Your marketing is talking about the wrong person

It’s almost midnight, and a woman who was served with custody papers that afternoon is sitting on the edge of her bed with her phone.

She isn’t searching the way you picture it. She’s not typing “custody lawyer” into Google and scanning ten blue links. She’s talking to an AI assistant in full sentences, the way people actually do now: “do I need a lawyer if my ex filed for full custody,” then “what happens to my kids while the case is going on,” then finally, “custody lawyer near me who will actually fight for me.”

She’s terrified and she’s shopping at the same time, and the question underneath every one of those searches isn’t really a legal question. It’s this: is my kid going to be okay, and will this person fight for us?

Now look at what she finds.

The first firm’s page opens with the founder’s headshot, his law school, and the year the firm was established. The second leads with “over 20 years of combined experience” and a row of award badges. The third promises “aggressive representation” in a serifed font laid over a stock photo of a gavel. Every one of them is talking. None of them are talking to her.

She bounces off all three. Then she lands on a fourth, and the first thing she reads is a paragraph that could have been written about her exact night: the papers on the counter, the fear, the not-knowing what happens to the kids while it all plays out, and what this firm actually does in the first two weeks to protect a parent’s position. She reads it twice. That’s the firm she calls in the morning.

That’s the whole disease, and I see it constantly. So often it seems like some lawyers really wanted to be doctors, with their diplomas hung on the wall behind the desk. There’s a romance to it: the credentials, the pedigree, the wall of framed proof that you’re smart. But you’re not in business to be admired; you’re here to help people and make money, and the person on the other end of that midnight search does not care where you went to law school if you’re getting the job done.

Here’s a fast way to know whether your firm has this problem: if prospects regularly ask where you went to law school, your marketing and sales process is doing a rough job. They’re asking because nothing you put in front of them answered the question they actually had, so they fell back on the only proxy for “is this lawyer any good” that they know how to check.

The fix has a name, but it isn’t mine: it’s the client story, and I first learned it from Ned and Lee at Rosen Institute. The idea is simple to say and hard to do: make the client the hero of the story, not you. You’re the guide who gets them through it.

I’ve been saying this for years: two things have shifted recently, and both raise the cost of getting it wrong.

The first is who reads your website before your prospect ever does. When that woman asked an AI assistant for a custody lawyer, something read every one of those firm pages and decided which ones to surface and summarize back to her. Answer engines don’t quote “20 years of experience.” They pull the specific, situation-matching language that actually answers the question a person asked. Credential copy is invisible twice over now: the human skims past it, and the AI never surfaces it in the first place.

The second is that AI is now writing a lot of the bad copy. A large share of firm websites in 2026 were drafted, or at least first-passed, by an AI tool. Left to its defaults, AI writes exactly the wrong thing: founding year, credentials, “dedicated and aggressive representation,” generic everything. Unless you steer it hard toward the client’s story, the machine will happily mass-produce the number-one mistake for you, faster than you ever could by hand.