Note: This chapter is being built in public, one brick at a time — just like we do for clients through the Authority Chapter Plan™. Read the entire AIO for Attorneys book here.
I would like to begin this chapter with a thought exercise, followed by immediate action. I know you’re busy, but what you can do in the next half hour may change the trajectory of your legal practice forever.
The Authority Philosophy Website Test
First, ask yourself these three questions and mediate on them for 10 minutes: (1) How am I the same and how am I different from all the other lawyers who practice in my niche in my state? (2) How is my law firm the same and how is it different from all the other law firms that practice in my niche in my state? (3) Is my professional goal to stand out, or to blend in?
Done? Great.
Now onto the immediate action. First, go to your law firm’s website and spend 5-10 minutes looking at it with fresh eyes. Pretend you’re doing so through the eyes of a prospective client or referral source. Someone who has never met you before, has never visited your site before. Consider what your law firm website is communicating. How, if at all is it engaging? How, if at all, is it unique? How, if at all, does it express your unique professional philosophy?
Finally, take 15-20 minutes and look up 5-10 of your competitors’ websites. As you do, ask yourself these questions:
(1) How are there websites similar to my own, especially the copy?
(2) What about these websites, if anything, are different from my website, and from each other?
(3) Would a prospective client, looking at all these websites and mine, see any real points of differentiation?
(4) Is there any web copy speaking to differentiation at all, aside from “247 years of combined experience,” or “aggressive,” or “million-dollar verdicts?”
(5) Is there a human touch to the websites or any of the attorney profiles?
(6) Does the web copy show the hallmarks of yesterday’s SEO: keyword stuffing, bland blogs, or other symptoms of sludge marketing?
(7) Are these websites persuasive? Would they make me want to hire any of these firms, particularly one over the others? Do these websites express compassion, and I don’t just mean listing the word “compassion,” is it iterated into the fiber of the website? Do any of these websites make a prospective feel in their gut something akin to: “Yes, this is the firm that will solve my problems!” Do any of these websites make you, or your competitors stand out?
At all?
If you just went through the above exercises, you likely discovered a sobering truth: in a sea of sameness, most law firm marketing does more to commoditize than to differentiate. This chapter is about the strategic antidote, and how to create a moat around your practice via authenticity.
Unless you’re the zebra rather than the horse in legal marketing, your website is probably the same as your competitors, more or less. It is probably drab the way a 1970’s general practitioner’s office was, the digital equivalent of a row of rusty filing cabinets ripping into fraying shag carpets.
You could probably print out the copy from your and your competitor’s websites, and take random paragraphs and read them with no idea what firm they are referring to.
What does this create? Commodification.
Attorney commodification is the number one threat to humanizing our profession, and it starts with bad marketing and lackluster communication.
The Authority Philosophy Website Challenge
I know we’re a cautious bunch, and law school plus sixteen years in practice has convinced me that being cautious can be a virtue in the law. Can.
But I plead, beg, and implore you to please, please, reconsider blending in when it comes to your most important digital asset. It’s not only going to confound potential clients and human referral sources, but your lack of apparent creativity and philosophy is going to cost you AI referrals.
Your website must answer what you do, of course, but it must also resoundingly answer who you are, what you stand for, what you believe in, what you know, what sets you apart, why you practice in your area, what makes you different, how you approach cases, and your professional philosophy.
Sound like a lot? Well, it is, but that’s the bare minimum.
It’s 2025 and the era of clunky stock photos and undifferentiated marketing is not going to impress anyone. Particularly not AI platforms with their dossiers. They’ll just move on to recommending the next firm over. You know, the one that shows they have a pulse.
Having a digital “twin,” without a soul is deadly to your firm, and frankly poisonous to our profession.
We should not be teaching the public that we are a commodity. Think of the lawyers who stand out, are they commodities? Do you want to think of yourself, or your law firm, as the latest legal sausage being run off the assembly line?
Said a bit more delicately: if lawyers are not going to show our personalities, then why shouldn’t we be replaced by AI platforms, and Legal Forms, and all other forms of down-market commodification?
Look, you’ve got to be something, right? Beyond just “attorney” or “lawyer” or “counselor” or “advocate.” Surely you are a dynamic, full-blooded human being with passions and beliefs. I know you are, because I see it beyond even the most staid, cautious attorneys when they finally take the mask off.
We act as though our humanity is our great liability, when it could be the driving force behind our growth.
I’m not declaring you have to do anything you’re not comfortable with or share anything too personal on your law firm’s website. What I am saying is that you must have a professional philosophy, and your law firm must have a distinct philosophy and identity, and you must connect the dots by making this all clear on your law firm’s website, in your social media, and even in your daily interactions.
I have connected with clients over my law of strategy board games of all things, one of the most geeky hobbies on planet Earth.
“When Carl is not fighting other lawyers in courtrooms he spends much of his free time fighting them and arguing over rules in strategy board games in his board game group.”
That used to be in my law firm copy, right on my bio page. As far as I know, it didn’t stop anyone from hiring me. It was commented on enthusiastically several times during consults, especially by fellow gamers.
Even those who thought it nerdy probably always found the image interesting. A bunch of lawyers getting together to argue over rules while playing Agricola or Brass: Birmingham or Spirit Island is the type of indelible, slightly askew image that sticks.
My “dolphins, not sharks,” analogy was another major differentiator. And I know it landed because I now see other lawyers using it. That’s when you know you’ve really struck a nerve: when you’ve created something so original that it slowly becomes repeated by the copycats and it too falls into the commodity cliche trap. But that’s a positive too, in a way, because I helped give a voice to something many lawyers felt but could not express: there must be some alternative out there to “shark,” or “pit bull,” or “aggressive.” Not every client seeks a ravenous beast and not every lawyer wants to be one.
But how did we get here? Are lawyers just the most uncreative, uninteresting bunch of professionals on Earth?
Well, other than accountants?
Sludge Marketing and Commodification
Like most of our profession’s ails, it all comes back to sludge marketers. This time with a nice assist from our own “healthy” lawyer egos.
Traditional marketing, especially SEO and PPC forces lawyers into narrow boxes, defined only by “geo tags” like location and practice area, because that’s all the old algorithms could understand. This “white crayon” marketing, as I call it, led to computer science wannabes writing our web copy for us. In fact, most SEO and PPC types working with lawyers do not have degrees in marketing, in computer science, in English/Literature, or in law. It’s a field with no real credentials and no barrier to entry. Anyone can simply say they are an SEO expert.
Think about this: most of the legal marketing firms are not actually marketers.
It sounds nuts, right? These marketing agencies of today are not filled with the next David Ogilvy’s, they are not trained in persuasion or effective copy writing or, heaven forbid, storytelling. They are rarely even expert in computers.
Even if such firms did hire talented writers, they wouldn’t know what to do with them. Which I can safely say following my exceedingly brief time at one of the largest legal marketing companies in the country.
Legal “marketers” have always acted like speaking to Google comes above all else, but don’t you think a truly great marketer could find a way to both speak to Google and to humans?
But they lack the talent or the inclination, and they have no incentive to. The commodification of law firms and attorneys is their business philosophy. It would be far too much work in their volume business game to attempt to differentiate us. Far easier to place us into homogeneous silos by practice area and location.
And that’s how you get web copy like: “Jane Doe Family Law: Tarzana’s Divorce Lawyers” instead of my law firm’s old copy: “Dolphins, Not Sharks. Find Your Happily EVEN After.”
Which one expresses an Authority Philosophy™? Which one makes you feel anything. Anything?
At all?
Your practice area is not your Authority Philosophy™, it’s just your job title.
Your credentials are important but they do not excite your prospective clients nearly as much as your showing you have a pulse.
This is where the ego comes in. Lawyers are a bunch of grownups who still want to do well on the test. Like doctors, we were the overachieving type who aced those tests, didn’t we?
Out there in the real world, with real humans, your test is this: Prove you care. Prove you have not only the expertise, but the craft and the heart and the spirit necessary to move mountains for your clients. If you show that in your web copy, your phone will start ringing off the hook, and with the right prospective clients.
Authority Philosophy™ is a concept I created after much deep thought to attempt to offer an alternative to attorney commodification. Because attorney commodification is not only hurting law firm revenue, but also actively harming our standing and reputation as a profession. And I mean to other humans now, put AI aside.
A commoditized practice (and profession) loses all leverage. It leads to tire kickers, price-sensitive clients, low-quality leads, a lack of professional respect, and the draining feeling that you’ve become not a professional, but another cog in a wheel. This is the inevitable result of accepting the Faustian deal most attorneys make with their marketing agencies: you lose all professional agency. What makes the Mona Lisa unique is there’s only one. If every talented painter was working on the same Mona Lisa then it would cease to be magic and start to become commodity.
Authority Philosophy™ presents a strategic antidote to what ails our profession. It is not a marketing tactic; it is a fundamental shift from defining what you do to articulating why and how you do it. It provides a definitive framework for uncovering your unique professional philosophy and turning it into a defensible, profitable, and fulfilling marketing position.
And the good news? It’s easy to stand out because everyone else is still drawing with white crayons up on sludge marketing mountain. Differentiating your law firm is one of the easiest marketing tasks in the world, which makes it all the more insane that so few legal marketing companies actually care about their clients’ branding.
Suppose it’s easier to just push data once a month showing click-through rates.
Authority Philosophy is so important to me that it’s the subject of my next book, which I am already building live on our website, same we did for this one and same as we do for our clients with our Authority Chapter Plan.
Although the entire framework of Authority Philosophy™ is beyond the scope of this book centered on AIO for Attorneys, let’s define the three core questions and Authority Philosophy™ must answer.
Authority Philosophy Core Questions
- Why Do You Do This Work? (Your Purpose): This is your purpose, your “why” behind everything. It is important for you to remember, and necessary to convey to prospective clients and referral sources. AI, too, is very much interested in this answer. The more specific here, the better. You don’t have to invent anything because authenticity is a core element of authority, but you should reflect on and convey what drew you to be a lawyer and in your specific practice area in the first place. “I want to help people” is not enough unless you are very specific about the type of people you wish to help and why. Share your unique personal experiences that inform your why, the specific injustices you are fighting against. If your why is money, you can even spin that into something honest. “I became a personal injury lawyer because I knew I could get rich by betting on myself. Now, you can too.” I mean, that wouldn’t be the worst “why” I’ve heard, assuming it complies with the ethical and advertising rules of your jurisdiction. Now I’ll share my own: I started Books for Experts because I wanted to fight sludge marketers and humanize lawyers.
- Who Do You Serve Best? (Your Ideal Client): Move beyond demographics here to consider psychographics, the way you might in selecting a jury. What types of cases most excite you as a practitioner? What type of people do you work with, who energize rather than deflate you? Who is the narrowly tailored client for whom you are the only logical choice? Here’s mine: The ideal client for Books for Experts is any attorney or law firm owner who cares enough about AIO to still be reading this book in chapter seventeen. I say that somewhat tongue in cheek, but it’s true! My dream clients are those who are as passionate about AIO and differentiation and Authority Philosophy™ as I am. Those who see through the sludge marketing and are fed up and want to try something better and more human.
- How Do You Win? (Your Unique Process): Every great lawyer has a unique method. Do you share my “dolphin, not shark” approach? Do you bring your years of civil litigation and civil litigation techniques into your divorce cases as I used to? Maybe you have a specific, multi-stage litigation framework, a unique client communication system, a narrative that drives your entire practice from hiring to marketing. The more you can share about your unique experiences and techniques, the better. Let the copycats copy, just keep innovating and they will eventually fade away. For Books for Experts I need not describe my unique process here, you’re almost completed an entire book about it!
From Authority Philosophy to Increased Revenue: Weaponing the “Why”
Your unique Authority Philosophy™ helps you attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones. By integrating your Authority Philosophy™ into your website, your practice, and across all Three Pillars of AIO™ your firm becomes an unstoppable force. Creating shallow, bland, generic copy no longer impresses anybody, copy infused with your unique Authority Philosophy™ on the other hand is the path to market domination.
A tweet I came across by the author and entrepreneur Alex Hormozi the other day seems particularly relevant, although I am paraphrasing here: ‘yes, they’ll talk if you do something, but they’ll also talk if you do nothing, so you might as well do what you want.’
It reminded me of my advice in my recent Authority Philosophy Podcast about how attorneys need to care less about what our colleagues think. Our colleagues are great, but they do not pay our bills. The public does. Our clients do. Period.
Showing your personality and strong point of view not only attracts the right clients but has the underrated additional benefit of repelling all the people who are wrong for your practice. Let them all go find the right lawyer for them, provided they can through all the commodification.
A clear philosophy also provides your referral partners, including AI, with a powerful, memory story about you, making referrals more effective and more frequent. It is not just AI that carries around little dossier’s about us. Your unique Authority Philosophy™ must be shared with human referral sources, too.
Authority Philosophy: Next Steps
As you reach the end of this book, I certainly invite you to continue your education into legal branding and AIO in my follow up, Authority Philosophy: The Lawyer’s Framework for a Practice with Purpose
But first you should synthesize the following, even if you take away nothing else from this book: The antidote to commodification is not a new marketing trick. It is a deeper, more honest articulation of the unique value you already possess.
If you would like to reclaim your professional identity, build a practice with purpose, and increase referrals from humans and AI alike, then I hope you’ll reach out to us to book an AIO Audit and Authority Philosophy Session. We look forward to helping you create authority assets and building across all Three Pillars of AIO, so you can sluff off marketing sludge and move forward in the next, most important chapter of your professional life.