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 Fifteen. Read the entire AIO for Attorneys book here.
AIO for law firms is an economic imperative, but you may not know where to start. After all this philosophy, strategy, even rules of implementation, you may be convinced of the benefits of AIO, and ready to proceed. But perhaps some tiny voice in the back of your head is still concerned. After all, SEO and the old tricks probably helped get you to where you are, and your law firm may still receive some benefits from them in the present. Thought leadership is hard, breaking inertia difficult, and there is much on the line.
There is a time and financial investment to pursue AIO at the highest levels, to truly implement Authority Intelligence Optimization™ (AIO) into a firm. Maybe some of the more generic forms of GEO and AIO seem better, or at least more familiar. You may be able to keep the same SEO team, and any homeowner knows it’s easier to convince ourselves of a new coat of paint than taking our house down to the studs and rebuilding the foundation back up. Even if what we’ll have after all that work is real rather than merely cosmetic change.
AIO for Law Firms
As a law firm owner, the stakes are even higher. You may need to get your partners on board. It’s hard enough to get everyone to agree on West Law versus Lexis Nexis or what practice management software the firm should keep using, let alone a systemic marketing change.
We are taught to be cautious from law school on, and you may be thinking though continuing on your current path is not ideal, at least it is the “devil you know.” Sure, your firm may just slowly fade, as SEO is slowly fading, but maybe you can live with that. “Let the early adopters get out in front of this thing while I grapple with it for a bit,” you may be thinking. “I can always dip my toe in later.”
But as we saw before with the initial rise of SEO, when it comes to digital land at stake, early movers do carry a large advantage.
For those who are interested but not entirely sold on the idea of overhauling their legal marketing budget and plans, then I again suggest a measured approach. Start working on producing authority assets, with or without assistance, have discussions about improving certain core technical authority signals, and improve real-world validation mentions. As you do so, perhaps redirect a % of your current marketing budget away from the decaying tools of yesterday and toward building real authority before humans and AI.
Given such feelings of trepidation, which are apparent whenever I first speak to attorneys about AIO v. SEO and PPC, I have included this chapter to provide an economic assessment of AIO’s return on investment (ROI). I want to address for law firms, whether solo or large, the big questions that our clients have when signing a retainer, namely: what will it cost, what’s the anticipated return, and how much of my time will it take?
You’ve been writing checks to SEO agencies with little more than a vague promise of ‘more clicks.’ It’s time for a more sophisticated financial discussion.
What this chapter is not is a sales pitch. It is a CFO-level analysis of your current marketing budget. We will deconstruct the hidden costs of your current approach and provide a clear, data-driven model for reallocating that budget into an investment that builds a permanent, appreciating model for your law firm.
The Sludge Tax: Calculating the True Cost of Your Current Legal Marketing
What if I told you SEO, PPC, shallow content, and accepting fake or low value awards all carry costs beyond what you spend on them. Namely, loss of reputation when the core asset every law firm and lawyer possesses is good will. But also opportunity cost, generally defined as “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.”
Before we can turn to the anticipated economic benefits of AIO for law firms, we must first understand cost benefit analysis for the old guard marketing measures.
Law Firm Economics: The Sunk Cost of Building on Rented Land
Think about the standard SEO/PPC model at your law firm. What is its most defining feature? I would suggest the most defining feature of most SEO or PPC is its monthly nature.
Every month, like the way the moon cycles the Earth, your law firm’s fortunes wax and wane with PPC and SEO. Every month, a new report analyzing marketing spend, every month another $3,000, $5,000, $10,000 or more is spent, apportioned between large tech companies and your legal marketing agency, for keywords that are mostly well defined after the first few months. This type of legal marketing is a lot like the small-scale monopolies created by power companies: there is some upfront cost to build up the infrastructure, then after that the work is minimal, you’re hooked in, and they can keep milking you for pure profit, month after month.
The moment you turn off your PPC ads, the power goes off, the same as if you stopped paying your electric bill.
When you build through SEO and PPC you are teaching yourself and your law firm dependence. That provides leverage to the sludge marketing types, or at least it did until a better alternative presented itself in AIO.
PPC does not create much if any visibility, at least not of the ongoing variety. Potential clients may remember your name or face from a billboard, but the “sponsored” ads you provide connected to certain keywords are just tiny, micro ads. The whole game of PPC is to try and find someone in their moment of pain and connect with them. That’s what makes the phone ring, sometimes, but it’s also what makes you a commodity because this type of marketing is so ephemeral. If you stop paying the piper, you go back to square one.
And that’s how they get their hooks in, and how you and your law firm stay stuck.
You may think SEO is better because at least you’re improving your law firm website, but that improvement is limited to your site alone rather than your complete “digital twin.” It also carries little weight today because the keyword stuffing and shallow content that is the hallmark of last generation’s SEO has not developed yet into anything of substance. That means most SEO tactics actively harm rather than help. As noted before, let’s take the few remaining positives from SEO, merge them into Pillar Two technical authority signals, and call it a day.
SEO has, and mostly by design, I believe, taught law firms the same dependency as PPC. It’s a simulated nuclear arms race that enriches third parties at the cost of law firms. Like PPC ads, most work is done upfront, and from there the shift is to maintenance mode. Like PPC, SEO does little to increase your invisibility, let alone your authority, and has limited long-term value.
AIO, on the other hand, focuses on creating authority assets of a lasting variety. By offering ala carte or limited subscription models, AIO can move in with the strength of a surgical mission. That leaves you out of quagmire territory with diminishing PPC and SEO. It also ensures you do not become a commodity, which is the true cost of sludge marketing. One that impacts not only your firm, but our standing as a profession.
The Economics of Commodification for Law Firms
As noted in my recent article for Law360 about how law firms can regain the public’s trust, the commodification of our profession is its core existential threat. We believe it’s new AI that will harm our standing while mostly ignoring the internal threats of sludge marketing. Most empires fall from within, and this is no different.
You believe you’re using a marketing agency to make your phone ring. What I think, and I base this on my sixteen years as a lawyer following every marketing trend for law firms, is that you are paying someone to turn your law firm into another commodity.
The economics here are simple: people pay a premium for differentiation. PPC ads train the public to see lawyers as interchangeable. They put in a keyword term like “Divorce near me” or “Personal Injury Law in Tarzana,” and they are peppered with 3, 5, 10 PPC ads, all with similar language. You know what they think? “Time to start calling these interchangeable law firms and see who offers the free consult, or takes the smallest retainer, or charges the lowest hourly rate.”
With PPC you are paying top dollar to literally train an army of tire kickers who devalue you, do not respect the profession, and now see you and lawyers in general as a commodity, no different from reaching out to the first plumber who will take their call during a pipe burst, only lacking even that urgency in most instances. The marketers profit, you struggle to keep your head above water, and the public thinks even less of the legal profession.
AIO on the other hand sells your unique Authority Philosophy and produces the assets and real-world mentions that bolster the profession, your practice, and every attorney who works for you. It is the antidote to commodification, and leads to higher hourly fees, better work from the right kinds of clients, and true authority, the kind that commands both respect and top dollar.
AIO is an investment with compounding benefits, while most other forms of marketing lead only to diminishing returns.
Law Firm Economics: SEO and PPC Diminishing Returns
Remember when PPC used to have a far higher ROI? For most law firms, the cost of PPC has only increased, while its efficacy has only decreased.
The hallmark of dependency in any form.
But now you’re afraid to quit, because you think you need the PPC just so your firm can feel normal, function at all.
If you drop PPC and SEO for good the phone may stop ringing, you fear. Who cares if the “prospective clients” on the other line seem to rarely reflect the individuals or businesses you actually want to represent in your practice.
And what is the true cost of misaligned or “bad” clients anyway? More on that later.
Because PPC runs on an auction model, and because the model is currently saturated, prices are higher than ever to bid on competitive terms. Meanwhile, less prospective clients than ever are using search engines and other PPC markets to find lawyers. Everyone is shifting to AI queries.
Said another way, less people are asking Google “who is the best divorce lawyer near me,” and more people are now asking that same question of Chat GPT or Grok.
The Economics of AI v. Search Engines: AI of Today v. AI of Tomorrow
Now here’s a paradox to keep in mind. Today, much of the results turned up by Chatbots come from reviewing Google or other search engines. Much of the “training” generative AI receives has been open sources, and they now mostly have limited roaming privileges across the internet.
What is occurring today, however, is a shift toward more free-thinking AI.
Think of it this way: AI of today is like a new associate. If you give it a task like “Find me the best divorce lawyer in Tarzana,” it’s going to run a search on Google, pull the top results, and then summarize and synthesize those results into a memo. (Or in this instance, a chat response to its user.)
That’s why the most bang for your buck is convincing Google AI overlay of your expertise. Because Google remains in the poll seat at the moment. It’s also why your SEO has not yet fallen totally off a cliff.
However, tomorrow’s AI will be more like the senior partner. It will not merely regurgitate what it learns from search engines, just as a senior partner would not merely regurgitate what is found on West Law. Analysis will be conducted.
Tomorrow’s AI – and I’m not talking way off in the future but starting now and improving over the next few years – will access a deep, internal knowledge graph built over a lifetime of experience.
This is the dossier I keep referring to throughout this book.
The dossier will be unique to each person and each business, and will allow AI to compare and contrast options based not only on the internet, but on knowing the authoritative texts on a subject (hence why you should build them as part of your authority assets work), it will independently understand a law firm’s and lawyer’s reputation (by looking to both authority assets and real-world validation), and it will connect the dots through the pillar two technical authority signals to better understand the relationship between lawyer, firm, published works, and public appearances.
Like a senior partner, AI will thus be able to make a judgment based on a holistic understanding of authority. This is not just a theory, but a technical and business necessity for AI companies. Otherwise, AI would simply become a novelty and search engines would roar back to life. AI is created to not be tricked by the same types of SEO manipulation that pollute search results. To become a trusted advisor, AI must – and it will because there’s too much money invested and too much at stake otherwise – learn to differentiate between key-word stuffed garbage and genuine authoritative displays of expertise.
The above is already happening because AI is moving from understanding strings of text to understanding and cataloguing entities, e.g. the dossier it is creating. Similar improvements are being made thanks to AI’s shift to multi-modality, as discussed in the prior chapter regarding AI now being trained on video, audio such as podcasts, and images, providing a far richer understanding of the world. Google’s own recent algorithmic changes to E-E-A-T principles, aimed at weighing: “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.”
The above demonstrates not only the need for AIO strategies today, but a comprehensive AIO system in place to capitalize on this sophisticated shift. We must build law firms optimized not for yesterday’s junior associate’s keyword search, but for the rich, rigorous, and multi-faced dossier of authority that a senior partner (i.e. AI) will demand.
The proper dossier also helps attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones. Another hidden cost of sludge marketing.
Law Firm Economics: The Wrong Clients
I truly believe that of all the things that can wrong at a law firm, there is no greater risk than the wrong clients. They bury us in work, often stiff us on the bills, and then act like malcontents about the whole thing. They are rude to our staff, leave negative Google reviews, and then file a false ethics complaint when we ask they pay what’s due.
A particular risk in consumer facing areas of the law like criminal and family law.
A marketing plan that seeks ‘clicks’ rather than connections will always be vulnerable to attracting the wrong clients. Some of them may not even be objectively bad clients, just wrong for your law firm.
Nonetheless, they present a drag on both law firm profitability and morale.
Your marketing “guru,” does not care; the only potentially difficult client they must worry about is you. So long as they are increasing clicks, or longtail keywords, or telephone calls, then they’ll say it’s “on you to have to convert.” Meanwhile, you’re wondering why your AR is reaching Everest-like heights and why your staff keeps leaving for greener pastures. Not to mention all the costs associated with retraining!
Another hidden cost of sludge marketing.
But let’s turn away now from the busted economics of yesterday’s marketing methods, and toward the sunny skies of the Economics of AIO for law firms.
Economics of AIO for Law Firms: Overview
I think we’ve covered what was spent on SEO and PPC enough, let’s turn now to what should be invested into AIO.
AIO, at least as offered by Books for Experts, is not about a monthly retainer to monitor and maintain. It’s about creating a holistic system that allows for strategic capital expenditures. Our extensive and proprietary AIO audit, for example, outlines a law firm’s (or an individual attorney’s) strength and weakness against the Three Pillars of AIO. Meanwhile, our Authority Philosophy session ensures that your entire law firm is aligned with your vision. Just as you cannot help a client until they know their end goals, we too must map out the correct path forward. Your Authority Philosophy is the foundation upon which the Three Pillars must be built.
From there, we create the opportunities for AI referrals via authority assets, technical authority signals, and real-world validation. Each is an ala carte service, not an ongoing retainer. The only exception is the one year, Authority Chapter Plan, which offers a book built in a month, one chapter at a time and all less than the cost of a standard, generic SEO monthly bill. (No contract and can be paused at any time.) At the end of a year, you have a published book all your own along with 12 individual chapters that can be used for blog posts, articles, keynote speeches, or podcasts.
Note, I am mentioning our specific products here because not everyone who claims to deliver AIO will be offering our core, global product line. Most agencies that will be offering AIO will be attempting to bolt AI frameworks onto outdated SEO models. They will demand the same monthly retainers and perform the same or similar work to what they’ve always done, only now with a “new and improved” sticker and a fresh (or not so fresh) coat of paint.
What we offer, Authority Intelligence Optimization™ is our proprietary, wholesale system for nurturing AI referrals. In other words, AIO for law firms are not all created alike. For many agencies, AIO for law firms means more of the same. Which is an important consideration when determining the economics.
AIO for Law Firms: Marketing Budget
AIO for Law Firms opens up opportunities for teamwork and sweat equity. We can be as involved or not as you wish. Whether that means we focus on strategy and you on implementation, or handling just about everything, we are ready with white gloves service to bring your law firm into the new era of AI referrals.
Let’s consider now the hypothetical law firm of Jane Doe Family Law. They have three partners, four associates, and five other staff members. They limit their practice to family law and have been using a generic SEO/PPC firm for years. The work they take on is “divorce law,” with very little differentiation. Some blog posts and web copy have mentioned “high net worth” divorce, but that’s true of most family law firms in the area. The truth is, Jane Doe Family Law is practicing “Door Law: Family Law Edition,” taking on cases as they come. If it’s family law, and the prospective client has the retainer money, Jane Doe Family Law will take them on.
*Budget and Anticipated Results: Generic SEO
Jane Doe Family Law has a marketing budget of $10,000.00 per month. $7,500 to their SEO/PPC firm for ongoing SEO “work,” and PPC ads, plus a discretionary $2,500 per month to be used to seed bar sponsorships, their annual scholarship, awards and directory listings, and the like.
The firm encourages reviews from clients and each of the attorneys is involved in the local bar. The managing partner occasionally presents CLEs and one of the associates is a Trustee of the local county bar association.
Very standard stuff, here.
Here’s what they receive each year in return for the $90,000 they pay their marketing vendor: their website is maintained, they receive two shallow blog posts each month, basic SEO is followed and implemented as necessary, their Google PPC ads run frequently and receive 15 independent leads each month, six of which become clients, three of those the right type of clients and three wrong.
The $30,000 in discretionary marketing provides some visibility in their local market and produces perhaps 1 client per year, but they are usually a good fit.
The rest of the work comes from satisfied former clients, natural Google Business Page reviews, their attorneys’ relationships with referral sources, and momentum from being in business as long as they have.
In other words, $120,000 in marketing produces 84 clients, 48 who are a good fit and 36 who are not.
If each client is worth $10,000 for this law firm, on average, then that means $840,000 in anticipated revenue, 90% of which is collected, or $756,000.
$636,000 left after paying out the marketing fees, an ROI of 5.3.
Which is enough to keep the lights on and then some. But remember, this is the current, best-case scenario. If things don’t change, here is the likely outcome in five years when search engines fully fade:
6 Leads per month, 2 clients, 1 a good fit and 1 not.
Discretionary $30,000 per year spending will continue to bring in one good client per month.
Marketing will still cost the same, or more, but will now produce: 36 clients, 24 of whom are decent, 12 who are not.
At $10,000 per client, that means anticipated revenue will slide to $360,000, or $324,000 anticipated to be collected. A drop of more than 50%.
The net after paying for marketing is now $204,000, or an ROI of 1.7.
And suddenly, you’re looking at your associates the way a hungry Lion might an antelope. There’s no other option; they must be sacrificed!
This is the type of disruption we’re staring at. If you don’t believe this is where things are going, ask yourself: do you currently have a higher ROI on your PPC and SEO than you did ten years ago? five? One? Remember, even search engine algorithms are starting to ignore or even penalize shallow content (Recall Google’s “E-E-A-T”)
In all of the above scenarios, the results cut out the moment you stop paying, except for any residuals in referrals from former clients who were brought in via PPC. Since most of the clients were the wrong ones, that value may not be as far-reaching as you anticipate.
Let’s turn now to anticipated numbers if you go all in on Authority Intelligence Optimization™.
*Budget and Anticipated Results: Authority Intelligence Optimization™
Let’s say they instead intend to spend $7,500 per month on AIO. This is where their Law Firm AIO math is at present:
Jane Doe Family law first chooses to spend a few thousand dollars at the start for an AIO audit and Authority Philosophy Session to get everyone at the firm on the same page.
Next, they decide to proceed with the Authority Chapter Plan, entry into an anthology, and continued consulting to use sweat equity to start up a firm podcast, more outreach via articles, and rewritten profiles and web copy.
They no longer have the $2,500 discretionary expense because it’s all rolled into the pillar three real-world validation work.
At the end of the year, they are surprised to learn they have only paid $50,000 in marketing, not $120,000, a real savings of $70,000.
Thanks to human and AI referrals, they receive 18 leads and 12 cases per month, 10 who are a good fit and only 2 of whom are not.
That equals $1,440,000 in anticipated revenue, with 95% collected because of increased client fit, and thus a total of $1,368,000 in revenue, or $1,318,000 net profit for an ROI of 26x.
In future years, they should be able to increase their rates as their natural authority increases. Note, they also had to work harder at marketing. Otherwise, the marketing spend would creep back toward the $100,000 mark. If you want to deduct some money here from lost billables, then go ahead, but remember they will also be gaining time back from not having to deal with has many difficult clients.
Regardless, they are now in a growth marketing platform – AI referrals – while growing their authority, all while spending less. In the future they can expect a similar or stronger ROI, as authority takes time to compound.
And if 26x ROI seems too good to be true, remember those are the types of results SEO and PPC used to command for those who were lucky enough to get in on the ground floor. That’s what made many of our legal “whales” and big names of today, not stronger legal acumen. Just being in the right place at the right time and having the foresight to act upon it.
The SEO iceberg lies ahead of everyone; the only question is will you pile into the nearest lifeboat headed straight toward a tropical paradise or will you wait around to go down with the ship?
But would this type of marketing scale to larger firms? You wonder.
AIO for Law Firms: The Economics of AIO at Larger Firms
Note that in mid-sized or larger firms, it will be a bit tougher to implement such strategies. Paradoxically, the larger the firm the more granular the process may need to be. Effectively turning each lawyer, or at least practice area into an authority silo.
This is a bit easier with traditional marketing, because PPC can target different keywords for different practice areas. But the largest firms in the country are also some of the most authoritative when it comes to publishing, speaking engagements, and media, and that is by no accident. The more you move beyond consumer-facing practice areas, the more a professorial quality helps attract clients.
Provided there is firm-wide buy-in, which starts with leadership at the top, there is no reason AIO cannot bolster regional or larger law firms. It will just take a bit more collaboration.
From Expense Line to Balance Sheet
today, most law firms consider marketing an expense line. With AIO, it becomes a capital expenditure, or even an investment in a better tomorrow. The book that bears your name will be yours forever. There is no better way to protect your staff, yourself, and even your firm than by signing up the right clients and turning away the wrong ones. Even better if you’re never matched with the wrong clients to begin with.
There is nothing more impressive to human referral sources than credibility, reputation, and authority. Increasingly, AI referral sources will share that sentiment.
The economics of AIO are the financial tailwinds of tomorrow. And fundamentally superior because you are moving your marketing spend from ongoing operational expense lines to the asset column of your firm’s balance sheet.
Stop renting attention, and start owning your authority. It’s not just better marketing, it’s a smarter, more profitable business strategy.
And it’s the only one that will work both now and in the future.
*The following is a hypothetical model based on common industry figures. While your firm’s results will vary, this framework illustrates the fundamental economic advantages of the AIO model.