What is Going to Happen to Legal Marketing in the Age of GenAI?
Billions of dollars are spent every year on Legal Marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Campaigns, and and entire industry depends on the stability of the lead generation marketing funnel. In 2023 a CEO of a Legal Marketing firm named Crisp became a finalist for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
Generative AI may be changing the game for lawyers spending millions on legal marketing for their firm trying and attract the best clients and cases with monster settlements. Headlines demonstrate there is significant amounts of money being spent on Legal Tech for lawyers in an area known as Legal Ops.
EvenUp raised over $50m with a valuation of $325m in June 2023. Thomson Reuters snagged Casetext in a transaction valued at $650m, cash. There are numerous other deals in Legal Ops that will leverage Generative AI for increasing productivity and efficiency of lawyers serving clients. But, what is going on with the marketing side and client acquisition?
ChatGPT 3.5, the free version returns basically, nothing, zilch, nadda, zero information regarding the “Best Personal Injury Attorneys’ in Philly. The free version of OpenAIs’ killer Generative AI basically punts and tells folks to go lookup stuff on their own. When we checked this out a few months ago, this seemed a bit strange. Seriously, the data is there, the search information is right in front of everyone. We speculated that maybe OpenAI was leaving this type of question unanswered so they could insert advertising into the GenAI Chat-stream at some time in the future. But we were wrong.
If you spend $20 per month on the OpenAI ChatGPT 4 or you are a legal marketing application developer, like we are, and you want the latest and greatest, the results are significantly different. Version 4 of ChatGPT provides specific information for a ChatGPT query “Personal Injury Attorneys in Philadelphia.”
We thought it was kind of interesting that the 2024 Best Law Firms publication was already out in November 2023. But, this is no hallucination, the 2024 Best Law Firm directory is for real. It appears that ChatGPT 4 has also been trained on Best Lawyers in America and Thomson Reuters Super Lawyers’ Directory as well.
What does that mean for doing things the old way aka Google Search?
Asking Google Search the exact same question, “Who are the best Personal Injury Attorneys’ in Philadelphia,” produces some very different results. First of all, we have the Sponsored Results Showing up at the top of the page. In fact, virtually the whole page is Sponsored results with Morgan & Morgan at the bottom of the Search Results. Morgan & Morgan advertises themselves as the biggest Personal Injury Law Firm in the United States.
Even Googles own Generative AI from the Exact Same Google Search phrase generates completely different search results.
Once again, the largest Personal Injury Law Firm in the United States, Morgan & Morgan, doesn’t show up on Google’s own Generative AI. In fact it appears that Googles’ Generative AI is really concerned about Google Reviews or Googles’ Local Ads.
Back to OpenAI and their ChatGPT 4 domination. Attempting a ChatGPT 4 Query for “The Best Workers Compensation Lawyer in Philadelphia” adds to the mystery of how this whole new way of doing things is going to work in the very near future.
It appears that Version 4 of OpenAIs’ ChatGPT has upped its game and now searches Avvo.com and Findlaw.com lawyer search websites. Avvo.com is owned by Internet Brands which I discussed in an article, “What’s Up With Internet Brands ….” FindLaw is a lawyer search website and like Super Lawyers, it’s also owned by Thomson Reuters.
A further deep dive into Bing Search (without GenAI) as opposed to Bing Chat (100% GenAI) provides some interesting insight into the information that ChatGPT 4 was trained on, although some questions remain.
The Bing Search looks at length of career as a “Workers Compensation Attorney” as a specific indication of quality of work. In this case, Sam Pond, the Founding Partner of Pond Lehoky Giordano is at the top of the Bing Search, but for some reason doesn’t show up in the GenAI version of Bing which is based on ChatGPT.
Obviously, OpenAI doesn’t use Google for Search, it uses Bing because Microsoft has invested $13 Billion into OpenAI and the partnership is one of the most significant in any technology relationship that has ever existed.
The implications for Generative AI strategies appear obvious. Lawyers are going to have to spread the money around to Legal Search portals that are used to train Generative AI. There certainly could be a decrease in traffic to these sites by consumers looking for attorneys, but this is offset by lawyers better positioning their firms to ensure they appear as part of the Generative AI query.
Law firms may want to reconsider their strategy for Optimizing exclusively on Google, since Bing is driving the the Generative AI train for ChatGPT 4.
Ever since I watched Iron Man, I wanted a Jarvis. ChatGPTs’ new voice capability is Jarvis. This will be more impactful than Apples’ Siri or Amazons’ Alexa. Voice commands and voice powered Generative AI will be the new bacon. Even Google recognizes that the jig is up. They have their own multi-modal Generative AI called Gemini which hasn’t been released as of November 14, 2023. Google appears to be hedging their bets and they invested $2 Billion in Anthropic which already has Amazon as an early investor. Google recognizes that people may be sick of being fed endless links in searches when they could easily get a direct answer to a specific question, CNBC has categorized Google getting caught flat footed as a Code Red.
Some lawyers and legal experts are still yapping about hallucinations in Generative AI. While there were some wild “made up” stuff early on, everything seems to be settling down in the world around OpenAIs’ products. The sober Generative AIs’ are distancing themselves from the pack, and any hallucinations that exist today can be quickly overcome by proofreading a draft from a Generative AI. Furthermore, its’ very possible that for consumers looking for legal representation that hallucinations may not be as big an issue as trying to figure out which attorney to choose from dozens of links in a traditional Google Search.
I’ve talked with a few attorneys and some really smart Legal Marketing folks at Faceless Digital. Generative AI is already being integrated into blog posts and other areas of Legal Marketing. There is some concern about ensuring existing SEO approaches work on websites which still requires some human interaction and expertise.
Looking at how this will play out near term, the Legal Marketing costs will tend to increase over time, since Google Search isn’t going away instantly. Advertising in Directories and keeping Local ads up to date will be critical as well. There may even be a need to invest in some Bing Places for Business, since it makes sense that Bing will be trained on this data as well. We’ve seen this before. Does anyone remember Yahoo or AOL?
The uncertainty in Legal Marketing created by Generative AI is the reason why Giupedi, Inc. pivoted from Legal Ops to Legal Marketing and the creation of entirely new and unique Legal Client Acquisition Platform. No matter how things turn out in the short term for traditional Search, we are very excited about the future.
Edward Bukstel
CEO
Giupedi.com
@ebukstel
