Artificial Intelligence

Law firms often think of brand messaging as the language on the current website or in the latest pitch deck. Prospective clients, recruits, journalists, search engines and AI systems don’t see such neat boundaries. They see what’s available. Your newest message is always competing with your oldest accessible content.

The work a law firm does to understand its AI exposure, readiness, and strategic opportunities should not remain an internal exercise. It can — and should — inform how the firm competes, governs and differentiates itself, and plans for the future. As it happens, clients really do care about those things.

Law firms are racing for position in the new world of answer engine optimization (AEO) and AI-generated search. One of the most important tools in that race is something many law firm marketers may not have heard of: schema. Schema is standardized code added to a website to help search engines and AI systems understand what the information on a page means and how it relates to information elsewhere on the site.

Agentic AI introduces risks that are novel and complex, but the most effective response is a familiar one. Zero Trust answers the problem of when an AI agent misfires on its own by constraining what an agent can do rather than betting on how it will behave.

The AI hype cycle has a name for lack of ROI — the trough of disillusionment, where inflated expectations meet unrealized results. But the gap between what was spent and what can be shown is not a technology problem. The technology works. The failure is operational.

Some AI features are exciting to build and easy to market, but the fact that a feature is technically possible does not mean it is currently safe to deploy at scale, particularly when client confidentiality and firm liability are on the line.

AI agents will not eliminate the need for court reporters, videographers, interpreters, production specialists or litigation support teams. They will, however, enhance how those professionals spend their time and how effectively information moves around them.

How can legal teams move fast, reduce costs, and handle greater volumes of information? AI has rapidly become the de facto answer. But beneath the enthusiasm for AI, how are practitioners actually using AI-driven tools — and what are they learning as adoption shifts from experimentation to daily operations?