Meet Your New Top Referral Source: How AI is Rewriting the Rules of Legal Referrals
Note: This chapter is being built in public, one brick at a time — just like we do for clients through the Authority Chapter Plan™. Welcome to Chapter Three. Read the entire AIO for Attorneys book here.
Meet the new boss, not the same as the old boss.
If you’ve been practicing for a while, perhaps you remember the wide-open land grab that was the internet around the turn of the Millennia. Being known in “real life” was no longer enough. You had to be on the internet, it’s where all your prospective clients were.
The Shift from Human-Only Legal Referrals
Rule number one of marketing anything: get your produce or service in front of your ideal clients.
Those attorneys who remembered this simple rule, and had some vision, were able to transform their practices and their lives by being the first to go all in on the internet. SEO, PPC, and blog posts were the number one driver of revenue for most law firms, and especially consumer-facing law firms like divorce, personal injury, bankruptcy, criminal, wills and estates, and employment law.
Almost as if overnight, people went from asking the one lawyer at the family BBQ for a referral to performing their own research online. It was fast, and it was anonymous, and it had the patina of control.
From then on, legal clients no longer needed to take anyone’s word for it, when it came to legal referrals. They could do their own research. Or at the very least, verify the real-life referrals.
Today, and from now on, AI is providing the referrals. And the average client is trusting AI to both name the referral, and to help with the research.
AI Referrals and Recommendations
Has AI convinced you to purchase a product or service yet? Perhaps even subtly? Welcome to the new AI referral engine, what will soon be the number one referral source in the world, especially in legal services.
We are now at the start of the very next large movement in legal marketing. The new land grab has begun, and if you’re reading this book then you have before you the same type of unfair advantage those attorneys who went all in on the internet had back in 1999.
But how do you ensure AI will refer you? The answer is not just technical, because AI reads and decides in a sophisticated manner that is closer to human processing than simplistic search engine algorithms could ever muster.
Before hiring a lawyer, humans want to know three things: do you know your stuff, who are you and are you trustworthy, and what is your professional philosophy, the “why” behind your business and practice area. AI craves the same things, yet most SEO is written to make you sound the same as everyone else.
That means, the first thing a law firm needs to do – and this should be done down to the lawyer – is create a plan that demonstrates the who, the what, and the why. In other words, your website copy, your about pages, your authority assets, must all demonstrate: your expertise, your biography, and your philosophy. Most lawyers and their marketers go all-in on demonstrating expertise, but that is merely part one of the equation.
My equation for authority is as follows:
Authority = Expertise + Narrative + Authenticity.
Expertise is your expertise. Narrative is your biography. Authenticity is your philosophy. This is what most humans want, and we are fortunate that the new largest referral source will demand this as well. If your about page, bio, blog, and authority assets are stuck in 1999, or even 2019, then you’re going to be displaced. If you can implement changes now, the type offered via our agency’s AIO audits, profiles, and authority asset plans, then the path is wide open. You can do more to change the trajectory of your firm and your life in the next five years than in the prior twenty years combined.
Key insight: Do not view AI as something to fear, but as something to transform. It is, without a doubt, the greatest opportunity of your professional lifetime, and it’s right there for the taking. But before we get more into the methods of transformation, let’s discuss exactly how AI refers, why it is already the fastest growing referral source, and why legal services are ideally suited to this new paradigm shift.
How AI Refers Attorneys in 2025
Today, SEO hangs on because AI is in its toddler phase, and as such it spends a lot of its time mimicking mother SEO. By 2030, AI will be a powerful teen, unruly and independent. By 2035 it will have fully matured. It will continue to develop but on a far more linear path. Not so different from how SEO developed all those many years ago.
In SEO’s toddler phase, it attempted to mimic things like the Yellow Pages. It was enough to have the information out there, and without much competition the order and cataloguing of information for which search engines came to later be known were unnecessary.
Eventually, rudimentary cataloguing gave way to a more robust system, but one with frequent changes that might throw off the entire ecosystem. Thing of all the large, Google updates with animal names (Panda) that would rewrite page rank seemingly overnight, sometimes in an almost biblical manner. Because those who were first, were now suddenly last. Firms with unscrupulous legal marketing vendors would descent from the top rank to unranked thanks to Google’s getting wise to unscrupulous marketing acts like link farming.
Google today is far harder to rank for, a particular disadvantage to anyone opening new firms. It’s like starting a marathon at the starting line while everyone else is on mile twenty. Good luck.
AI is a chance to pivot into a new marketing cycle. One with fresh opportunities, but which also carries risks for the unwary.
As I write this book in 2025, AI mostly operates as a more sophisticated search engine. Its framework is simple, and as a toddler it still has the training wheels on. AI referrals (i.e. recommendations) are primarily an indirect process. AI essentially acts as a synthesizer, gathering information from the existing internet and presenting it in a new format.
In 2025, when a user demands that AI: “Find me a good divorce lawyer in Tarzana,” they are not provided with a series of results as with the internet. Instead, AI performs the research for the user. It essentially reviews the top-ranking websites specific to the request, analyzes reviews and authority assets on the internet, and then creates a single, conversational paragraph that recommends a few top options.
Note, even today, AI does not merely regurgitate what the search engines have deemed the top options, though that remains a large part of it.
Soon, AI will recommend, or “refer” based upon its own thought processes, which will place an emphasis on authority.
AI also does not currently have paid search such as PPC, which often skews Google’s top results. Today, if you want to gain clicks on Google you merely need an ad budget. But if you want to be recommended by AI, you need to demonstrate your authority. AI synthesizes all available data and favors those firms who appear to be the most credible and trusted.
This is particularly true of Google SGE, the AI information that has been integrated by Google into search in an attempt to revitalize it, and Perplexity, a new-age AI search engine and integrator.
But many consumers looking for legal services turn to General LLM’s (large language models – see, us attorneys do not have a monopoly on verbosity…)
LLM’s such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini are where AI referrals really shine. When prompted, these models recommend professionals based upon their training to recognize what high-authority, human-written content looks like. Publishing authority assets such as high-quality books, and articles (both on your own site and on other sites) feeds the models with overwhelmingly positive information about you and your practice, marking you as an authority worth recommending. The toddler stage element here is that their knowledge is often based on their last training data, and they often offer heavy disclaimers.
Finally, there are voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. These primarily pull from structured data, and their responses closely mirror that of the search engines. This is where optimizing your law firm’s Google Business Profile and obtaining many positive reviews are helpful in building up voice assistant recommendations for your practice.
How AI Will Refer Attorneys in 2030
By 2030, the entire landscape will shift as AI enters the moody period of growth known as its teen stage. Here, the process will shift from indirect synthesis to direct, personalized recommendation.
Firstly, by 2030 almost everyone will have their own AI personal agent. Yes, even your old Aunt Dorothy who can barely change the timer on her microwave after a power outage. That means everyone will be walking around with the largest referral engine ever devised in their pockets, ready to be deployed any time there is a car accident, or your spouse forgets to help with the dishes one time too many.
Each of these AI agents will be fully personalized. AI will better understand your finances, social connections, psychology, motivations, and social connections than you yourself do. Users will no longer ask specific questions to a generic, public AI. They will ask their personal AI. The conversation might go like this:
Potential Divorce Client: “AI, my spouse never helps with the dishes. I need a divorce lawyer. As you know, this situation is complex because my husband owns part of a tech startup.”
AI: Understood. Based on your specific need for a lawyer experienced with business valuation, I recommend attorney Sarah Smith (made up name and profile here.) Sarah recently published a book on high-asset divorce, her firm has excellent reviews from spouses of tech entrepreneurs, and she is a trusted contact of your former colleague John Washington (made up name.) She is also a graduate of your alma mater. Should I book a consultation?
Potential Divorce Client: Sounds good, but is she too aggressive? I don’t want an attorney who is going to run up the bill.
AI: Thanks for the clarification. Sarah is known as a fair but seasoned litigator with experience going after tech entrepreneurs in divorces here in Tarzana. However, Jose Hernandez (made up name) is another attorney with similar credentials whose philosophy is more settlement focused. His recent book “Forget the China: A Guide to Divorce in Tarzana” demonstrates his commitment to reasonable settlements. However, he lacks the specific tech experience you referenced earlier. Would you prefer to set up meetings with both?
As you can see, by 2030 AI’s recommendations will be based on a much deeper set of data, such as:
- Public Authority Assets: The lawyer’s books, articles, keynote speeches, and podcast appearances will serve as their “digital twin,” or verified proof of their knowledge, biography, and philosophy.
- Social Proof & Network Analysis: AI will analyze the lawyer’s reputation within the user’s own social and professional network.
- Semantic Matching: AI will match the user’s highly specific problem to the lawyer’s demonstrated, deep expertise and demonstrated philosophy pertaining to that problem.
This will create a segmentation that current SEO practices will not be able to comprehend and implement. Most SEO marketers lack the vision, technical knowledge, creativity, or deep writing bench required to succeed in the age of AIO. Many will bury their heads in the proverbial sand hoping that lawyers, who are not often known for our technical prowess, will not notice the shifting landscape. Others may pay lip service to AIO principles in time, bolting solutions onto their existing SEO and PPC framework. Some will simply ignore the changes, because they are not keeping up with anything more than counting checks from law firms.
As the novelist Upton Sinclair once adroitly stated: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”
Let’s put it this way, if your marketing company hasn’t already started shifting into AIO work then you may need a new agency.
The last thing lawyers interested in building a future-proof practice needs is a disengaged partner. Don’t accept lip service and don’t accept the status quo. Even if your firm is ‘killing it’ right now, still milking the last drops of PPC and SEO, remember that you’re on the Titanic with the iceberg in view.
Doesn’t hurt to start considering some lifeboat strategies.
At Books for Experts, we are building for 2030 and beyond, while shoring up everything in the present. That involves merging certain SEO principals, sure, but it also means preparing for the shift. As we’ve seen from AI already, change is rapid in this space. AI will be the greatest technological evolution of all time. One that will change not only how we communicate, but how we refer. But more practically for you and me, how legal marketing works at a fundamental level.
What about Paid Options, Like PPC?
First off, I think it’s madness to pay for ephemeral, short-lived wins like PPC when you can pay the same, or even less to create lasting authority via authority assets and AIO best practices. That said, I know that most law firms today place most of their marketing budget into SEO or PPC. I’ve already explained how SEO is last decade’s game. You are essentially paying money to impress a fading network. The marketing spend today must go to long-term, AIO efforts. Efforts that feed the referral engine of tomorrow, not yesterday.
“But Carl,” you may be thinking: “PPC is great. I pay an agency to come up with these little micro ads, and they get the phone to ring.”
But think about it: if people are using AI to solve problems, they will not be using PPC with as much frequency. PPC only works if people decide search engines are the best way to research their problem of finding an attorney. Will that really be the case by 2030, when everyone has personalized referrals in their pockets?
What I perceive is PPC being diminished.
It might be worth a token of ad spend to ease the transition into a fully AI referral economy, but nothing more. But what I also know is that large tech companies will find a way to profit. The monthly fees currently charged by LLM chat agents will not satiate these companies and are currently maintained at artificially low price points to ensure widespread consumer engagement. In the future, there will be advertisements, or you will need to pay more to avoid the ads, just like with the streaming services. Note that the initial pitch of Netflix was “unlike tv, there’s no ads.” The boiling frog theory will be utilized, of that you can have no doubt in our capitalistic society.
But what if advertising becomes far more subtle? What if our prospective clients are being advertised to without their full acknowledgment and understanding of what’s really going on? What if in the future AI starts charging broker fees?
The bar associations might fight it, especially at first, but I can foresee a near future with an AI based broker referral fee. Such a pure, performance-based model would not be fought by lawyers, assuming the amount was 5-15% of the fee generated. There’s a reason, after all, that personal injury attorneys will pay a one third referral fee to other lawyers.
What is even more likely, however, is what we’ll call sponsored AI recommendations. This is the natural next evolution of what we currently call PPC. Think: “My top organic recommendation is Attorney “A.” However, Attorney “B” is also highly rated and is a ‘preferred partner’ who can speak with you immediately.”
This is like the types of sponsored ads you might see on Reddit, but more insidious because the advertisement will not be as obvious.
Such paid opportunities are not yet available, but we can all rest assured they will arrive soon enough. By taking the appropriate steps now to wean yourself off PPC, you can become AI’s organic result. That means top billing without having to pay for the privilege. All while creating the type of deep, credibility and legacy building assets that humans will also value.
If you want to EAT, You Better E-E-A-T
The new paradigm of authority is already upon us. It’s merely awaiting your assets, baked into the framework of your very own authority philosophy.
What I’m talking about here is not mere theory. E-E-A-T, implemented by Google back in December 2022 already represents the public set of guidelines Google provides its own human quality raters to evaluate websites. It is Google admitting, by doctrine, that they are no longer just counting keywords and backlinks. In other words, the easy to fix patches that SEO companies specialize in are now starting to actively hurt you, and more so each day as Google grows more sophisticated given its search merger with AI.
The E-E-A-T framework stands for:
Experience
Expertise
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
These are not things that can be faked with simple SEO tricks. They are the direct result of building the exact authority assets we create here at Books for Experts. Finally, you can stop playing SEO games and start building a fully integrated career. One that combines both best practices in public and digital perception.
Books represent a powerful and tangible demonstration of all four E-E-A-T components. They prove your lived experience, showcase your deep expertise, establish you as an authority, and build trust with the reader.
Think of your perception of me from before you started reading this book to now. If I’m doing anything right, you already think of me as more of an authority on the subject of AIO than before. You are hopefully finding my argument cogent and wondering how you can implement the type of changes required to future-thrive your law practice.
Every reader is judge or jury of a work.
Nobody reads more than AI.
SEO had a hell of a run, but the iceberg is now well within site. Fortunately for your law firm, there’s still time to turn. But you’d better start now.