How Law Firms Can Leverage AI for Competitive Intelligence and Better Decision Making

Manual review is inadequate to handle the scope and volume of available data, while the volatility of AI Overview citations makes uncovering content gaps increasingly important.

In this environment, every advantage counts. You cannot expect your intake department to become overwhelmed by leads when your web content addresses questions that all your competitors already answer. The need to offer helpful, accurate and unique information is greater than ever.

AI-powered competitive analysis tools can identify both topics your competitors have missed and questions your website content is not adequately answering. And this can be done while tools proactively monitor off-site signals like reviews, search queries, AI citations, industry news, and social media to predict which content will need to hit your pipeline.

How Can AI Help With Competitor Analysis?

The move from tracking competitor actions to analyzing movement and trends in real time helps law firms make better strategic decisions. AI tools, like those built into the CLM Sequoia platform, can process competitor data at scale and make actionable recommendations for content pillars, FAQs, videos and other needs. Human editors can then review recommendations and determine what to produce and where to distribute it. This makes moving from reactive to proactive easy for law firms of any size.

Areas where competitive intelligence will benefit law firms include:

Identifying gaps in competitor content. You can review your competitors’ websites to see which topics they address and which questions they answer. But this is just part of the picture. A more interesting metric is, what are your competitors missing that you can cover?

Uncovering pain points. Natural language processing tools can perform sentiment analysis by looking at customer reviews and teasing out the emotions behind them. At scale, this means law firms can see what is making clients happy and what is frustrating them about their competitors and the legal process in general. Firms can use this as a jumping-off point for answering these concerns.

Identifying gaps in your own content. As Gemini refines its processes for synthesizing answers, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that a page ranking in the top ten organic Google results will also be cited by AI Overviews. Search result placement tends to be relatively static, while AI citations fluctuate constantly. This creates both hazards and opportunities. The opportunities lie in understanding whether chatbots cite you, what they say about you, and the content gaps you can close to increase your chances of being cited and portrayed to your advantage.

Traditional SWOT analysis. Traditional SWOT analysis is a method for identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It can be applied to a project, business plan or personal idea, or it can be used to size up competitors within an industry.

Since AI bots look at a firm’s website, as well as third-party data like reviews, social media, press mentions and YouTube when generating answers and choosing citations, the breadth of available data can help produce an insightful SWOT analysis of your main competitors. This can give you insights into how to proactively counter other law firms’ efforts.

What Do Law Firms Need From an AI Competitive Intelligence Tool?

Using AI for competitive intelligence only works when performed with forethought and purpose. To avoid pitfalls, look for the following:

A relevant, accurate data set. While AI can collect enormous amounts of data, it can also be prone to “hallucinating” data to provide the information the human making the query wants to see. Bad data leads to bad decisions.

Additionally, accuracy is of particular concern to attorneys, whose content falls under the “Your Money or Your Life” standards. Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is the expression Google uses to describe content that can impact a person’s health, financial stability, or safety. Google’s quality raters place greater weight on this type of content because inaccuracies can cause measurable harm.

Security protocols. Some security risks are unique to AI systems, and firms must ensure any vendor is vigilant about security. Privacy protection is also a key consideration for law firms.

Analysis and reporting. You will need data organized and presented in a way that is shareable so your team can make good decisions based on findings. More advanced models will be able to offer suggestions for next steps.

How Can CLM Help?

CLM helps law firms own the conversation by monitoring competitor activity and fluctuations in AI overviews, and by providing constructive recommendations to their law firm partners.

CLM’s AI marketing platform for lawyers, Sequoia, uses its vast library of indexed law firm websites to run routine content gap analyses and even sends real-time alerts that turn into action items when a competitor’s published content approaches the same coverage level as ours.

Sequoia’s Brand Intelligence layer monitors what chatbots are saying about your firm and builds a profile to tell you not just whether your firm is being cited but also what searchers are being told. If there is a disparity between your firm’s brand and what chatbots are saying, we can push content to the appropriate sources to fix inaccurate narratives.

Changes in the world of AI lead generation will continue to evolve rapidly. And Sequoia will keep growing and adding features that keep our law firm partners ahead of their competition. If your marketing company isn’t keeping up, we should talk. Set up a free appointment here.