AI readiness for law firms

An assistant is summarising your expertise. It can only summarise what it can read.

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The moment

Helen, marketing lead at a twelve-partner firm

A founder asks an assistant which firms in the city handle share-option disputes for early-stage companies and who the named specialist is.

What the agent needs: Practice areas, the specific specialism, the named partner, and how to make contact.

What actually happens: Practice areas are a hover menu, partner bios load in a modal, and the firm's genuinely strong commentary sits in a PDF newsletter archive. The assistant recommends two firms whose bios are plain pages.

Which dimensions decide it, and why

AIScan grades five dimensions. These are the ones that carry the outcome for this kind of business.

Content

Authority is the product. Partner bios, practice areas and published commentary must be crawlable text with Person and LegalService structured data — a modal bio is an unnamed lawyer.

Discoverability

Firms have deep site structures and shallow sitemaps. Insight articles and specialist pages are what an assistant cites; if they are not listed, the firm is represented by its homepage alone.

Bot access

Professional firms have a genuine reason to think about training use, and a genuine reason not to block assistant fetchers. Content Signals let you take a position on one without losing the other.

The checks that matter here

Fix guides: /docs/checks/content · /docs/checks/bot-access · /docs/platforms/wordpress

Most sites like this run on WordPress — read the WordPress playbook for where each fix lives.

Questions we get asked

Should a firm let AI systems train on its commentary?

That is a business decision, and the point of Content Signals (B1) is that you can answer it explicitly — permit search and assistant use, decline training — instead of leaving it to be assumed.

Our insights are PDFs. Is that a real problem?

Yes. PDFs are read inconsistently and quoted rarely. An HTML article with the PDF attached gets you both audiences.

Do partner bios need structured data?

Person markup with jobTitle and knowsAbout is what lets an assistant name an individual with confidence rather than saying 'the firm'.

Is a feed worth it for a firm?

If you publish commentary regularly, a feed is how it gets noticed without a full re-crawl. Check E5 grades it.

Could an assistant misstate our advice?

It is likelier to when the accurate version is unreadable. Clear, server-rendered text with dates and jurisdiction is the best correction mechanism available.

Where should we start?

Scan the firm's insight index and one partner bio. Those two URLs usually expose the whole pattern.

Scan your site and see where you actually stand

Free, no account, about twenty seconds. The report names every failing check by ID, shows the evidence we found, and gives the fix for your platform — plus a hand-off prompt you can paste straight into Claude Code or Cursor.

Run a free scan npx aiscan-cli yoursite.com

Prefer to read first? Browse every check we run or the guide library.

Next in Professional servicesAI readiness for accountants and bookkeepers

Also covers: law firm, solicitors, attorney, barrister chambers, legal practice, conveyancing, family law, employment law, immigration lawyer, personal injury, intellectual property, corporate counsel, notary, patent attorney, mediation service, compliance consultancy, professional partnership.