When clients ask
AI about the law.

The best data so far comes from the UK. The legal thinktank Justice surveyed 3,287 people between December 2025 and January 2026. Of the 1,428 who'd had a legal dispute in the past two years, 16.3% had used an AI chatbot, rising to 26% of 18 to 24 year olds. They used it to understand their rights, translate jargon, draft letters and rehearse phone calls. Chatbot users drew on 3.7 sources on average, against 1.9 for everyone else.

No Australian survey of the same kind was found. The closest local signal is from LawConnect, a legal AI platform, which reported more than 120,000 queries in its first year, led by family law, criminal law and property. That's one company's own figures, not a survey, so read it as a hint about which problems people take to AI, not how many people do it.

Either way, AI is one stop among several. Someone in Penrith asks ChatGPT what happens after a drink driving charge, texts a friend, then searches for a lawyer. The firm whose explanation matched what they'd already read starts the first call with an advantage.

Queensland's courts publish guidance for people using AI without a lawyer. It warns that chatbot answers may be inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, and may be based on overseas law that doesn't apply in Australia, and that chatbots can make up cases and legislation.

Courts are seeing the results. UNSW researchers counted 84 reported Australian cases involving generative AI since late 2022, 66 of them involving people representing themselves. A made-up case can sink a valid claim and lead to a costs order.

For a law firm, that's the opening. Time limits, injury schemes, wills and tenancy rules differ between NSW, Queensland and the rest, and a lot of free legal content online is American. A page that says which state it covers and when it was last checked gives an AI tool something correct to draw on, and gives the reader a reason to trust it.

Ask the questions your clients ask, in their words, in each tool. Do it logged out or in a private window, so your own chats and searches play less part, and write down who gets named and which pages are linked. Google's AI Mode has been available in Australia since October 2025, so test it alongside ChatGPT and Gemini.

Google is plain about the basics. Its guide says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and needs no special schema or llms.txt file. OpenAI says sites that block its crawler, OAI-SearchBot, won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Gemini sometimes shows sources within and below its answers, and those are the pages you want to be.

Beyond that, it comes down to clear, consistent facts:

• One page per common problem, in the client's words, with the state it covers and the date it was checked. SEO for law firms covers how to write them.
• A page for each lawyer: admission year, the matters they run, the courts or tribunals they appear in, languages spoken and any accreditation.
• The firm's name, address and phone written exactly the same on the website, each Google profile and every directory.
• How you charge, in plain words. Cost is one of the first follow-up questions people ask.
• No near-identical pages for every suburb. Google says making many pages mainly to rank or manipulate AI answers breaks its scaled content abuse policy.

Lawyers appear on public registers, which makes them a source anyone can verify. The Law Society of NSW register can be searched by suburb, accredited specialisation and language. Victoria's register of lawyers covers area of practice, languages and accredited specialisation, and South Australia lists everyone holding an SA practising certificate, updated daily.

So check your site against them. If a profile says 'accredited specialist in family law', the register should agree, because under rule 36 only accredited specialists can say so. If the register lists a language and the lawyer's page doesn't, add it. 'A family lawyer near Cabramatta who speaks Vietnamese' is exactly the kind of specific, checkable answer an AI tool can give, if the facts are there.

Google's quality rater guidelines treat legal topics as 'Your Money or Your Life', where inaccurate content can do real harm, so raters look harder at who wrote a page and whether it can be trusted. That matters more once AI tools quote you. A wrong time limit repeated in an AI answer is still your wrong time limit.

Keep explanations general and say so: 'This page explains how property is usually divided in NSW. It isn't advice about your situation.' It costs nothing, it's honest, and it leads naturally to the next step, which is a conversation that is about their situation.