Episode 348 | Why Focus on Your Firm’s Reputation Is Your Best Strategy in the Face of an AI Takeover
It's 11 at night, and a woman is sitting at her kitchen table with her laptop open. Her mother died six weeks ago. There's a house, there's a brother with opinions, and she's been meaning to call a lawyer for about a month. Instead she types the whole mess into a chat window. The answer she gets back is decent. Organized. It doesn't ask her for a retainer or make her feel foolish. She closes the laptop and sleeps better than she has in weeks.
That woman was going to call you on Monday.
In this episode of the Wealthy Woman Lawyer® podcast, I get into what that actually means for your firm. I'll say up front that I'm not an AI expert, and I'm not going to hand you a tool list. Honestly, I think anyone claiming to be an AI expert for the legal industry right now knows only a little more than you do. What I do know is what makes a law firm valuable, and I've watched plenty of firms get hit by new technology before.
We talk about the physical limits on AI that almost nobody in the legal world is discussing. Electricity. Water. Price, and why the tool you're paying 20 dollars a month for isn't going to stay 20 dollars a month. There's also a public database of court cases involving citations that AI simply made up. It's past 1,800 now, and in more than 700 of them the person who filed the bad material was a lawyer.
Then I take on the answer most lawyers land on, which is to get better at prompting than their clients are. Prompting is a real skill. It isn't a strategy. Anything you can learn about operating a tool, your competitor can learn by Friday.
So here's the question I think matters instead. When legal information gets cheap and instant, what's left that's still hard to get? I have three answers, and all three of them already belong to you. I also give you the three things I'd build over the next 12 months, and the two things I would never, ever hand to a machine.
Every competitor you have is announcing their technology initiatives right now. There is enormous room to be the firm that announces its humanity.
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