A referral used to end with a phone call. Now it ends with a search. Someone gives a prospective client your name, and before they pick up the phone they type it into Google, or increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity who you are. Surveys of legal consumers keep finding the same pattern: most people research a lawyer after being referred, and a large share contact only the first one who makes a good impression. The referral gets you searched. The search decides whether you get the call.
So it is worth knowing exactly what that search shows. Not what you assume it shows, and not what your firm's marketing team says it shows, but what a stranger with no context sees on a phone at nine at night. This post goes through the five things most attorneys find when they look honestly, why each happens, and what fixes it.
Run the search properly first
Do this before reading further, because your own browser lies to you. Google personalizes results using your history, location and signed in account, so the search you usually run is flattered by your own clicks.
- Open a private window and sign out of everything, so nothing personalizes the results.
- Search your name on its own, then your name with your city, then your name with "attorney" or "lawyer", then your name with your practice area.
- Ask an AI assistant the question a prospect would ask: "Who is [your name], the [city] attorney?" Try ChatGPT and Perplexity at least, and Google's AI Mode if it is available to you.
- Write down everything on the first screen of each, including who owns each result.
Most attorneys who do this find some combination of the following.
1. The directories own the first screen
Avvo, Justia, Martindale Hubbell, FindLaw, Super Lawyers, Lawyers.com. For a large share of practicing attorneys these take most of the first page for their own name, ahead of anything the attorney controls. There is a simple reason. Directory pages are tidy: one person per page, a consistent template, structured data in the code stating that this is a lawyer with these admissions at this address. Google can read them with confidence. Your firm bio, by contrast, is usually written in prose, and a personal page, if you have one, is often missing the hidden layer altogether.
The directories are not the enemy. A prospect who sees your Avvo profile is still reading about you. The problem is what the directory page is for. Its job is to keep the visitor on the directory, so it shows them other lawyers beside your name, sometimes your direct competitors, sometimes as paid placements. The first page of your own name search becomes an advertising venue that somebody else sells.
2. Someone else has your name
If your name is at all common, there is another lawyer with it, possibly in your own state, and Google may not know you are two people. The symptoms are distinctive. The panel or the AI answer gives you the wrong law school, or a year of admission that is not yours. A review meant for the other attorney sits on your profile. An assistant describes a career that is half yours and half theirs.
This happens because search engines and AI systems keep track of people as entities, and they merge or split entities based on the evidence they can find. If nothing clearly states that you are this person, admitted here, at this firm, with these profiles, they guess. The guess is often a blend. We cover how that works for everyone in how AI search decides who you are; for attorneys the fix has a natural anchor, which we come to below.
3. Your old firm still has you
Lateral moves leave debris. The old firm's bio page often stays up for months, sometimes years, with the old title, the old headshot and the old phone number. The bar record has your current firm. LinkedIn has whatever you last remembered to update. Avvo has the address from two moves ago. Each source contradicts the others, and every contradiction is a reason for Google to stay unsure which version is current. A prospect who calls the number on the stale page reaches your former colleagues, who may be your competitors now.
We have written a full guide to changing law firms without losing your name search, because the fix is mostly about doing things in the right order on the day you move.
4. Your actual record is nowhere
This is the quiet one, and it costs the most. The matters you have handled, the reported decisions, the articles in the bar journal, the CLE panels, the years of practice: almost none of it appears in a name search, and when an AI assistant is asked about you it has little to say beyond your firm and a practice area. Experience is the factor legal clients most often say they choose on, and it is exactly what a name search fails to report.
It is not that the information does not exist. It exists in scattered places that are not connected to you in any way a machine can read: a decision on a court website that names you as counsel, a PDF of a CLE brochure, a bar journal article with your byline, a firm bio that mentions a matter in a paragraph of prose. Each is a source. None of them points at the others, and nothing states that they all describe the same person.
5. The AI answer is thin, or wrong
The assistants build their answers from the same sources Google does, and they are blunter about gaps. Where Google shows ten blue links and lets the prospect sort it out, an assistant writes a paragraph, and that paragraph is the prospect's first impression. If the sources disagree, the paragraph is vague. If they are thin, it pads with generic text about the practice area. If you share a name, it may blend you with the other lawyer. What does ChatGPT say about you explains how to test this properly, and why the answer changes from week to week.
Why all five have the same cause
Each of these looks like a separate problem, but they share one cause: there is no single, authoritative, machine readable source that says who you are. Directories fill the gap with their version. A namesake fills it with theirs. The old firm's page fills it with an old version. The scattered record is never assembled, so it never shows up. And the assistants, which need one coherent story to write a paragraph, cannot find one.
The fix is therefore not five fixes. It is one record, built properly, that everything else can point to.
The fix, in order
- A page about you on your own domain. Not the firm's domain, which belongs to the firm and goes with it when you leave. Your name, admissions, education, firm, practice areas, publications, speaking and the matters you can describe, stated plainly for people and marked up in the hidden layer for Google and the assistants.
- Anchor it to your bar record. The state bar listing is the most authoritative source about an attorney and the one every directory copies. Your page should state the same name form, admission dates and bar number where your state publishes it, and link to the listing. That is what separates you from the other lawyer with your name: two entities, two bar records, no confusion.
- Bring every profile into agreement. Firm bio, bar listing, Avvo, Martindale, Justia, Super Lawyers, LinkedIn. One name form, one headshot, one current address and phone, and each one linking back to your page. Agreement across sources is itself the signal Google looks for.
- Connect the record that already exists. Collect the decisions, articles, panels and press, and list them on your page with links to the originals. Every one becomes an outside source that agrees with your record.
- Clean up the old firm. Ask in writing for the old bio to be removed or redirected to your new one. Firms usually agree; it is in their interest too.
- Check the result in a private window and in the assistants, the day you launch and again at ninety days. Things move in weeks, not hours.
What to keep within the rules
Everything on your page is a communication about your services, so your state's version of ABA Model Rule 7.1 applies to it, including the hidden layer in the code. In practice that means facts rather than claims: admissions, not "leading"; certifications by name where you hold them, not "specialist" where you do not; matters on the public record described accurately, without implying results you cannot promise. Include any disclaimer your state requires. If your firm has marketing or ethics counsel, let them review it before it goes live. A page made of verifiable facts is easy to approve, which is one more reason to build it that way.
What this does not do
It does not remove a negative review or an old news story. Nothing honest can do that, and anyone who promises it should worry you. What a complete, consistent record does is give Google and the assistants something better to show first and to describe you by, so an old result loses prominence. It also does not guarantee a knowledge panel, though it is exactly the foundation a panel is built from; if a vendor offers to sell you one instead, read why an attorney should never buy a knowledge panel first.