, uh uh established and more established firms. That's great. Why would you not want that? Who would not want to be in the AI overview, knowing that getting that placement is going to promote visibility for your business. So the patent continuation language is very clear about what it does. And I like that. It's not a novel, and it doesn't have to be. It just has to say what innovation does. Google did not waste real estate on the page. It worked basically like this. The innovation kicks in under one of two scenarios. Either there is information on the web that meets the user's query criteria, or there isn't one, at least not one that measures up to Google standards for quality content. So it's interesting because up until recently, Google did not explicitly save prior queries from users. We assumed that they registered them, we assume that they were aggregated into the global data, but they just kind of sat there. Nobody did anything with them, which of course was problematic for users and frustrating besides. And maybe a user goes, okay, well, if I can't find it on Google, I'll go to Bing, I'll go to Yahoo, or I'll go to Yandex. And naturally, Google doesn't want that. You don't stay dominant in your field by having people leave your company for somebody else. That's just not how it works. Uh, if you get enough people jumping ship, you become you end up becoming Yahoo, which is basically at this point a historical footnote. There just aren't that many people using it, especially relative to the number of people using Google. I believe, if I remember correctly, the last time I looked, Google controlled something like 92% of all search engine traffic on the planet. That's a lot of information being exchanged. We're talking billions of searches per day. Trillions when you look at the growth and expansion on a decade basis. It's entirely possible that in the next decade they'll break into the quadrillions. That's pretty serious numbers. So, of course, Google has a vested interest in making sure that they're the default go-to search engine. Gemini's ability to save queries that don't deliver any information good enough or the right information, it gives them more ability to spot gaps in the knowledge base on the internet and help fill in those gaps. Knowing this, you have an opportunity to find gaps in the knowledge base for your field of law, and you could be the one to fill them in. For example, somebody is doing black hat SEO and they've they're just throwing a bunch of random keywords at a page and praying that nobody catches on. Well, we all know that's a sucker bet because sooner or later later Google's gonna catch on, usually sooner, and the consequences are harsh. If the right person steps in at the right time with the right information, you can blow them right out of the water. And you'll be doing it the right way. Now you can try this for yourself. Think of five questions that you wish your clients would ask you, and it doesn't matter what they are, it doesn't matter what your field of law is. Just pick five questions that you wish your clients would ask. Uh maybe they don't ask it simply because they don't know to ask it. Maybe they don't understand that they can even ask this question. So that's your opening, that's your in, and that's your ticket to getting on uh onto AI overviews, which puts you ahead of the competition. So whether you're a one-person law firm operating out of a spare bedroom with a laptop and a cell phone, or whether you own an entire building in Coral Springs and you've got 60 people working for you, you have the opportunity to play on the same level playing field. That's wonderful. But why would you not want that? When I got into this game some 27 years ago, it never would have occurred to me uh that we would be able to interact with the internet in this way. Now, again, that's a blessing and a curse. And we are seeing some weirdness because of it. People getting bilked by AI, uh, people falling in love with AI in a very literal romantic sense. There's a lot working here and it has to be considered, but that's not what we're here for. Uh I'll let someone qualify take that topic on. The problem with AI as I see it is just because we can do a thing doesn't necessarily follow that we should do that thing. On a global level, we're more concerned with uh can we than should we? And of course, uh Jeff Goldblum uh posited it the problem uh in the original Jurassic Park. So we're stuck with it now. There's really no way to pull the plug on AI without effectively wiping out the internet, starting all over at zero, and basically resetting our technology to the 1970s, and nobody wants that. We've all gotten addicted to convenience, we've gotten addicted to comfort, and we've gotten addicted to the ability to interact with our world and with the internet on demand. The Internet of Things has taken over, and so, like it or not, we're now part of the machine. And so you take these five questions you came up with and you distill them down into keywords, and you try feeding some of them into Gemini on your phone. You can do it on your desktop, your laptop, whatever, but just go to Gemini, ask these questions and see what comes up. And if Gemini says that there's no good responses for this query or no information exists that matches your query's intent, then you have the option, you have the opportunity, and of course it would be silly for you not to take it. Now some people are going to say, yeah, shouldn't my SEO agency be on top of this? Well, in theory, yes, but that doesn't guarantee that they're going to uh A know that it works, B understand what it is, or C, even know the difference between, for example, a continuation of an existing patent and a separate patent filing in its own right. Now, in case you're interested, the patent number for this continuation is 2026-00375A1. That's what indicates that this is not a standalone patent. It's not something that came up in a vacuum on its own. It's building onto a patent and intellectual property that Google already has. Of course, as both a patent attorney and an SEO expert, my interests align here and they come together rather neatly in this situation because when you read the claims and you see the intent of the claims, it's pretty cool what Google is trying to do. And certainly, if any entity out there has the ability to do it, uh, who isn't Apple, it's Google. So this is one place where I can wholeheartedly cheerlead for AI instead of taking a more jaundiced view. The reason this patent matters is because it will help secure another way for Google to maintain market dominance, which of course it will. That's the entire point of having a patent or a number of patents. You want as much control over the field as you can possibly get. A patent effectively allows you a monopoly for a limited period of time, and what you do with it during that time determines the success or failure of your business. So a lot of people don't really understand why patents matter, but Google does. Well, Disney does, Ford Motor does. Name a company, and I can guarantee that at least 80% of their valuation is tied up in their patents, their branding, or their associated IP. This continuation is a big one for Google. Uh, it has unlimited potential to bring Google back from the days of don't be evil. Now, whether they use it uh for that purpose or not, I can't say. That's entirely up to them. But there are mutterings on uh both ways, and you know they're going to continue on the track that they're on, or they're going to cycle back to the more ethical stance of don't be evil, uh, which is where they started. Now, does that matter to us on a practical, pragmatic level? Not really. I mean, it does, of course. Everything that Google does, one way or the other, impacts our daily lives at this point. Now, it may be a few steps down the stream, but it does have an impact. And this AI assistant's ability uh to circle back to a given user with an answer to their query days, weeks, months, or maybe even years down the line is absolutely a reflection of that. So in your law firm, you want to be looking at what questions and what knowledge gaps already exist in your field. Maybe you're looking for information about a very specific subset of your field, and you couldn't find anything that really gave you that, uh gave you what you needed. You're the intended audience and the potential beneficiary of this system. So that's great. You've already found an opportunity now. You just have to capitalize on it. So how do you capitalize on it? Simple. You get your answers up first. Say, okay, if I was going to answer whatever the question is, I would say A, B, C, D, and so on. Get it published, get it indexed on Google and see what Gemini does because it may very well come back and say, we found an answer for you on this website, and it's your website. Great. Now, when you type that query in, there's a good chance that you're going to be seeing your own law firm's website in the AI overview. And what did you spend on that? Let's say it takes you two hours to write something off the top of your head to answer the question. You've already got the question, and that probably took you a total of 10 minutes to come up with. If you really nerded out on it and went hard on your SEO, you probably spent another half hour publishing. It literally takes a single mouse click, maybe two or three, if your website is un you know, has unusually stringent security. And then you wait. Now Google comes back and says, I found this answer on this website. You look, and there's if that's the answer that you created, then you type into the search string uh the question that it boils down to. Remember, uh you want to pull out the stop words and eliminating and eliminate all of the unnecessary phrases. You're looking for the main key phrase here. So SEO is going to play a role in this, obviously. But once you've done that, you should be in the AI overview, which immediately means you trump number one in the organic Google listings. Excellent. And that's good news. And if you've invested a total of two hours and 45 minutes max, uh, you're doing really well incredibly well. And for two hours and 45 minutes worth of work, you're beating much larger law firms, your much more established law firms, and now they're the ones scrambling to keep up with you instead of the other way around. Wouldn't that be like a kick in the head? So keep this in mind uh that you do have this option now. Of course, as usual with this, your SEO agency ought to be on top of this. They should be asking these questions, but ask them, hey, have you heard about this? And if they say no, it's probably a good time to start looking for another agency. But if they say yes, your next question should be, okay, what are we trying to do to capitalize on this? Where are the gaps in the website that could fill this in and get us back on top? And they should at least have some idea of how to approach that. Now, of course, it's your website, it's your firm, your business, your content. Uh, and it's gonna come down to you on how this actually gets done. But if you've done it right and you've done it uh in the way that Google likes, which of course you know we're all slaves to the machine in some way, you now have a very powerful tool that levels the playing field between the largest law firms and the smallest startup law firms that you can think of. That I think is pretty cool, and it's definitely worth investigating. So play with it for yourself. Check out Gemini Assistant on Google. It's probably on your phone if you have an Android. If not, uh you can find a way to access it and give it a try for yourself. So see how it works, see what answers it comes up with, of course. Uh and while you're at it, uh look for the answer that you would want your clients to have. You can also identify other gaps like we've discussed before. You should be researching other websites, you should be seeing what your competitors on Google are doing that might give you a leg up if you make some adjustments or some tweaks, or you do one thing instead of another. So please keep that in mind. And again, if you want to investigate the patent for yourself, the number you want is US 2026 0037585A1. The patent continuation is called Autonomously Providing Search Results Post Facto, including an assistant context. The inventor is a person named Zee Woo. And again, it's an extension of an existing patent. It's pending right now, but it's well worth the read so you have some idea of how it works in concrete terms. And it may spark some ideas for you on how you and your SEO agency can capitalize on it for the future. Again, I'm John Risvie, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any updates from this channel. And don't forget to share with your friends that are attorneys or colleagues who will find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today, and make sure you tune in next week for more tips and ideas on making your law firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you next time.