How to get AI to recommend your law firm

AI may already be deciding whether to recommend your law firm to your next client.

Before your next client chooses their legal adviser, there’s a growing chance they’ll first ask Copilot, Claude or ChatGPT which firm to use.

That’s because the way people and businesses find and compare professional firms is rapidly changing, with a growing number of sophisticated buyers turning to AI assistants.

In fact, a recent Gartner survey found that 45% of B2B buyers had used generative AI during a recent purchase, primarily to gather information about vendors and products.

Meanwhile, Semrush found that among AI-using B2B professionals, 72% used AI for early research, 62% used it for vendor comparison, 48% used it for shortlist narrowing and – perhaps most remarkably – 45% of all AI-using buyers also used it to support their final buying decision.

So if you’re invisible to AI assistants – or if they’re saying the wrong things about you – you’re probably already losing out.

 

How AI assistants decide whether to recommend your law firm

If you think getting AI’s attention is simply a matter of stuffing your web pages full of phrases like “best commercial lawyer Melbourne,” think again. AI assistants don’t work that way (P.S. neither does Google anymore).

Instead, when someone asks an AI assistant to recommend a lawyer, it’s likley to draw on evidence from websites, search indexes and other publicly available sources.

In doing so, it’s effectively looking for one thing: authority.

If a prospective client asks AI for a legal adviser in your field, it’s likely to assess your authority in the space by searching for and analysing factors such as the services you provide, the work you’ve reportedly done, the depth of your published expertise and what other people say about you. And to go from this to recommending you with confidence, it will need to see enough consistent, credible and verifiable information associating you with the precise problem the user is trying to solve.

In this regard, third-party corroboration can be especially useful. Things like independent media coverage, directory listings, professional profiles, awards, rankings, client commentary and references from other credible sources all give an AI assistant evidence that your expert status isn’t just self-proclaimed.

But, within your broader “authority ecosystem” (apologies for the marketing speak) it’s your own law firm website that remains the most important asset.

That’s because your website is where you get to control the narrative, describe your expertise in the way you want it to be understood and connect your lawyers, services, experience and published thinking in a structure that AI assistants can actually interpret and recommend.

So what does that mean for your website right now?

Four things your law firm needs to do

To improve your chances of an AI endorsement, your website needs to do four key things.

1. Make your law firm understandable

Most law firm websites tell the world their lawyers are “experienced, commercial and client-focused”.

The problem is the same description could be copied and pasted into almost every firm’s site.

Just like clients, AI assistants want to know how you’re really different. To do this, they need enough information to determine who the firm is for, which problems it solves and why it should be recommended instead of another (possibly equally) capable legal practice.

The most effective way to do this is with clear positioning that makes those relationships explicit. Compare this line you’ll see on any number of law firm websites:

“We provide strategic employment-law advice tailored to your business.” 

With something that actually differentiates you:

“We help employers manage the legal, financial and reputational risks that arise when senior employees leave.” 

By identifying a common factor among clients, a recognisable situation and the kind of problem you solve, you immediately give the AI assistant a clue about when it should recommend you. (If the example above seems narrow, don’t worry: you can have a broader firm-wide position, with more specific propositions for individual practices, sectors or client groups).

On the other hand, if your site uses the exact same generic boilerplate as 500 other firms, the AI has no logical reason to pick your firm over anyone else.

So if you don’t know what you stand for, who you serve and what problems you really do solve better than others – make that your immediate priority. Because no amount of elegant copy can compensate for a firm that itself doesn’t know why a client should choose it over a rival.

2. Make your expertise believable

An AI assistant might understand what you claim to do, but it also needs a reason to believe it.

Here, most law firm websites again lean heavily into adjectives, saying things like “Our lawyers have extensive experience in construction disputes”. To an AI assistant that’s going to read a bit like a fudge. It actually wants to see concrete evidence of the experience you have and the types of problems you’ve solved.

To get AI’s attention and endorsement it helps to be specific by including things like:

• • Matters, case studies and outcomes (preferably named where confidentiality permits)
  • Details of the types, scale and complexity of work the firm or lawyers have handled
  • Named clients it advises or, where that’s not possible, at least the sectors and jurisdictions involved
  • Rankings, credentials and professional recognition that can be verified
  • Testimonials attributed to real clients and roles, where appropriate
  • Articles and guides that demonstrate how the firm’s lawyers actually think.

This doesn’t mean publishing confidential information or turning every webpage into a catalogue of past matters. But you should make it a principle to always support important claims with the strongest specific evidence your firm can responsibly disclose.

In other words, your website shouldn’t merely ask clients and AI assistants to believe you have expertise. It should give them enough evidence to reach that conclusion themselves.

3. Make your thinking valuable

Until recently, publishing a competent explanation of a legal issue required time, effort and at least some subject-matter knowledge.

Today, AI can generate a serviceable overview of shareholder agreements, unfair dismissal or directors’ duties almost instantly. Simply publishing another generic explanation of the law is unlikely to distinguish your firm or give an AI assistant much reason to cite it.

But, while a generic explainer might be pointless, AI loves seeing signs of analysis that’s been gained through genuine experience.

Rather than publishing exactly the same article as everyone else, focus on making your website’s content both useful and personal. Write about:

• • Patterns your lawyers have observed across multiple matters
  • Risks you’ve seen clients routinely underestimate
  • Practical frameworks clients can use to make better decisions
  • Lessons from strategies that have succeeded or failed, or
  • A clear and defensible perspective on how an issue is developing.

Consider this: an article explaining the basic operation of restraint-of-trade clauses probably won’t impress many people, let alone AI because that information is already widely available.

However, an article explaining which aspects of a restraint Australian employers routinely misunderstand, why certain drafting approaches fail and what your firm has learned from seeing restraints tested in practice contributes something far more valuable. It demonstrates not merely that the lawyer knows the law, but that they know how it operates in the real world.

And this should make AI assistants light up because it has a substantive reason to associate a lawyer with that particular problem and to draw on their thinking when answering questions about it.

4. Make your authority findable

Even strong positioning, credible evidence and valuable thinking won’t build authority if prospective clients and AI assistants can’t find this information. And this is exactly where many law firm websites fall down.

Many organise their websites in silos. Practice-area pages describe what the firm does. Lawyer profiles sit elsewhere. Matters and case studies are collected in another section (if at all). And articles are filed chronologically on an “Insights” page that doesn’t link to anything.

The connections between these topics may seem obvious to somebody inside the firm or even other legal professionals. But they aren’t necessarily obvious to an AI assistant attempting to understand which lawyers have experience with which problems, and who it should recommend.

That’s why your website should connect each claim of expertise directly to the evidence supporting it.

A practice-area page should lead directly to the lawyers who perform that work, the matters that demonstrate their experience and the articles or guides that reveal how they think. Lawyer profiles should link back to relevant services, sectors and published insights.

And one useful page should naturally lead to the next.

The real key is to stop thinking about your website as a collection of individual pages and start thinking about it as connected bodies of expertise. A connected cluster of pages gives an AI assistant more evidence of the relationships between your services, lawyers, experience and expertise than one enormous page attempting to establish everything in one hit.

Just as importantly, make sure all of your content is arranged in a way that AI assistants (and humans) can actually read, synthesise and repeat.

That means being direct, anticipating and answering questions, setting out your content with signposts like headings and bullets and (let’s face it) doing the same things that satisfy human readers too.

(PS Google similarly recommends using internal links so its AI features can discover related pages, as well as putting important content in readable text not PDFs).

Make your expertise impossible to miss

Getting AI to recommend your law firm isn’t really about learning a new collection of optimisation tricks. It’s about making the authority your firm already possesses easier to understand, verify and connect to the questions potential clients are asking.

After all, an AI assistant can’t recognise experience you haven’t made visible. It can’t confidently associate a lawyer with a particular problem if that relationship is merely implied. And it can’t verify a claim when the supporting evidence is missing, buried or disconnected from it.

The encouraging part is that none of this means choosing between content that works for AI and content that works for humans. Clear positioning, credible evidence, genuinely useful thinking and intuitive navigation also make it much easier for prospective clients to understand why they should choose you too.

AI is simply making the consequences of getting these things wrong more significant.

 

These four principles provide the foundation. But applying them across an entire law firm website (from its homepage and practice-area pages to lawyer profiles, matter studies and thought leadership) requires a more detailed approach. For the complete framework, practical examples and a 20-point authority audit, read our guide to law firm website content in the AI era.