Best Lawyers CEO: When AI Fails, Credible Legal Rankings Win

[00:00:00] Phil Greer: In a new AI world, it’s important that you have brand recognition that’s very strong and it has depth and breadth to it. So when someone starts that conversation with ChatGPT, they have a lot of references. They have a credible source that your company is the source of truth.

[00:00:22] Announcer: Welcome to Spill the Ink, a podcast by Reputation Ink, where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let’s get started with the show.

[00:00:39] Michelle Calcote King: Hi everyone. I’m Michelle Calcote King. I’m your host, and I’m the principal and president of Reputation Ink. We’re a public relations and thought leadership marketing agency for B2B professional services firms, including law firms. To learn more, go to RepInk.com. So if ChatGPT is telling clients which lawyer to hire, where does that leave legal rankings directories like Best Lawyers?

Today we’re talking about AI’s impact on law firm visibility, and how one of the industry’s top ranking programs is responding to AI’s role. So I’m welcoming to the show today Phil Greer, the CEO at Best Lawyers. In his 20 years at the company, he’s led international expansion strategies that ensure lawyers around the world receive the recognition they deserve through various Best Lawyers recognition offerings.

Phil also has a background as a software engineer, which he tapped into to create the company’s first content management system to take the company and its products from analog to digital and is using today as we step into the AI future. So thanks so much for joining me.

[00:01:49] Phil Greer: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

I’m excited to talk about AI. It’s a fun topic.

[00:01:53] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. And interesting. That’s very cool that you started out as a software engineer and now into the CEO role. Tell me a little bit about your background.

[00:02:02] Phil Greer: Yeah, so it wasn’t my aim. Originally I became an engineer.

And it was right after the dot-com boom and programmers didn’t have a lot of places to go. So I was actually working at Bridgestone Firestone as an engineer out on one of the plants. I found this job in the newspaper and I decided, OK, let me make this change to going back into a smaller company and Best Lawyers had been around since 1981.

A very analog company calling lawyers, getting mail-in ballots for trying to determine who are the Best Lawyers. And they produced a book every two years. Actually, one of them is right there.

[00:02:39] Michelle Calcote King: Wow. Yeah. Produced a book.

[00:02:41] Phil Greer: Produced a book. Yeah. That’s how you found lawyers, how you found quality lawyers through that research process.

I came on board to digitize it and I thought, oh, I’ll do this for a couple years and then I’ll finally create my own company, like all young software engineers want to do. And I just never left. The founders, Greg and Steve, were just very supportive of growth. And they wanted somebody who can help them take on this company in a different way.

And after I built all these systems and the core systems to digitize it was clear I can’t leave because now the company is a digital tech company and research. Yeah. And so I stayed along for the ride and eventually started running it in 2011. And when I helped sell the company with the last remaining founder, Steve Naifeh, in 2018, I became the CEO.

So it went from engineer to director of IT to COO and president, and then CEO. So yeah, it’s been a 20-year run.

[00:03:40] Michelle Calcote King: That’s great. Yeah. And who would’ve thought that combination of skills would work so well, so very cool. Well, let’s talk about AI. So from your perspective, how is AI changing how people find and evaluate lawyers?

[00:03:55] Phil Greer: So I think AI in general is just changing how everyone finds anything. I got a daughter in college right now, and she doesn’t use Google. She uses ChatGPT or Perplexity or if she does use Google, she’s looking at the Gemini results. So I think the concept about how we actually use the web has changed pretty stark in the last year. It was actually funny this morning I was on a walk with her and she called Safari a search engine. I was like, no, Safari’s a web browser. You use that to go to websites. She was like, no, you only use that if you’re going to Google. So,

[00:04:33] Michelle Calcote King: Oh wow.

[00:04:33] Phil Greer: So I think that the way people are finding anything is changing in regards to lawyers.

Tools like ChatGPT allow you to say, what’s the top IP litigator in New York? And you get some instant recommendations. That’s a start of a conversation, and that’s really the whole concept. The nuanced phrasing of, I need to find somebody. How do I do this? Let me learn more. When you’re using Google, or as my daughter calls it, Safari as a search engine, when you’re using that.

You are doing these long-form queries and you’re getting a ton of websites that you then have to figure out how to aggregate and what to do with it. And that’s why SEO practices were so important because you wanted to be at the top of that. Well, in the new AI world, it’s important that you have brand recognition that’s very strong and it has depth and breadth to it.

So when someone starts that conversation with ChatGPT, they have a lot of references. They have a credible source that your company is the source of truth, and that’s a big focus for Best Lawyers. We’ve been around for over 40 years, and we can be that source of truth for these LLMs, which is what they’re relying on, instead of just opinions and need to say, how do we get to the answer?

How do we help someone find something? How does it all relate? Yeah. So it’s all changing.

[00:05:52] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, really rapidly. And I’m sure you guys saw this as well about how when AI engines started really hitting the scene, how search and traffic impact was felt. And tell me about your experiences hearing that from law firms and what you saw happening.

[00:06:12] Phil Greer: So again, something not just even in the legal space last year, we noticed a dip, is starting happening in trap around Q4, and that’s when Google re Google launched their latest version of Gemini, which now when you do a Google search and you have the results, you have that little AI overview at the top, that’s their Gemini results.

And people were starting to look at that to get information, but not necessarily click on the sites further.

[00:06:34] Michelle Calcote King: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:34] Phil Greer: So when we saw that happening. We were like, oh, we have to make it. We have to, we have to really start to figure out how we’re feeding these LLM services. But everybody, every industry started having 15% to 50% nosedive in traffic.

[00:06:50] Announcer: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:50] Phil Greer: And we talked to a lot of SEO experts. We talked to a IO experts, out in the field and they were saying, yeah. This is, this is really hurting all industries. So luckily, us being proactive, when we started to see that dip, we said, OK, how do we feed this where the traffic’s going somewhere? It’s not like overnight people stop needing lawyers, stop needing doctors and dentists.

They just. Started getting the information from a different place. So spotting that risk and seeing what we were running into. Like we, alright, how do we structure our data? How do we get it fed? What is the appropriate way to do it? And honestly, it’s been a lot of trial and error because there’s not a roadmap for disruptive change.

I think that’s and disruption itself. They didn’t come out and say, OK, we are the, we are all the LLMs. Here’s how we’re going to disrupt all industries. Please follow this roadmap and you’ll be OK. So it’s been a little bit of a. Technology, wild west to figure out how this new source of data is getting fed.

And, I dunno, it’s pretty exciting, for us to help not just our company, but give that coverage and visibility to all these lawyers and law firms who are going, I don’t know what happened.

[00:08:00] Michelle Calcote King: Right. Yeah. Well, let’s talk about specifically legal directories and rankings. How do they fit into this new landscapes?

Are they becoming more important, less important? What, what’s your take there? 

[00:08:14] Phil Greer: It depends on the credibility and the brand. The strong, credible brand based, directories like ours is. So much more important. I was talking earlier about the source of truth. All of these LLMs are trying to solve what is the actual source of truth.

And we saw this early in last year, and even this year where everyone’s talking about hallucinations, AI just hallucinates. It’s a lack of good source of truth that causes a problem. The more sure it is about the value that they’re giving to the user when they’re trying to predict what the next response is, the the better the response is.

So LLMs have been doubling down on, source of truths that are credible, so. Rankings, like Best Lawyers, extremely important. We are backed by data. It’s peer review. We have, multiple, we’re in over 70 countries. We’re referenced by other strong brands that care about legal, the legal market network.

And it just, it helps give confidence. So a source of truth and confidence is important, for these LLMs. So Best Lawyers is actually seeing a really exciting. Next chapter with AI, as the searching tool.

[00:09:30] Michelle Calcote King: Well, it sounds like, p, as a PR person, my whole career we had long talked about third party validation.

Mm-hmm. So the power of third party validation in a human being’s, decision making process. But it sounds like what you’re describing is that third party validation means a lot for these LLMs.

[00:09:50] Phil Greer: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Because if the goal is to try to predict. What the next response is, and it’s based off of trained data of how we would logically figure out an answer.

You’re talking about how, oh, how do I know the value of a lawyer? Well, peer review, that the other experts in the profession, they know the work and their expertise that a lawyer can provide. You can say, OK, they have a, they have a good measuring stick on how, what makes a best lawyer in a given area?

So these LLMs are trying to assimilate in a similar way. They want to make sure that they’re making logical decisions, so peer review data, extremely important. They want to give that the right answer, the true answer.

[00:10:32] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. It’s like being able to survey everyone at once. Yeah. In, in an instant.

Yeah. Amazing. Which is what the legal industry was. Really the foundation of it was going to peers and asking them for referrals back when we actually saw each other in person a lot.

[00:10:49] Phil Greer: Yeah.

[00:10:50] Michelle Calcote King: So, let’s talk about how Best Lawyers is responding to this new environment. So how are you making your data?

Accessible to these AI systems? 

[00:11:00] Phil Greer: Yeah, so data governance has always been important. Even back when I started building the first systems, the idea that we were going to stop taking votes over the phone. I mean, you can still call and talk to our researchers and they’ll gladly let you vote. It’s just stored in a different way now.

So data governance was always important. Making sure that when law firms are giving us private data, whether it’s our client lists or if it’s of other peers, we want to be honest and comfortable with that. So that’s always been important. When we talk about data governance with AI, we have an AI policy on how data is supposed to be used and exposed.

When it comes to the ranking, the, that private data that’s being sent in, it’s still in a private cloud. It’s not exposed in any way. We don’t want to provide that to the LLMs. That’s not, that’s not information we want exposed. What we want to expose is things that we would. Already want, a potential client to see, information about lawyers, information about law firms, their practice, content they’re writing, trends that we’re, they’re experiencing in the space, the growth of certain sectors.

And with AI, we have the opportunity to package it up in very structured ways. So without getting too technical. In, in SEO world, you have schema markups. It’s kind of expanding that structured schema markup. So when LLMs are searching your site or scraping your site, they’re able to read it more quickly other than just trying to interpret the webpage.

So we’ve put a lot of effort into making sure our schema markups are exposing the right amount of data, the questions that we know people would ask when looking at our site that we’re asking in that schema markup so that LLMs can help answer the questions as well. So it’s — we still pride ourselves on keeping private data private.

Mm-hmm. And ex, and helping expose appropriate data to answer the question, how do I find the best lawyer for a given matter? 

[00:12:51] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. Yeah. That’s really, the privacy component is so key, especially in this industry. So, I know you told my producer about, something called Smithy AI. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So tell me, tell me what that is.

[00:13:05] Phil Greer: Yeah, so Smithy AI, it’s our proprietary agent.the naming is actually a nod to the founders of the company, Greg Smith and Steve. So Smithy, and what it does is it allows us to help with. Lawyers and firms marketing themselves in this new world. And I say this because the first thing we notice when we go back to like all the traffic’s changing, people aren’t coming to you.

People are using these LLMs. What you notice is there’s a lot of duplicative content out there. So you start with the lawyers. Profile, they’re probably copying their profile from their page to the next page, to the next page. It’s written by their PR team or some version of a template that they created in the past, and then they just continue to, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

So to make our data stand out, we said, OK, how can we help lawyers and law firms on our site write unique content and we can structure and expose it to the AI systems? So we decided to create Smithy AI and Smithy AI at the original goal was. Writing these bios with SEO in mind, with a IO in mind, that’s artificial intelligence types optimization and that we have not just information we know about the lawyers in the law firms because we know a lot about their trends, their practice, all the data we have.

So it’s trained on that data, but it’s also trained on, specialized prompts that feed into the SEO components we’re talking about and information we can gather from other sources, such as their website. So it was a cool way to say. This is complicated. Creating new bios from scratch is hard. We know who you are.

So we want to have Smith the AI, be able to write in the persona of the person and create what their potential customer would be, and to display that information on Best Lawyers.com in the profile section. So that was the original goal. And then we kept expanding and we kept expanding. So right now we’re trying to.

Work with where we’re not trying to, we’re currently extending Smithy AI to be part of the navigation process on Best Lawyers. So step one was helping a lawyer and lawyer or marketing director rewrite the content, whether it’s their bios or actual articles that we’re writing. And now the step two is we want to help clients use the system to find those nuances.

So you can go to chat GBT and learn about Best Lawyers. You can go to Google and search and learn about Best Lawyers. And the coming this year, we’re going to be able to change the way we search on our website using Smithy AI as well. So it’s a promotion process, helping you write new content, promote yourself both on our website, on other, on your website, and, .

Insights and trends and navigations of how do you figure out the nuance questions of, is this a best lawyer? So, pretty cool. It’s our differentiator is all of our data. We can train it on what we know about the industry and that we are going, we started go working on this last year, and so I think we’re ahead of the curve and we’re really excited about what we can continue to roll out this next year.

[00:15:58] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. That is exciting.so let’s explore kind of the flip side. Do you see a, do you worry that AI will influence how lawyers actually vote in their peer reviews and sort of undermine the rankings or influence it in a way that would not be effective? 

[00:16:16] Phil Greer: So when it comes to our rankings. The, you don’t get to choose who you vote on.

We decide who you vote on first off.and we base it off of some algorithms we wrote a long time ago that say, we know we think we know who, based off your practice. And we have heuristics based on what you’ve said in the fact in the past about, oh, I don’t know this person. I know this person.

We encourage lawyers to be honest about the, not just the scoring because it’s private information. We don’t share it. But also if you don’t know someone market us you don’t know because. There’s not a lot of value in you seeing a name and then going to research on the side and then come back and say, OK, let me give a score.

So you can’t game in the sense of choosing who you vote on and the, there’s not a high value in you going to do research then give us response. We, we don’t, we don’t need that. We want your true and honest opinion. And the third element. That keeps our process pretty unique is the lawyers are voting because they’re eligible for this list as well.

Mm-hmm. And so they want the reputation to be of high value. Mm-hmm. It doesn’t mean that if they see a name, they’re not going to look it up. And if in the, if you, if in the past years you Googled things and now you pull up ChatGPT, you might, but there’s not an, there’s not a value in them giving us data based off of something that exists.

What’s more valuable is actually knowing what they know in the field, and they want to give us that truthful information because it’s their list. The Best Lawyers are voting on who the Best Lawyers are going to be. Yeah. So they want that to be highly accurate and highly prestigious.

[00:17:49] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s great.

So, well, I’d love to kind of bottom line it for law firms who are, and we’re seeing it right now, where, we’re getting more and more questions from our clients about, Hey, I just had a client sell a new client tell me they found us in ChatGPT. But if lawyers are really starting to think about AI and law firm marketers, .

What’s the, what should they know in terms of the importance of legal rankings, in this whole ecosystem? 

[00:18:21] Phil Greer: Participate in the ones that have a high credibility in brand, that’s like good methodology that when you, when you read about it and you te you test it in the industry that’s been around and you go, this feels like a legitimate pro process.

It feels like a real product and it feels like the brand is strong. You should be investing in that. Your lawyer should be voting, your marketing team should be continuing to provide data because that data is then, it’s not only just creating the rankings. But the non-private data, the data that we’re, that you want exposed is going to be aggregated and put together and fed back to these LLMs from a third party accreditation,, credible service.

So you want to be participating, but you also want a level of scrutiny about what you’re participating with it, brand is important. And so I would say really focusing on which directories make sense. What are we trying to accomplish and how do we get our message across? 

[00:19:16] Michelle Calcote King: Music to my ears. When you say brand is important, I love it.

well, is there any final thought you’d love to live, leave our listeners with? 

[00:19:24] Phil Greer: Yeah, I exactly. That. Don’t, don’t stop investing in your brand. It’s extremely important. Your company will live and die by it. And honestly. It’s the most important thing that can exist for you in a digital space is people agreeing that you’re providing a quality product that people need.

So it’s, it’s number one. It should be part of your roadmap every year. What are we doing to grow, test and strengthen our brand? 

[00:19:52] Michelle Calcote King: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. We have been talking to Phil Greer of Best Lawyers. Appreciate your time today.

[00:19:59] Phil Greer: Yeah, I appreciate yours as well.[00:20:04] Announcer: Thanks for listening to Spill the Ink, a podcast by Reputation Ink. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.