LAW FIRM MARKETING · GUIDE 09

The content reads like a robot wrote it. For a law firm, that costs twice.

Generic AI-written practice-area pages cost law firms twice: Google treats legal content as high-stakes, and clients can tell. What E-E-A-T means for lawyers, and how to write pages that sound like your firm.

Read your own practice-area page out loud. The one for your main service. If it contains the phrase "navigating the complexities of" or "our experienced team is dedicated to" or "you deserve a lawyer who will fight for you," and if you could swap your firm's name for any other firm's and nothing would break — that page was written by nobody in particular. Increasingly, it was written by a model with your practice area pasted into the prompt.

Every business has this problem now. Law firms have it worse, for two reasons that compound.

Reason one: Google treats legal content as high-stakes

Google's quality guidelines have a category called "Your Money or Your Life" — topics where bad information can hurt someone's health, finances or safety. Legal is in it, explicitly. For YMYL pages, Google's raters are told to look hard for what it calls E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust. Who wrote this? Are they qualified? Does the site show evidence of a real practice? Is the information specific and accurate?

A generic page fails all four quietly. No named author with a bar number. No specifics about the county courthouse or the local procedure. No case results, no attorney's voice, no sign that a human who practices this law touched it. It doesn't get penalized, exactly. It just never gets trusted, so it never ranks against a firm whose pages do.

That's the first cost: the page is invisible for the searches you want.

Reason two: your client can tell, and it's a trust decision

The person reading your DUI page at 1 a.m. is deciding whether to put their freedom in your hands. They are reading for one thing: does this firm know what it's doing, and will they treat me like a person? A page that says "we understand this is a difficult time" and then explains nothing tells them the answer is no.

Compare: "In Travis County, a first DUI arrest means an ALR hearing request within 15 days to save your license — most people miss it because nobody tells them. Here's what happens at that hearing and how we handle it." That's one sentence a robot can't write, because it requires having done it. And it's the sentence that makes the phone ring.

That's the second cost: the page is visible and doesn't convert.

What "written by the firm" actually means (it's not you writing it)

Partners don't have time to write 3,000-word pages, and they shouldn't. What has to be true is narrower:

A real writer, with legal experience, wrote it. Not "the content team." A person who has written for lawyers before and knows what a plea offer is. AI can help that person research, outline, and draft — we use it that way — but a person who understands the practice area owns the page.

Your intake notes went into it. The questions clients actually ask on the first call are the headings. Not "What is personal injury law?" — nobody asks that. "Do I have to talk to the other driver's insurance?" "What if I was partly at fault?" "How much does this cost me if we lose?" Your intake person knows all of these. Ten minutes with them produces a better outline than any keyword tool.

The attorney read it and added three things. Not rewrote — added. A local detail, a war story (with the disclaimer), a strong opinion. Three sentences from the lawyer make a page sound like the lawyer.

It carries the attorney's name, photo and credentials. Author byline, bio link, bar admission, year. This is what E-E-A-T looks like in practice, and it's also what a scared person at 1 a.m. wants to see.

The five tells of robot content (check your site)

1. The name-swap test. Replace your firm's name with a competitor's. Does the page still work? Then it's not about you.
2. No place names below the H1. The city is in the title and never again. A real page mentions the courthouse, the county, the local procedure, the roads where the accidents happen.
3. Every paragraph is the same length. Three sentences, three sentences, three sentences. Humans write unevenly.
4. Empathy without information. "We understand how stressful this is" followed by nothing you could act on.
5. No author, or an author who isn't a lawyer. Look at the byline. "Admin." "Marketing Team." Or nothing.

Two or more, and the page is costing you on both fronts.

How we produce a practice-area page (so you can compare)

1. Intake interview — 20 minutes with whoever answers your phone: the ten questions people ask, the cases you want and don't, what surprises clients.
2. Market read — what the top three pages in your county say, what they miss, what the AI answers currently say for the query.
3. Draft by a legal writer: 1,500–3,000 words, structured around real questions, local specifics, process, cost signal, FAQ.
4. Attorney pass — you add three things and approve. Thirty minutes, once.
5. Structure — FAQ schema, author schema with your bar admission, internal links, images with real captions.
6. The bar check — no "best," no guarantees, results with the disclaimer, review language clean.

Then it goes live under your name. It's slower than pasting a prompt. It's also the only kind of page that does both jobs.

What to do with the robot pages you already have

Don't delete them all — some rank, and deleting loses that. Rank them by how much they matter (main practice areas first), then rewrite the top five using the process above. Redirect nothing; the URL stays, the content improves. Watch the commercial rankings and the calls from those pages over 90 days. The difference is usually visible.

Frequently asked questions

Is AI-written content penalized by Google? Google says it doesn't penalize content for being AI-generated — it rewards helpful content and demotes unhelpful content regardless of author. In practice, generic content is unhelpful, and legal is a category where Google looks hardest. The tool isn't the problem; the absence of a person is.

How long should a practice-area page be? As long as it takes to answer the questions people actually ask — usually 1,500 to 3,000 words for a main practice area, less for a sub-area. Length for its own sake reads like padding, and padding reads like a robot.

Can we use AI at all? Yes, the way you'd use a paralegal for a first draft: research, outline, first pass. Then a person who knows the practice area makes it true and makes it yours.

What about bios? Attorney bios are the most under-used pages on law firm sites. They're where E-E-A-T lives. Real photo, real history, cases (with the disclaimer), why you do this work. Written in first person if the attorney will allow it.

Want to know which of your pages are ranking, which are robot, and what the AI answers say about your firm? Your Growth Plan includes your organic visibility and an AI check across four systems. Free, in 48 hours. Get your Growth Plan

Attorney advertising services. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.