A lawyer at the intersection of legal marketing and legal AI

I trained as a lawyer and chose marketing over the courtroom, and I built Konan & Spade on the unglamorous, measurable work of growth: law-firm websites, search engine optimisation, and the steady business of turning searches into leads.

For years it worked, and it worked well. We earned firms a place at the top of the results, the visitors arrived, the leads followed, and the figures were the kind you are happy to put in front of a managing partner. We knew the directories too, Chambers, The Legal 500, IFLR1000, because we handled submissions as part of the service. Today the agency works with 100+ law firms across 15+ jurisdictions, from Dubai outward.

In most industries, you win AI visibility on your own website. In law, you win it across an ecosystem of authoritative sources you mostly do not control.

Then the rules changed. The latest Google update began placing AI-generated answers at the very top of the page, not only for background questions but for the searches a person makes when they are ready to instruct a firm. Visits dropped. Enquiries dropped. Not gently.

So we did what you do when the floor moves. We investigated, across hundreds of practice-area searches, and a pattern emerged. Where a firm was ranked in the directories for a practice area and place, it appeared in the AI's answer. Where it was not, it was absent, however good the website. And for the niches the directories do not cover, the AI fell back on ordinary search results, where classic SEO still won. An AI decides whom to name in one of two ways, and which way depends on whether an authoritative ranking already exists for the question being asked.

That discovery became a framework I now hand to firms in full: the Law Firm GEO Authority Map, a model of every source that decides whether an AI engine recommends a firm, scored not by how prestigious it looks but by whether the AI can actually read it. It is the spine of my book, GEO for Law Firms.