Generative AI can make parts of law firm content production faster. It can organize interview notes, compare drafts, expose missing questions, and help a subject-matter expert get past a blank page. It cannot decide what a firm should say, verify a legal proposition, supply first-hand experience, or accept responsibility for a published page.
That distinction is the basis of a useful AI content strategy. The goal is not to publish more pages because a tool can generate them. The goal is to reduce low-value production work while protecting the accuracy, originality, and professional judgment that make legal content worth reading.
Start with the reader and the firm’s actual knowledge
A sound assignment begins before any prompt is written. Identify the reader, the decision the page should help them make, and the knowledge the firm can contribute that a general-purpose model does not have.
For a practice page, that source material might include attorney interviews, recurring client questions, the types of matters the firm accepts, jurisdictional limits, and the firm’s intake process. For an article, it might include a new opinion, a regulatory change, or a pattern the attorneys are seeing in their work. For a biography, it includes only verified credentials, representative work the firm may publish, and the attorney’s approved description of the practice.
This is where first-hand experience enters the process. Google’s guidance on helpful, reliable, people-first content asks whether a page offers original information or analysis, demonstrates first-hand expertise, and leaves the reader with enough information to achieve a goal. A model cannot create those qualities from a prompt alone.
Use AI for bounded production tasks
In my experience, AI is most useful when the source material and the requested task are both constrained. Good uses include:
- organizing a transcript into a proposed outline;
- identifying unanswered questions in an attorney interview;
- comparing two drafts for inconsistencies;
- converting an approved long explanation into a shorter summary for review;
- suggesting plain-language alternatives to internal terminology; and
- creating a review checklist from an approved content brief.
These tasks produce working material, not publishable authority. The human editor still decides what belongs, what is accurate, and whether the result sounds like the firm.
High-risk uses are the reverse: asking a model to supply legal analysis without authoritative sources, generate client stories, create statistics, characterize competitors, or publish many location and practice variants with minimal review. Google’s spam policies define scaled content abuse by purpose and value, not by whether a human or AI produced the text.
A six-step workflow for law firm content
1. Write the assignment
Define the audience, purpose, page owner, jurisdiction, sources, desired action, and subjects that require attorney approval. Decide whether AI will be used and what it may do.
2. Assemble a controlled source packet
Use approved firm material and primary authorities whenever possible. Record the title, publisher, date, and link for each external source. Do not assume a model’s citation is real or that its summary accurately reflects the source.
3. Generate structure before prose
An outline is easier to audit than a finished article. Check that it follows the reader’s questions rather than a list of search phrases. Remove sections the firm cannot support with useful knowledge.
4. Draft with attribution boundaries
Keep sourced facts, attorney observations, and editorial interpretations distinct. Phrases such as “the court held,” “the agency states,” “in our experience,” and “this suggests” help the reviewer see what kind of claim is being made.
5. Require substantive human review
The attorney or qualified reviewer checks legal accuracy, jurisdiction, currency, confidentiality, advertising concerns, and whether the page could create an unintended expectation. The editor checks clarity, originality, source fidelity, links, and consistency with the rest of the site. The firm approves the final substantive draft.
6. Publish, measure, and maintain
Track outcomes appropriate to the page: qualified inquiries, useful internal-search behavior, engagement with a key resource, or whether attorneys can send the page to answer a recurring question. Do not call a ranking change an AI-content result without evidence that establishes causation. Review time-sensitive pages on a schedule based on their risk, not an arbitrary demand for freshness.
What Google has actually said about AI content
Google does not say that AI-assisted content is automatically rewarded or penalized. Its current generative AI content guidance focuses on accuracy, quality, relevance, and compliance with spam policies. It also says disclosure can be useful when readers would reasonably want to know how content was created.
Google’s May 2026 guide to generative AI features in Search reinforces conventional SEO foundations and emphasizes unique, non-commodity content. It does not establish a separate set of tricks for “GEO” or “AEO.” My interpretation is that law firms should spend less time creating query variants and more time making their real expertise clear, well structured, accessible, and easy to verify.
E-E-A-T is also frequently overstated. Google describes experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness as concepts its systems seek to identify. It explicitly says E-E-A-T is not one specific ranking factor. Many legal-information topics may receive greater scrutiny because inaccurate information could affect legal rights, financial stability, or safety, but not every sentence on a law firm website is automatically a YMYL claim.
Privacy and professional responsibility still apply
Do not place confidential client information, protected work product, personal data, or unpublished strategy into a public AI service unless the firm has approved the tool and its terms, retention settings, and access controls. A sanitized prompt can still reveal more than intended when several details are combined.
AI policy also belongs to the firm, not just its marketing department. The people responsible for professional responsibility, information security, and vendor review should define which tools and data are permitted. The American Bar Association’s Formal Opinion 512 addresses lawyers’ duties when using generative AI, including competence, confidentiality, communication, supervision, candor, and reasonable fees. Firms should also check the rules and guidance that apply in their jurisdictions.
A practical publication checklist
- The page answers a real client or referral-source question.
- A named person owns the assignment and final approval.
- Primary sources are linked beside important claims.
- First-hand observations are labeled as experience, not universal fact.
- Every quotation, statistic, credential, and case reference is verified.
- No confidential or personal information was placed into an unapproved tool.
- The draft adds something the source material or competing summaries do not.
- The visible modified date reflects a material change, not routine housekeeping.
AI can support this process, but the value comes from the firm’s knowledge and the discipline of the review. If the process cannot identify who supplied the expertise, how the claims were checked, and why the page deserves to exist, the tool has not solved the content problem.
Last substantively reviewed: August 1, 2026. This revision replaces update-causation claims and third-party volatility statistics with a source-led workflow based on current primary guidance.
Dan Gilroy
Dan Gilroy founded Dan Gilroy Design in 2004 and leads every website engagement. Before starting the studio, he spent 16 years in Washington, including three years with the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and 13 years inside White & Case and Patton Boggs. That background gives him a practical understanding of how law firms work and how clients evaluate them.
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