This is issue one of Legal Desire Insider, our weekly letter on legal tech, legal marketing and the systems that make legal work faster. Subscribe here.
When a potential client has a legal question, they no longer start with a lawyer. They type it into Google, or increasingly they ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity. Whoever answers that question is the first voice they hear, and it shapes what they believe before they ever pick up the phone.
So last week I checked who is answering.
I took five ordinary questions, the kind that come up in a first consultation, and put them to Claude with web access on. Then I wrote down every source it pulled. Here is what came back.
“What happens if you break an NDA.” Adobe took three of the nine sources. Not a law firm. Adobe, the software company, with three separate pages from its Acrobat Sign section. Below them sat Sirion and Hyperstart, both contract software vendors, and a Quora thread. Firms who litigate these disputes for a living appeared underneath all of that.
“How long does a trademark last.” The top two were Trademark Engine and iGERENT, both filing services. Three IP firms did appear. So did a YouTube video, a Rocket Lawyer guide, and a Scribd document, somebody’s uploaded university assignment. The USPTO, the body that actually administers trademark renewals, did not appear at all.
“Can a salaried employee get overtime pay.” The top source was ClickTime, a timesheet software company. Then a state labour department, then a run of employment firms. The last source was a page sitting on a university’s graduate programmes subdomain, titled “9+ CA Salaried Employee Overtime Laws & Rules”, which has nothing to do with that university.
“What counts as wrongful termination.” One firm led, which was good to see. Then a directory, then Wikipedia twice. One of those two Wikipedia entries was about wrongful dismissal in the United Kingdom, served against a US question.
“Who can override a power of attorney.” This one was different, and it is the most useful result of the five.
Before I go further, a quick hello, because this is the first issue.
I am Anuj Kumar, founder of Legal Desire Media. We have been publishing legal industry news and analysis for 14 years, more than 20,000 stories and 12,000 tracked deals, read by lawyers, general counsel and firm partners around the world. Alongside the publishing I work with law firms on exactly this problem: getting found, getting cited, and getting the marketing and technology side of a practice working properly.
This newsletter is the practical half of that. Every week: legal tech, legal marketing, and the systems that make legal work faster. What is worth buying, what is not, and what to change first. No predictions, no vendor press releases dressed up as analysis.
Now back to it.
The result that changes the argument
On “who can override a power of attorney”, real firms rank. ElderLawAnswers and MetLife are up there, but so are Mandelbaum Barrett, Barnes Walker, Paths Law Firm and Simone Law Firm. Actual estate practices, answering an actual client question, sitting where they should be.
Same profession. Same kind of question. Completely different outcome.
That is what makes this worth writing about. It is not that law firms cannot win these pages. Estate practices win theirs. Personal injury practices win theirs comprehensively. It is that commercial, IP and employment practices have largely not tried, and software companies, filing services and Scribd uploads filled the space.
And these are not hard pages to win
There is a standard measure of how competitive a search phrase is, scored from 0 to 100. Anything under 20 means almost nobody credible is fighting for it.
“What happens if you break an NDA” scores 5.
“Who can override a power of attorney” scores 8.
“How do you prove wrongful termination” scores 6.
“Can a power of attorney change a will” scores 0.
Zero. On a question where the wrong answer can cost a family an estate.
This is not a budget problem and it is not a fierce market. These pages are sitting empty.
Why this matters more than it did a year ago
When someone searched Google, they saw ten links and picked one. Your page had a chance even at position four.
The AI assistants work differently. They read the web, compose a single answer, then name a few sources they leaned on. There is no list to appear in. There is only whether your material was clear enough to be used and trusted enough to be credited. On the NDA question, that meant Adobe got credited three times and nobody who practises in the area got credited at all.
The assistants also differ sharply from one another in where they look. Published research into their citation patterns shows ChatGPT leaning heavily on encyclopedic and authoritative sources, with Wikipedia taking a large share of what it cites. Perplexity leans towards community discussion, with Reddit as its single biggest source. Google’s AI answers sit somewhere between, mixing Reddit, YouTube, Quora and LinkedIn with traditional media.
None of that is your practice area page. And all of it now sits between your prospective client and their first answer.
Why the usual advice underperforms here
Most of what firms are being sold right now is the old search playbook with “AI” written on the cover. Keywords, meta descriptions, more pages. That was built for ranking in a list.
Three things matter more now.
Say the answer in the first two sentences. Both search engines and AI assistants lift direct answers. Neither can lift an answer that arrives in paragraph nine, after three paragraphs explaining that every case turns on its facts. Give the answer, then give the caveats. The Adobe page that beat everyone on the NDA question does exactly this and nothing else.
Write what only a practitioner knows. The statutory position is everywhere. What is nowhere is what actually happens. Which clause people breach without realising. What the other side always argues first. Where clients get caught out every single time. Adobe cannot write that. Neither can a content agency. That is the material that gets you cited, because you are the origin of it.
Make your headings the question itself. “How long does a trademark last?” rather than “Our Trademark Practice”. These systems match questions to questions.
What I would actually do, in order
One. Rewrite your ten most important pages so they answer the question first. Take the ten questions clients ask you most. Put the direct answer at the top, then explain. An afternoon per page. This single change does more than everything else on this list combined.
Two. Publish one piece only you could write. Not a summary of the law. What you have seen happen, repeatedly, in your own matters.
Three. Turn your headings into real questions.
Four. Check that AI crawlers are not being blocked from your site. Bot protection, over-aggressive robots rules and heavy JavaScript quietly shut them out of firm websites far more often than people realise. Your web developer can check this in ten minutes. Do it before spending money on anything else.
Five. Add structured data. This is code that tells machines who is speaking and what the page is. Not magic, but cheap, and it removes ambiguity.
Six. Be present where these systems look. Answer questions publicly, under your own name, where people ask them. Slowest of the six, compounds the hardest.
One thing not to spend money on yet
You will hear about llms.txt, a proposed file that tells AI systems how to use your website. It costs almost nothing to add and it may matter later. But the major AI companies have not confirmed they use it, and anyone selling it to you as the solution is ahead of the evidence. Add it if you like. Do not build a plan around it.
Twelve questions currently sitting unanswered
Real US monthly search volumes, pulled this week. The competition score is in brackets, out of 100, where under 20 means almost nobody credible is competing.
- Can a power of attorney change a will. 880 searches a month (0)
- What happens if you break an NDA. 1,000 (5)
- How do you prove wrongful termination. 210 (6)
- Who can override a power of attorney. 3,600 (8)
- Does power of attorney end at death. 1,600 (10)
- Can a salaried employee get overtime pay. 1,600 (10)
- Are non competes enforceable in Florida. 720 (11)
- How long does an NDA last. 590 (11)
- What is wrongful termination. 880 (17)
- Do LLCs get 1099s. 1,900 (17)
- How long do trademarks last. 1,000 (20)
- Trademark vs copyright. 6,600 (25)
Every one of these is a question a lawyer can answer definitively and a software company can only approximate.
That is the part I find hard to accept. The questions where professional expertise matters most are the ones the profession has most completely walked away from.
The twenty minute check for your own firm
Write down the five questions clients ask you most before they instruct you.
Put each one into Google, then into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Note who gets named.
If your firm is nowhere, do not read that as a verdict on your firm. Read it the way I did. Every one of those questions is a page nobody has bothered to write properly, on a topic you already know cold, in a market where the competition is a software vendor’s marketing page. That is the easiest work you will do all quarter. Start with the question you answer most often and write the page you would want a client to have read before they walked in.
If a competitor is there, read what they published. It is almost always more direct and more specific than yours. It is rarely more polished.
None of this needs a budget. Most of it needs a decision to say something specific instead of something safe.
If you would rather not do it yourself, this is part of what we do at Legal Desire. We work with firms on search, AI visibility, content and the automation side of a practice. Email anuj@legaldesire.com and tell me what your firm does and where you are stuck. I will tell you honestly whether it is worth paying anyone for, or whether you should just fix your top ten pages and save the money.
Either way, run the twenty minute check. It costs you nothing and you will learn something uncomfortable.
Anuj Kumar
Founder, Legal Desire Media
anujkumar.co
Legal Desire Insider goes out once a week. Legal tech, legal marketing, and the systems that make legal work faster. Subscribe here.
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