I met with law firm business development and AI leader, Guy Alvarez in DC on the last afternoon of the Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference a couple weeks ago. I told him that it was my observation that most of the people at the conference, including the companies selling marketing and business development solutions to law firms, didn’t understand AI and its implications. Guy agreed.
Folks were talking content creation. For search rankings and distribution. At a time when we are undergoing the most dramatic change of our lifetimes.
While AI is having a huge impact on legal publishing and the consumption of this publishing, most of professionals at LMA were talking like it’s five years ago and that things will be the same five years from now. Struck me that these folks may not have the same jobs in a couple years. What they were doing today would likely be extinct.
Guy agreed, and offered the below, today, to make his point.
When AI assistants become the primary search interface, law firms will need to completely rethink their SEO and content strategies. Traditional keyword optimization won’t matter when AI does the searching and synthesizing for the end user.
The winners will be firms that create truly substantive, authoritative content that AI systems recognize as high-value. Surface-level “thought leadership” pieces won’t cut it anymore when AI can instantly compare depth and quality across thousands of sources.
Content distribution will matter less than content quality and structured data that makes information easily parsable by AI systems. This shift actually advantages specialized firms with genuine expertise over those with bigger marketing budgets.
Read the post by Paul Roetzer, Founder and CEO of the Marketing Institute, shared by Guy. GPT can do search 100 times better than you and I can do search today. The use of GPT is exploding while the use of Google and other social media is on the decline.
True thought leadership emanating from experienced, caring and passionate legal professionals will count, while hiring SEO companies to hire out for content written by people who aren’t even lawyers will mean little—nor will marketing driven efforts to tailor lawyer publishing, whether it be for search performance or distribution performance, will mean little.
Time to look up.