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 One. Find the whole AIO for Attorneys book here.
AIO for Law Firm Authority Building: How Leading Law Firms Will Dominate the Future With AIO and Authority
AIO is an emerging term, generally meaning “Artificial Intelligence Optimization.” Some also refer to it as GEO, or “Generative Engine Optimization,” or even AEO (“Answer Engine Optimization”). When the term is used by computer engineers, they may mean the system for building AI thought processes. By IT or software folks, AIO may mean “all in one” AI solutions, which is something else altogether.
As you can see, it can all get quiet confusing.
I have own definition of AIO, one that will no doubt someday be bastardized by SEO or other marketing agencies attempting to profit by bolting SEO tricks onto a change in venue.
But as the first all-inclusive AIO Marketing agency exclusively for lawyers, and perhaps the first AIO Marketing Agency period, we hope you will take judicial notice that our definition be viewed as seminal.
Here it is:
Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO) is the deliberate strategy of building, structuring, and distributing a brand’s authority so that both human decision-makers and AI systems recognize, trust, and refer them.
At its core, effective AIO must combine what we call the Three Pillars of AIO™
(1) Authority Assets: Prestige content such as books, CLE presentations, high-credibility articles, podcasts, video, website and blog copy, and thought-leadership projects that establish trust and demonstrate expertise.
(2) Technical Authority Signals: Structuring authority asset content so it is machine-readable, well-linked, metadata/schema rich, and contextually reinforced across reputable, authoritative sites – ensuring it is easily ingested, understood, and weighted highly by AI models.
(3) Real World Validation: PR mentions, events, seminars, media appearances, CLE presentations.
We call these the Three Pillars of AIO™, which collectively lead to AI trust, and therefore referrals.
Although there is slight overlap with standard SEO, it should be noted that SEO is merely a small component of the more robust, AIO whole. Which is an important distinction because search engines are fading, and AI will soon be the number one referral engine of professional services.
The trap for the unwary is, the above is our Authority Intelligence Optimization ™ definition of AIO, a term that has been co-opted by SEO agencies, “AIO” agencies, and others looking to cash in. Many people are offering artificial intelligence optimization and AIO, but only our firm incorporates our proprietary authority intelligence optimization ™ that combines the Three Pillars of AIO ™ with your distinct Authority Philosophy ™ into one holistic system. It is this comprehensive system, and our ability to deliver across all three pillars that produces outsized results.
What Does AIO Mean for Law Firms?
For law firm management and owners, AI means engineering both the substance (what you’ve built) and the scaffolding (how it’s presented, tagged, and distributed) so that when someone asks an AI assistant “Who’s the best attorney for [X], your name appears because:
- You’ve built a visible and credible body of work that human audiences respect, and
- AI systems can find, verify, and cross-reference that work with confidence.
Unlike SEO, which primarily chases short-term rankings in a single platform’s search results (Usually Google), AIO prepares your firm for the long-term, multi-platform referral economy where AI assistants, aggregators, and knowledge engines will be the primary gatekeeper of client recommendations.
To summarize, AIO builds lawyer reputations for humans and AI combining prestige, authority assets with technical optimization and real-world mentions so that AI algorithms and people alike will trust, find, and refer you first.
The Commodification of Lawyers
The key to any effective marketing is differentiation. But what if I told you lawyers have been collectively paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to not stand out, but to become commodified?
Would you agree that the only meaningful differentiation your marketing is currently highlighting is practice area and location?
Yikes.
Even billboards provide more differentiation than most digital legal marketing of today. Think about most PPC ads, what do they offer than bit-sized proof of your existence for tens or hundreds of dollars a click, some of which are no doubt from your competitors to run up costs.
“X Law Firm: Aggressive Divorce Law: Tarzana: Free Consults” can only be deemed “marketing” in the broadest definition.
Do not feel shame if you’ve been taken for a ride on sludge marketing mountain. I too have been suckered by SEO and PPC services that did not deliver the promised ROI. That seemed beneath my dignity and that of my firm. What I finally realized was that PPC and SEO types are usually not marketers in any classic sense of the word. They do not write with persuasion, they do not care much about branding. Surprisingly, very few hold any technical expertise either. Maybe some quick certificates. What they are really great at is sales, unfortunately only of their own services, not yours.
“The data, the data,” the Greek Chorus of sludge marketers now chimes in. “It’s not about the messaging, it’s about targeting the right people!”
No, I reject that construct. Messaging is always important in marketing any service. The right messaging draws in the right types of clients and repels the wrong ones. Targeting the right clients is the lion’s share of the marketing equation. Effective marketing needs to not only speak, but to the right people and with the right message.
When lawyers all sound the same in our marketing, it leads to the commodification of our industry. To the types of professional tire kickers who call every divorce lawyer in town not asking if you “are the best,” but “how much do you cost” until they get the answer they can live with. Totally clueless, and can we blame them given the dearth of effective legal marketing messages, that oftentimes it is the “cheap” lawyers who prove to be the most expensive.
Of Dolphins and Sharks
My divorce law firm always had a unique philosophy. My tagline was “Dolphins, not sharks.” The book I wrote for my divorce practice was called Happily Even After: The Guide to Divorce in New Jersey. It’s still out there today, a decade later, getting me referrals I can no longer take on, educating the public, and distinguishing me as not just another lawyer, but a lawyer with a very specific professional philosophy.
That book earned me additional multiples of six figures and changed how I was viewed by my colleagues. The money didn’t come from the royalties, but from referrals. Because I proved my expertise to prospective clients, referral sources, and the market at large, I was able to raise my rates and the quality of my clients increased and were more aligned with my professional philosophy.
When I realized Google AI mentioned my book as one of the primary reasons why I was a “good lawyer,” and noticed that AI was starting to refer, the opportunity of the Books for Experts agency was born. But more than anything, I wanted to use that opportunity as an avenue to humanize lawyers, fight sludge marketing, and create true authority assets with depth for this industry I love.
AIO presents the first real opportunity for successful differentiation for attorneys since the rules of advertising were relaxed in the ’80’s. I won’t sugarcoat it, effective AIO takes more work than paying a marketer to stuff keywords or drip out PPC slime, but if done right it will not only create books and other lasting authority assets for your business, but provide the type of differentiation all attorneys should be searching for personally, and demanding of their marketing companies.
Lawyers are Operating on the Old Model
The only trouble is, most everyone forgot what persuasive, human-based marketing actually looks like. Surely the sludge marketers most firms use are hoping nobody brings AIO to light because they are happy using AI to do their writing and to collect their checks from printing a couple of reports each month.
As I stated in my 2025 book The AI Content Paradox, the market will become so flooded with AI written sludge, that even AI will begin to detest it.
And punish it.
The types of authority assets that AI loves to consume and will refer, require depth. Books, articles, white papers, thought leadership, podcasts, these all provide the healthy, balanced diet our growing AI needs to grow up big and strong.
Instead, AI’s getting sick on a diet of recycled blog posts and scummy, keyword stuffed homepages.
Those who implement AIO today will be the new category leaders of tomorrow, and it won’t be particularly close.
Moving Digital Offices
Right now, almost every agency (and by extension every law firm they serve) are still circling search engines, because for so long that was the biggest meal in town. But search is fading, dying, about to turn all lawyers still circling it into carrion eating vultures.
The smart play is to set out on a different path now, before anyone else gets wise that AI is now the banquet hall that holds the feast. A feast with surprisingly few guests at the time of this writing, and near unlimited food for the foreseeable future.
AI is the new, unavoidable referral engine, but it’s going to remain underutilized because it is new, and because of SEO inertia, and because selling AI algorithms on your services takes far more nuance than selling search engine SEO or PPC. And I mention PPC here too because the truth is, if less people utilize search engines to solve their problems, then PPC will also lose market share to AI. Someday there will be AI ads and AI PPC type pay-to-play solutions, the beauty of right now is that everything is organic. It’s like the early days of Google search before it was inundated with ads.
The Targeted AIO Audience
The key to marketing is speaking directly to your targeted audience. That’s why the title of this book is AIO for Attorneys, not AIO for Plumbers. Seems simple enough a concept, right?
Google PPC and SEO were such great marketing opportunities for so long, past tense, because that was where people went to solve their problems. They would type in search query’s like: “Who is the best divorce lawyer in Tarzana?” or “Best personal injury lawyer near me,” and Google was able to act as the middleman, pairing problem with solution-oriented service provider, and thereby becoming one of the world’s richest companies along the way merely by scraping dollars and cents from each transaction.
It all worked out amazingly for Google, great for the SEO and PPC marketers, and well for the consumers of legal services. It even worked out ok for most lawyers; though many law firms lost money with no tangible results to show for it, some got rich. Mostly because of timing, not marketing brilliance, but first-mover advantage has always been a thing. For others, the name of the game was saturation, but did that path lead to authority law firms or to mills working half the month to cover marketing costs?
SEO was never an easy solution for larger law firms. It’s hard to target eighteen different practice areas on one homepage. Not even the best keyword stuffers in the world have that much stuffing in them.
AI fixes this problem, too, as the focus shifts to creating authority assets for each practice area, and more specifically for each attorney in the firm, essentially creating multiple silos within each firm to increase the odds of AI referral.
Today, people are increasingly turning to AI to solve their problems. And every problem that is addressed by AI, is one less problem that a search engine will solve. Said another way, SEO is the past, and AIO is the future.
So why is nobody taking about it?
From Cornucopia to Poison: The Death of Standard SEO Techniques
AI will grow to hate the usual keyword stuffing SEO techniques. As search engines become more sophisticated (by integrating AI into them), they too are starting to find keyword stuffing as repugnant as I do.
That means even if you believe search engines are still a viable venue to fish for clients, if you use the old SEO techniques you will be actively harming your website and losing credibility. (All while your web copy sounds like it was written by a deranged robot.)
Google has announced that keyword stuffing is considered a form of spam that can get you delisted. Buying links is also considered an SEO infraction, but link farms remain a thing even now.
That leaves exceedingly few tricks left for SEO marketers, especially because the Google map is already carved up. Why do you think your marketing vendors are pushing PPC and longtail keywords in the first place?
Thankfully, that’s the sludge marketers’ problem, not yours. Provided you move on, wean yourself off SEO, and begin to view it as one part of the AIO whole rather than something worthy of its own category.
AI (and AI infused search engines like Google) are now no more impressed by low-quality blogging than the humans who try to read it. “Seven Signs You’re Divorcing a Narcissist” articles are not only recycled and rotten, they are actively training AI to ignore or de-rank your website. And by extension, your firm.
Prestige Assets
What AIO really craves are authority assets. Think real books that show your knowledge, personality, and professional philosophy, not some expanded blog post topic like: “Ten Things to Do if Pulled Over In Tarzana.”
What you need in the AI referral economy are prestige class, weapon-grade authority assets that impress humans and AI alike, not disposable, generic sludge.
Stop Writing With AI, Start Writing For It
The big distinction here is that most marketers are writing with, AI, meaning they are using AI tools to create generic content. At Books for Experts, we are writing for AI. The core paradox noted in my book on the subject is that AI actually prefers unique, human written work. Otherwise, it will suffer model collapse if it trains too long on inferior, AI generated data.
AIO is not about using AI as an output, but as an input. In other words, using human creativity to obtain AI referrals. Everything we do at Books for Experts must satisfy both a human and an AI audience, or we won’t recommend it. There is no other agency working like this in AIO. Our AIO offerings combine some of the technical SEO components (at least the ones that are still best practices) but mostly integrate creation and real-world validation.
While others may offer Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO), what they probably mean is the broad category and quick technical fixes. But the last thing you need after having survived the SEO wars is some sludge marketing company bolting AI referral work onto existing SEO frameworks.
We do not offer SEO services and never have. We created this business specifically for the opportunities presented by AI referrals. Accordingly, we have created Authority Intelligence Optimization ™, our unique, singular, and proprietary system that ensures referrals from AI and humans alike.
Although there are certain limited shared links between SEO and AIO, in time even that will fade as AI stops being trained on the same systems that generated our current, fading version of the internet.
Books are the number one accessible form of authority assets favored by AI. AIO is all about positioning for AI referrals while impressing humans. It’s cutting-edge stuff, and the reason why I left the law after sixteen years to combine my love of writing, futurism, and the law into Books for Experts, an AIO agency offering strategy, ghostwriting, and publishing options exclusively for lawyers.
But there is another distinction that anyone looking to implement AIO (with us or on their own) should consider, and it is something no sludge marketer will ever consider. Philosophy and Authority.
Authority Philosophy™
Authority Philosophy is the name of my most recent book, and it is also the name of my podcast, so you can tell right away it’s very near and dear to my heart.
It’s the framework utilized by us to ensure differentiation. If you don’t know what you are, and where you want to go, then we can’t get you there. The same advice I used to give my divorce clients all those years.
I can help you discover your Authority Philosophy, I can help you refine it, but it’s your law firm and your career, so you ultimately need to figure out what you stand for. Precisely, and in a way that is easy to articulate. Then, we can teach AI to think of you, and only you, when referrals for that type of lawyer arrive in their queries.
The equation I invented for Authority is:
Authority = Expertise + Narrative + Authenticity
Incidentally, this is a combination that AI can never reproduce. AI can mimic expertise, which is dangerous for many lawyers because expertise is our favorite method of selling our services. Think of all the “147 years of combined experience” website copy you see in the wild.
AI can never recreate human authenticity. The key is to display your authenticity and expertise via narrative. Which must all align with your Authority Philosophy, the why and how of your business. Without a philosophy, one that infuses every aspect of your business, you will be treading water. You will be creating assets, but not authority assets.
Authority Philosophy is the unique, proprietary engine upon which our AIO services run. Again, nobody else is doing this.
In this book, I will not only teach you everything you need to know about the new and exciting world of AIO, but I will also advise how to forge a unique Authority Philosophy™.
Now is the time to ditch SEO for good and claim the future.
SEO v. AIO: Two Tracks
Throughout this book, consider what type of firm you’re building, and what you want it to be. You wouldn’t be reading this book on AIO if you weren’t curious about making certain changes in your firm. Change is hard, but not nearly as hard as being left behind. You can either choose to differentiate, or to be further commodified. You can continue building a testament to the past or you can start writing your future. These really are quite binary choices.
The great news is this: there is no reason to be afraid of AI if you’re proactive. AI is actually the greatest opportunity you’ll ever have in your career. But only if you reach out and grab the opportunity. As a lawyer, you know that our industry traditionally thrives during times of upheaval. Change is what fattens our operating accounts, not inertia. This is a large change, even a technological revolution, but lawyers have been operating since the days of Plato. We’ll find a way to carry on.
An AIO Agency For Lawyers, Created by a Lawyer
I practiced law for 16 years. I built a thriving firm, but I also got a front row seat to exactly how the marketing industry fails attorneys. I created Books for Experts to be the antidote.
My life’s work began when I realized most lawyers were being marketed like the widgets we learned about back in law school contract classes.
Now, with the rise of AI, that commoditization is happening at a scale I could have never imagined. The ‘sludge’ isn’t just human made anymore.
Sludge Marketers have tried to sell me the same story every solo lawyer hears, that just one more month of PPC ads, SEO blogs, or Google Local ads would finally bring in better clients. Sometimes, I was duped by their reassurances, as perhaps you have been.
But there was no authority built by sludge advertising tactics, and not enough revenue for the damage to my dignity.
Sludge doesn’t build trust, and it cannot build legacy.
Authority Does.
I made it my mission in life to stop the commodification of lawyers, fight marketing sludge, and create narrative excellence. One authority asset at a time.
Books for Experts exists for one reason: To help serious lawyers turn their expertise into legacy, and reclaim their voice in a noisy, soulless market.
That mission is built on a core belief. AIO is the engine, SEO is the used up oil from prior missions staining the wings. What was once the most useful tool many lawyers had is now spent up, and it would be dangerous to pretend otherwise.
As you read this book, if you think AIO is exactly what your firm needs, we hope you’ll reach out to us to schedule a consult.