On this episode of One More Thing, Rae Ritter and Julie Owsik Ackerman delve into the captivating world of A.I. and its impact on attorney bios. They explore how A.I. can enhance the creation of lawyer profiles. Discover potential risks, best practices, and more for crafting engaging attorney bios!

  

Rae:

Hey, podcast listeners, welcome to this week’s episode of LISI’s All the Things podcast. Today we’re discussing attorney bios best practices. As we all know, the law firm website bios are an extremely important part of your site because they’re the second most highly viewed pages after the homepage. And we see this in the analytics time and again. In addition to the best practices, we’re digging into how A.I., artificial intelligence can be used to support attorney bio creation and the potential risks of artificial intelligence. We’re excited to share our thoughts with you listeners. Hi everyone. I’m Rae Ritter, director of client service and marketing at LISI, and today I’m joined by my brilliant colleague, Julie Ackerman, LISI’s communication manager and legal content writer.

Julie:

Hi, nice to be here with you.

Rae:

Hey, Julie. This is our monthly podcast, All the Things, and this month, Julie and I are talking about something that every attorney and legal marketing professional need to think about, attorney bios.

Julie:

Yeah. I know that this is something, first of all, of course, every attorney has to have a bio on their website. And I imagine everybody listening already has one, but it needs to be updated and there’s often room for improvement, let’s say. Yeah. So, our goal here is to give you some ideas to hopefully make it a little easier, a little less painful. We’re going to get into talking about how you might be able to use A.I. or ChatGPT to help you a little bit.

Rae:

Right. I mean, that’s something that we really weren’t talking about a year ago, or even six months ago. I think that was not quite on our radar for the everyday user, but now it is.

Julie:

Yeah, that’s right.

Rae:

So Julie, let’s start with the basics. What are some of the things that need to be in every attorney’s bio? And I think our focus now is really website bios, but of course, these could be in RFPs and have other uses as well.

Julie:

So, before I get to the meat and the potatoes, it’s really, this seems obvious, but I see a lot of bios that make it a little bit hard to figure out how to contact somebody. Make it very easy with your phone number, your email, however, you want to be reached, make that very obvious. So, that’s one thing. And then, of course, you want to describe what your current practice is, whatever expertise you have. Well, you don’t want to use the word expert. And then any relevant past experience, education, any matters you’ve worked on that either represent what you do or have been certainly any landmark cases that you’ve worked on you would want to mention. So, you want to give a picture of your legal practice at present and past.

Rae:

It’s funny that you said about being able to contact you because I’ve spoken with firms before who say, “Oh, we want people to stop calling our lawyers. We want them to call the main number or email,” and it just seems kind of obvious. Then take the phone numbers off the bios if that’s not the best way to contact the lawyers. If you prefer email, keep the email there. If you prefer the main receptionist or whomever put that number on the bio.

Julie:

Right. Yeah. But whatever it is, don’t make it hard for people to figure it out.

Rae:

Absolutely. So, with so many attorneys and each state or country, how can any attorney make their bio stand out from everyone else?

Julie:

Yeah, this is the challenge. And we’re not just competing with other people’s bios or other attorneys, you’re competing with all the noise on all the devices to get somebody’s attention. So, I think the number one thing with any kind of writing you do is to think about your audience, and then specific to the attorneys, with your bio, you want to include at least one or two personal details.

Rae:

So, when you say audience, can you be a little more specific? What do you mean by that?

Julie:

In this case, when you’re thinking about… First, think about who is reading your bio? Who do you want to be reading your bio? So, who is it that you’re trying to reach, attract? Is it current clients? Is it prospects? It’s often opposing counsel, judges. These are sort of typical answers I hear to that question. So, think about in your specific case, who do you want to be coming to the website and learning about you? And why are they coming? So, if it’s a prospective client, what kind of problems are you able to help people with? And so yeah, keeping your audience in mind, put the most important thing right up front, “Here is how I help people in my practice.”

And then from there get into more detail. But frankly, nobody cares about if you were on moot court in law school. I mean, there are a lot of things, and I’m a lawyer, I get it, there are things that we’re proud of as lawyers, but you really, really want to stay focused on what the person coming to the website is looking for and give them that as succinctly as you can.

Rae:

And I would add to that, I know our focus here is on the contents in terms of words, but I would add in the design, make sure that that intro, problem-solving, is upfront at the top because we know that people don’t even read the whole bio, that they may just be skimming. And to put that most important piece at the top and make sure that that’s part of the design will help achieve the goal of getting that message over to your audience. So, you also mentioned adding personal details. What kind of personal details you think would make sense in a website, in a bio for a law firm or for a lawyer?

Julie:

Yeah. This one’s a little tricky. I mean, maybe in every business, but particularly with lawyers, I do get a lot of resistance to this idea. And it is important to be professional and present oneself as a professional. And at the same time, you want to show your human side. We say this a lot here at LISI, “People do business with people.” And so if in my bio you see that I love rooting for the Philadelphia sports teams and traveling in Europe, that’s just a little something somebody can latch onto. And you might think, “Well, I’m a Giants fan,” but just a way to connect as a human outside of the business purpose that you’re there for, I think is really important. And a way to… It’s a missed opportunity, I think if you’re not doing that.

Rae:

Okay. So, taking this kind of the other direction, humans and people with personalities, let’s move the other end of the spectrum and talk about artificial intelligence for a little bit. So, is artificial intelligence or A.I. and all these tools that are out there, is it reasonable to try to use them to help lawyers and legal marketers with their bios? And what does that look like?

Julie:

Yeah. So, good question. A.I. is in its infancy. It’s new to, if not all of us, the vast majority of us. So, I just myself have just started to play around with how it can help in the work that I do in writing with lawyers and for lawyers. So, what it will not do, I’ll just say right up front is it will not… You can’t say, “Hey, ChatGPT, write my bio for me,” and expect to have a finished good product. But ways that it has really helped me is in brainstorming is one way, and getting over that hump of looking at a blank screen, having something you need to write and just being stuck. Those are two ways that I have personally found A.I. to be helpful.

Rae:

So, can you go into more detail about how you would use A.I. to brainstorm?

Julie:

Yeah. Yeah. So in this case, it’s a little different depending on what it is you’re trying to produce. So for your bio, it’s kind of cool because you can ask questions, it’s sort of like a conversation. I opened up ChatGPT, and I typed in what elements should every trust and estate lawyer include in their bio. And it gave me a whole list of things. And this one I think I actually liked, even more, was what do people want to know before hiring a trust and estates lawyer? Because that one can help put you in the shoes of the person who’s coming to you for help. It’s sometimes hard to shift our mindset from being the lawyer to being the person who’s looking for illegal services.

So yeah, I thought both of those were, again, it’s not perfect, it’s not as if I got a list and then I was going to use every single thing that it gave me, but it was just a way to get the wheels turning. And lawyers know that the question you ask is very important as to what answer you’re going to get, so you definitely want to play around and ask some different questions to see what results you get.

Rae:

I’ve been doing a lot of research on A.I., and I think that working with lawyers who are just traditionally risk averse, many are at least, I think we have to talk about some of the risks of A.I. I think, like you’re saying, if you’re just brainstorming and using it as a tool, you still go through the process of evaluating each piece of information, each line that comes out and deciding, “Is that something I want to apply or not?” But let’s kind of lists off a few of the risks, including there’s these things called hallucinations where the output can be literally just made-up content or made-up cases or pointing to data that is actually not even real.

And another major one is privacy, because you’re putting something in, where does your question and where does that go and how can that be used? So, attorneys need to be really mindful of the way that they’re using it. If you put in your whole resume that has your email and your phone number, does it then take that and then use that as part of its own information that it’s learning from? That would be pretty scary.

Julie:

Yeah. No, I absolutely agree. Lawyers are, if not risk averse, we’re definitely risk-sensitive. And we’re always looking for. And for me, I had tried, and I’ll keep playing with it, but I’ve tried to use it to help with research, thinking like, “Oh, maybe this will save me time on research.” But actually what I found is that it took me as much, if not more time because whatever answers I got, I then would have to check them. It was almost like double research, asking it to research and then researching everything it gave me. So yeah, those points are very well taken. And I would just add that A.I. does not understand our ethical obligations as a lawyer. So just before, as you would check anything that you produce for your ethical obligations, that was certainly even more so true with something that you’re using this tool for.

Rae:

Oh, you were in preparation for this podcast, you mentioned that you had a story that you put in a question and you were surprised by the output.

Julie:

I was, yeah. As I’ve been saying, I’ve been playing around with this, and so I thought, “Well, okay, let’s see if what would happen if I asked ChatGPT to just write a bio.” So, I copy and pasted information from a bio and just said, “Write an attorney bio for me using this information.” And it was really interesting. It was helpful because it took what was bullet points and list of job experience and put it into paragraph format. I was like, “Okay, that’s something.” But the language was like, it looked almost like it was a high school student trying to sound like a lawyer.

So, the words mostly made sense, but there was just a lot of extraneous legal or legal-sounding language thrown in. And it just did not seem like a human, certainly not a human attorney, but even didn’t seem and sound like a human wrote it. Again, helpful as far as like if you’re really stuck and just having trouble even just getting those first words out, I think it’s a great tool just to get over that initial hump. But that is step one. Definitely not… Just step one.

Rae:

It’s not taking your job away yet.

Julie:

Yeah, not yet.

Rae:

And it’s not a human. So you said before, adding some personal elements gives your bio a human factor. This is literally the opposite of that.

Julie:

Yeah, absolutely.

Rae:

So, I thought it would be interesting to ask A.I., “What risks are associated with using A.I. for writing a lawyer bio?” You tell me what your faults are. So, the results were mostly things that we had already talked about and thought of, but there were two things that I hadn’t investigated further. And I hadn’t thought of this, so I thought it was interesting like you said, if you’re brainstorming or looking to fill in information. So, one of the answers was keyword stuffing. So, if you tell your query, “Write this with search engine optimization in mind,” the output could overuse keywords or even employ outdated S.E.O. practices, and then that could negatively impact your search engine rankings. And then of course it would impact your user experience if you are a human person reading a page of content that’s repeating keywords in a robotic way, you’re definitely not going to think that you have a… feel that that person has a human element.

And the other one, and I thought this is interesting too, because like you said, A.I. is still pretty new to us. I mean, think about how old the internet has been or how long the internet has been widely used, and what the internet looked like in the ’90s compared to today. So, we’re like in the ’90s of the internet with A.I. So, the other thing that it mentioned was reputation risk, that if your peers or clients or whoever find out that you used A.I. to write something, could they perceive that you’re lazy or unprofessional or could it damage your reputation in some way? And I just thought that was interesting because we don’t know how people are perceiving A.I. right now. I would say people’s feelings about it are not uniform. So, that was an interesting one that A.I. offered as an answer.

Julie:

But no, I’ve actually seen a couple stories about lawyers submitting briefs and not checking them. And apparently, there are tools that it’s very easy to see if something is A.I. generated. And so they were caught submitting legal briefs that were A.I. generated, and that has caused a lot of problems for them. And I think just some more caution in the industry overall about how to use it, how it’s okay to use it. I’m sure we’ll be getting a lot of lawsuits and ethical rules and there’s going to be all kinds of things coming, I think, to give us more guidance. But for now, at this stage, I just proceed with caution I guess.

Rae:

So, as we proceed with caution, can you give us some examples of some queries that you found helpful using A.I. to support website bio writing or brainstorming?

Julie:

Yeah. I found the resume exercise interesting, might be worth trying, especially with your own resume because you know exactly how accurate it is or not. So, that might be just something interesting to try. And if you’re worried about personal information, of course, you can leave out your phone number and email and whatnot. But also, one of the queries I tried was how can A.I. make a lawyer bio more interesting? And it gave me a list of ideas to think of. So, I think getting creative and just playing around with it, it may not take you where you want to go exactly, but at least it’s food for thought. It really can give you some good food for thought. So, I guess that’s my main thing is get in there, play around, and be creative.

Rae:

Yeah. Cool. So, what would you say… We’ve talked about the key aspects that belong in a website bio. What do you think our key takeaways are for our audience about attorney website bios?

Julie:

Key takeaways? I think, again, if you work at a law firm, the bios, there will be a style guide for the format they should be in and the voice. Very likely there will be guidelines like that. So, within that though, to give the most important information about you upfront, so what is your practice, how do you help people? And to keep that audience in mind with everything that you include, why would this matter to somebody coming to learn about me? And again, that little personal touch I think really helps too.

Rae:

Well, Julie, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. And thank you, listeners, please look out for our upcoming blog post about attorney bio best practices, and that’s coming out in our August newsletter. And listeners, please make sure to subscribe to the podcast and follow our almost every week live streams on LinkedIn, which are also replayed as podcast episodes.

 

You have been listening to All the Things, the podcast from Legal Internet Solutions Incorporated, where we bring you all the things. Whether it’s three things we learned hearing from a legal marketing insider and ask me anything session or that one more thing we’ve been dying to tell you all month long but couldn’t, that’s All the Things. Our next episode will be out in a week wherever you get your podcasts. And you can join us for the live events every Friday at 12:30 Eastern on our LinkedIn channel for our livestream where we bring you All the Things live.