The reputation, client, and talent gaps that matter more — and what to do about each one.
By now, most legal marketing teams have heard of GEO. Generative engine optimization (the practice of making your firm’s content more visible in AI-generated answers) has officially entered the legal marketing mainstream.
It’s showing up at ABA Techshow sessions, in JD Supra primers, and on the agendas of marketing committees that hadn’t heard the term six months ago.
Good. That conversation is worth having.
But GEO is a tactical conversation. And while your firm is focused on tactics, three deeper AI visibility gaps are compounding in your firm’s competitive reputation, your client relationships, and inside your own department.
Thomson Reuters put a number on part of this in their 2026 Great AI Disconnect report: more than half of law firms are using or evaluating generative AI, forty-one percent of attorneys use it regularly, and most clients have no idea. That finding captures one gap. The other two don’t show up in any report yet.
Here is what is not in the room.
The Reputation Gap
AI is already describing your firm to prospective clients. Nobody at your firm has reviewed what it’s saying.
When a general counsel or legal operations professional asks an AI model to evaluate firms in a practice area, they don’t get a list of links. They get a characterization. The AI describes your firm: its reach, its strengths, its positioning relative to competitors. It draws from your website, your directory listings, your Chambers and Legal 500 submissions, and whatever other sources it has determined are authoritative.
By Aries has run cross-model audits encompassing multiple firms, and the findings are consistent. One firm we worked with was described as a regional leader across every AI model tested. Their direct competitors in the same practice areas were being characterized as nationally recognized, with language emphasizing global reach and landmark matters. The competitive framing gap was significant, and it traced directly to language decisions made years ago in Chambers submissions and website copy.
The word “regional” appeared nowhere in the firm’s own materials as a self-description. But the absence of language explicitly claiming national presence meant AI filled the gap with the most conservative interpretation available. Their competitors had been more deliberate. The firms that submitted language saying “nationally recognized” and “global litigation practice” were getting exactly that language reflected back in AI-generated answers.
Small decisions, made in submissions nobody thought twice about, are now producing reputational outputs the marketing team has never reviewed.
What makes this more urgent than GEO: the discovery process is not staying in search. AI agents are moving from answering questions to active vetting, comparing firms against criteria before a human reviewer ever engages. This is already standard practice in procurement and private equity, where platforms autonomously evaluate submissions before a human sees them. Legal operations departments face the same volume pressures.
According to the ACC/Everlaw 2026 survey, sixty-four percent of in-house legal teams are already expanding their own AI capabilities and reducing outside counsel reliance. When thirty proposals arrive at once, the efficiency argument for AI-assisted screening is identical to what already happens in recruiting, where AI filters candidates before human eyes touch a single resume. The firms whose positioning is stated rather than implied will make the shortlist. The ones still writing for a pre-AI audience may not.
What to do now: Run a cross-model audit. Not just one search in ChatGPT, but consistent queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Compare how AI characterizes your firm against how it characterizes your direct competitors. Then go back to your Chambers submissions, your practice group descriptions, and your attorney bios. If your national presence, cross-border capability, or market-defining work is assumed rather than stated, that assumption is working against you.
The Client Gap
Your clients are waiting for you to say something. The silence is doing more damage than you think.
The Thomson Reuters finding deserves a direct translation for CMOs: your existing clients are reading the same industry coverage you are. They are attending conferences and asking peers how their firms are handling AI. What they are not receiving, in most cases, is a proactive answer from your firm about what AI is doing on their matters, what governance exists, and what it means for the value they receive.
This silence is a choice, even if it doesn’t feel like one. By Aries has had this conversation with CMOs directly, and the hesitation almost always comes back to the same place: the billable hour.
If AI helped accomplish in four hours what previously took forty, and a client knows that, the partner billing on that matter is exposed. So firms don’t invest in AI workflows that support client work and the efficiency gain stays invisible to clients.
The silence designed to protect the billable hour is preventing firms from making the one argument that would help them justify their rates as the market shifts: that AI is making their work better and faster, and that the client is the direct beneficiary.
The firms already operating on alternative fee arrangements don’t have this problem. They can say directly that AI is improving quality and efficiency and explain what that means for how they price their work. That is a differentiating message. Most firms cannot make it yet, but the window to build toward it is not staying open indefinitely.
Clients who are already asking how their firm uses AI are not going to stop asking. And “we can’t really speak to that” is not a reassuring answer. It is the opposite.
What to do now: If your firm isn’t ready for a full AI transparency strategy, start smaller. Work with your key client relationship partners on a consistent, honest answer to the question “how is the firm using AI?” Confirm that answer exists. Confirm everyone who might be asked has it. The firms building a client-facing AI narrative now, even a simple and honest one, will be significantly better positioned when the billing model conversation moves from management committees to client meetings.
The Talent Gap
Your most capable AI people are invisible inside your own department. Recruiters already know who they are.
There are people on your team right now who have built something impressive with AI on their own time, without asking permission, because they understood before the firm did that this was not optional learning. Workflows that eliminate research bottlenecks, frameworks that cut preparation time in half, tools that have changed how they do their jobs. Most of them haven’t told anyone.
The incentive to stay quiet is rational. Demonstrating you can do the work faster doesn’t always lead to recognition. Sometimes it leads to more work and no additional compensation.
Meanwhile, AI fluency is the most in-demand competency being sourced in legal marketing right now. The person building workflows in their spare time has a target on their back from every competitor firm that has figured out where the market is heading. You may not know they have it. They do.
The question worth asking yourself honestly: if that person left tomorrow, what would your department actually lose? If the answer is more than you’d like to admit, what you have is not an institutional capability. It is a personal dependency built on someone else’s unpaid learning.
What to do now: Surface what your team has actually built, not what’s been officially deployed, but what individuals are using right now to do their jobs better. Ask directly and without judgment. If someone on your team can be a real-world example of what’s possible with AI, that is a skill with real market value, and it should be recognized as one. Create explicit incentives for knowledge-sharing.
The message your team needs to hear is unambiguous: sharing what you know makes you more valuable here, not a target for more work.
The Firms That Close These Gaps First Will Be Difficult to Catch
GEO is worth your attention, but it is a single tactic inside a much larger visibility problem: one that runs through your firm’s competitive reputation, your client relationships, and the talent that is building your department’s AI future whether you know it or not.
The firms that will pull ahead are not necessarily the ones with the largest AI budgets. They are the ones that recognize AI visibility as a leadership challenge rather than a marketing tactics problem, and start having the three conversations that are not in the room yet.
Those conversations are available right now. The question is who starts them first.
By Aries works with law firm marketing leaders to close all three of these gaps: auditing how firms appear across AI systems, building client-facing AI communications strategies, and surfacing the internal AI capability that marketing departments don’t know they have. If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, that’s the right place to start.
