Ever feel like you should be writing a blog, updating your website, or posting on social media… but the blinking cursor feels more like a wall than a window?
You’re not alone. Most of the attorneys I coach want to demonstrate thought leadership, build trust with potential clients, and establish a real professional presence online — but they get stuck before they start. Writing feels unnatural. Marketing feels like a foreign language. Time feels nonexistent.
I wrote about this last summer, and the fix I recommended still works: stop trying to write your content and start speaking it. But a year is a long time in this space. Some of what I told you has gotten easier, one piece of my advice I’d take back entirely, and the stakes have moved.
Let me walk you through it.
What Actually Changed This Year
Here’s the shift that matters most to your practice: a growing share of people with a legal problem now start with an AI assistant instead of a search box. They describe their situation in plain language, have a back-and-forth conversation about it, and get an answer that cites a small handful of sources — sometimes with a recommendation attached.
That changes the question you should be asking about your website. It used to be “do we rank?” Now it’s also “are we the source the AI reaches for?”
The uncomfortable part: the internet filled up with generic AI-written legal content this year, and it all reads the same. Vague, hedged, interchangeable. It doesn’t get cited and it doesn’t get clients, because there’s nothing in it that couldn’t have come from anywhere.
What does stand out is specific, experienced, plainly-stated answers to the questions real clients actually ask — the ones you’ve answered a hundred times in consultations. That’s not something you need a copywriter for. That’s something you already have in your head.
The Old Problem: Content Paralysis
Most of us struggle to create marketing content because we overthink it. We want the perfect message, the perfect tone, the perfect citation. We edit before we write. We stare at a blank screen for thirty minutes and walk away frustrated.
When we overthink to the point of paralysis, our best insights stay locked in our heads.
The best marketing for lawyers is simply sharing what we already know: common client questions, legal myths worth busting, tips for working professionals, updates in our practice areas. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to get it rolling.
The Fix: Say It First, Let AI Shape It
You don’t have to write your content. You can speak it — and let AI do the formatting.
Record your thoughts. Every major AI assistant now takes voice input directly, and your phone’s recorder still works fine. Speak for two or three minutes like you’re explaining something to a client across the kitchen table, or to a colleague in the hallway. Don’t perform. Don’t outline. Just talk.
Feed it to the AI with real context. This is where most attorneys leave value on the table. Don’t just paste a transcript and ask for a blog post. Tell it who you are, what you practice, who you’re writing for, and what you want back: “You’re helping a disability attorney turn a spoken explanation into a 700-word blog post for people considering an LTD claim. Keep my voice. Answer the question directly in the first paragraph. Give me a headline, subheads, and a call to action.” For social, ask for hashtags. For video, ask for a 60-second script.
Polish it yourself. Read it out loud. Cut anything that doesn’t sound like you. Then add the one thing the AI could never supply — a specific example, a number you know from experience, a client story with the identifiers stripped out.
That’s it. You’ve just created content without typing a word.
Set It Up Once, Use It All Year
This is the biggest workflow upgrade since I last wrote on this topic, and almost nobody is using it.
The major AI tools now let you save a persistent workspace — a project, a custom assistant, a saved instruction set, depending on which one you use. Load it once with your bio, your practice areas, your typical client, three samples of writing that sound like you, and your firm’s tone rules. Every future session starts from there.
The difference in output quality is not subtle. You stop re-explaining yourself every time, and the drafts stop reading like they were written for a general audience by a stranger. Twenty minutes of setup, and it pays you back every week for a year.
The Advice I’d Take Back
Last year I suggested running your draft through an AI detector and asking the AI to “humanize” the text. I’d skip both now.
The detectors aren’t reliable enough to act on. False positives remain a well-documented problem, and mixed human-and-AI writing — which is exactly what this workflow produces — is the hardest case for them to call correctly. A bad score tells you nothing useful, and a good score doesn’t make the content any better.
The “humanize” prompt is worse. What it usually does is sand off specifics and swap in casual filler. You end up with something that sounds looser and says less. The thing that makes writing sound human isn’t syntax. It’s a real detail only you would know.
Better test: read the draft out loud. If it doesn’t sound like you talking, fix it yourself.
Where the Ethics Rules Land
Marketing copy is still advertising under your bar’s rules, whether you typed it, dictated it, or an AI drafted it. A few things worth keeping in front of you:
You own the output. ABA Formal Opinion 512 (July 2024) applied the existing Model Rules to generative AI — competence, confidentiality, communication, candor, supervision, and reasonable fees. It didn’t create a new regime. It confirmed the old one applies. Verify every factual and legal claim in anything you publish under your name.
Advertising rules apply to AI-drafted content. Florida’s Opinion 24-1 is advisory, but it addressed lawyer advertising directly and has been treated as a model elsewhere: you’re responsible for AI-generated marketing content, and if you’re running an AI chatbot for intake, prospective clients need to know they’re not talking to a person. Check your own state’s guidance — the opinions vary more than you’d expect.
Watch what goes into the prompt. “No names” isn’t the whole standard. In a small practice area, an unusual fact pattern can identify a client all by itself. And if you’re dictating through a third-party transcription app, your words may pass through two vendors before they reach the AI. Talk about the type of case, not the case.
Practical Use Cases
- Website FAQs. Record yourself answering the questions clients actually ask — “how long does a disability claim take?” — and turn each one into its own page. These are the pages AI assistants pull from.
- Blog articles. Dictate your take on a new regulation or a trend you’re seeing in your caseload.
- Social posts. Talk through a recent case (de-identified) and let AI turn it into a client-facing tip.
- Email series. Brain-dump your advice on what clients confront in your cases; turn it into a five-part sequence.
- Video scripts. Speak the outline, then ask AI to tighten it to sixty seconds for LinkedIn or YouTube.
Why This Works for Lawyers
We’re natural speakers. We explain complex ideas in consultations, depositions, courtrooms, and networking events every week. Our problem was never the content — it was the container. AI converts spoken authority into written credibility without the friction.
It’s also a genuine time-saver. You can create weeks of content on the drive home from court. Instead of making a mental note to write something up later, pick up the phone and talk it through while the idea is fresh.
And the voice-first approach is what keeps your personality in the finished piece. Your tone. Your stories. Your way of thinking about a problem. Clients hire you, not a textbook — and increasingly, that’s what separates content that gets found from content that gets ignored.
Try This Today
- Think of one question a client asked you in the last week.
- Open your voice recorder and answer it out loud, like you’re talking over coffee.
- Hand the recording to your AI tool with context about who you are and who you’re writing for.
- Read the draft out loud. Add one specific detail only you could know.
- Publish it.
Final Thoughts
You became a lawyer to help people, not to become a full-time marketer. But visibility builds trust, and trust wins business — and the way people go looking for a lawyer is changing faster than most firms are keeping up with.
Your next client might be describing their problem to an AI right now. The firms that show up in that conversation are the ones publishing real answers in a real voice.
You’ve already got the voice. Quit typing. Start talking.
John Tucker is a Past-President of the St. Petersburg Bar Association. In addition to his role as CEO of Tucker Disability Law, P.A., he is an Adjunct Practice Advisor with Atticus Advantage, where he coaches attorneys on the business of law. You may reach John at tucker@tuckerdisability.com