Ask a marketing agency in 2026 whether they use AI to write your content and you will usually get one of two answers. Some say no, flatly, which is almost never true and tells you they think the honest answer would lose the account. Others say yes, enthusiastically, and treat the question as settled. Neither answer is useful, because the question was wrong. Every content shop on earth has a language model open in a tab. What separates a vendor you can safely publish from one who will eventually embarrass your firm is not whether a machine produced the first draft. It is what happened to that draft between generation and publication, and whether anyone with a bar license read it.
This piece gives you the questions to ask, the answers that should worry you, and the specific tells in delivered work that reveal no lawyer touched it. You do not need to understand how the models work. You need to audit a process.
Drafting Is Not Publishing
A first draft is raw material. Your associates use forms, prior briefs, and practice guides to avoid starting from a blank page, and nobody thinks that is a scandal, because the associate reads what comes out, checks it against current law, and signs their name to the result. AI drafting sits in exactly that category, a productivity tool that produces material a competent human then verifies and owns.
The failure mode is not the drafting. It is publishing without the verification step. A model generates fluent, confident, structurally correct legal prose containing a statutory citation that does not exist, a filing deadline that changed two sessions ago, or a description of comparative fault that is accurate in Texas and wrong in your state. Every one of those errors looks exactly like correct text. That is the entire problem. Bad legal writing announces itself. Confident wrong legal writing does not.
The stakes are also asymmetric. On a plumbing company’s blog, a factual error costs almost nothing. On a law firm’s website, published under the firm’s name, in a practice area you hold yourself out as knowing, an incorrect statement of law is a claim about your competence made to people deciding whether to hire you. Some of them are opposing counsel. Some are referral sources. A few are prospects who will call about the deadline you got wrong.
The Regulatory Floor Nobody Waives
Your website is advertising. That is not a metaphor, it is the legal classification, and it means everything on it is subject to the same truthfulness and substantiation standards that apply to any other commercial claim. The Federal Trade Commission’s advertising guidance for businesses sets the baseline plainly. Claims must be truthful, not misleading, and supported by evidence before they are made. There is no exception for content a vendor produced, no exception for a page you never read, and certainly no exception for text a model generated at three in the morning.
Layer your state bar rules on top of that floor and the exposure sharpens. Comparative superlatives, implied guarantees of outcome, results claims presented without context, and unearned specialist language all live in the same paragraphs that AI drafts love to produce, because that is the register of persuasive marketing copy the models were trained on. A model asked to write a compelling page about your trial practice will reach for exactly the phrasing your state’s advertising rules restrict. We walk through the specific language traps in ABA compliant law firm marketing rules, and the short version is that responsibility runs to the lawyer whose name is on the site, not to the vendor who typed it.
Ten Questions To Put To Your Vendor In Writing
Ask these by email, not on a call, and keep the reply. A vendor who answers cleanly in writing is telling you something real. A vendor who wants to discuss it verbally is also telling you something.
- Do you use AI in drafting our content, and at what stage. Research only, outlines, full first drafts, or final copy. Any answer is workable. Refusing to answer is not.
- Who is the named human editor on each piece, and what are their qualifications. You want a name and a background, not a department.
- Is there attorney review before publication, and is it ours or yours. If theirs, ask who, licensed in what jurisdiction. If ours, ask how the review is routed and tracked, because unreviewed drafts sitting in an inbox are functionally unreviewed.
- How is every statutory or case citation verified, and against what source. The acceptable answer names a primary source, the state legislature site, the court’s own opinion database, or a paid research platform. The unacceptable answer is a general web search.
- What is your documented process when the model produces a citation you cannot verify. The right answer is that the claim comes out of the draft. Look for a process, not an intention.
- Do you refresh content when the underlying law changes, and how do you find out. Statutes of limitation get amended. Damage caps get challenged. Someone has to be watching.
- Will you show us the review record for the last five pieces you published for us. Track changes, editorial comments, a review log, anything. A clean document with no edit history means either a flawless process or no process.
- What is the average turnaround per article, and how many people touch it. Four long articles delivered within twenty four hours of a request, by a two person team, did not receive substantive legal review. The arithmetic does not work.
- Who owns the content and who carries liability if a published statement is wrong. Read the actual contract clause. Most vendor agreements put this squarely on you.
- Can you name the last thing you refused to publish for a client and why. This is the question that separates operators from order takers. A shop doing real review has killed drafts. If they have never pushed back on anything, they are not reading closely.
Notice that none of these ask a vendor to stop using AI. Asking for that gets you a lie and changes nothing. These ask what the humans do, which is the part you are actually buying.
The Tells In Delivered Work
Vendor answers are claims. The delivered pages are evidence. Pull three or four recent articles from your own site and read for these.
Citations That Do Not Resolve
Take every statute number, case name, and rule reference in a piece and look it up at the primary source. Not a search engine result, the actual code or opinion. Fabricated citations are the single most reliable signal, because a lawyer reading that sentence would have checked it reflexively. When a cite resolves but the pinpoint is wrong, or the case says something adjacent to what the article claims, you have found the same failure in a subtler form. Real review catches both.
Jurisdiction Drift
Look for law that is correct somewhere else. A two year limitations period stated for a claim your state gives one year. A comparative negligence rule described in the modified form when your state is pure. References to procedures that exist in federal court and not in your state’s trial courts. Models blend jurisdictions because their training data does, and a reviewer who does not practice in your state will read straight past it.
Confident Numbers With No Origin
Average settlement figures, percentages of cases resolved before trial, timelines stated to the week. If a number appears without a source you can trace, treat it as fabricated until proven otherwise, and understand that publishing it also puts you crosswise with the substantiation standard above. Real editors either source a statistic or cut it.
Structural Sameness
Line up five articles side by side. If every one runs an identical shape, roughly the same section count, the same three item lists, the same closing paragraph that restates the introduction and urges the reader to contact an experienced attorney, you are looking at template output. A human writer with something to say produces uneven pieces, because some points need eight hundred words and some need eighty.
Nothing Only Your Firm Could Say
This is the most damaging tell and the hardest to fake. Scan for anything that could not have been written about any other firm in any other city. A local court’s scheduling reality. A named judge’s known preference. A hard-won observation about how a specific insurer handles a specific claim type. When every paragraph would be equally true for a firm eleven hundred miles away, the page carries no experience signal at all, which is precisely what search engines and prospects both discount. That gap is the practical core of what we cover in legal E-E-A-T signals for law firm websites.
The Byline Problem
Check whose name is on the post. If it is a partner’s byline on work that partner has never read, the firm is making an implicit representation about authorship that is not true. If it is a generic admin account or no byline at all, on a professional services site, prospects and search engines both read the absence.
A Spot Check You Can Run Before Lunch
Pick your two most recently published pages. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Verify every citation against a primary source. Highlight every number and try to trace it. Ask whether any sentence contains a fact specific to your firm, your county, or your bench. Then send those pages to whichever attorney owns that practice area with one question, would you say this to a client. The results tend to be decisive in one direction or the other, and twenty minutes of partner time is a cheap way to find out which vendor you actually have.
What A Defensible Workflow Looks Like
You are not looking for perfection. You are looking for a process with a named human at each gate. In practice that means a brief written by someone who understands the practice area and the local market, a draft produced however the vendor likes, a verification pass where every citation and every number gets checked against a primary source and anything unverifiable is cut rather than softened, an editorial pass that adds firm-specific substance a model could not know, and an attorney sign-off recorded somewhere before publication.
That last step is where most programs break, and usually for a scheduling reason rather than a philosophical one. Attorneys are billing. Review sits in an inbox. The publishing calendar wins. The fix that works is unglamorous, a standing thirty minute block, a queue of no more than four pieces, and a rule that nothing publishes without a recorded approval. Firms that hold that line publish less and sleep better.
The Honest Tradeoffs
Real review costs money and slows you down. A vendor running verification and attorney sign-off will deliver fewer pieces per month than one shipping generated drafts straight to the CMS, and the price per piece will be visibly higher. That gap is the entire reason the cheap option exists, and it is why the arithmetic behind suspiciously low retainers almost always resolves into skipped steps, a pattern we lay out in why cheap SEO backfires for law firms.
Volume is also worth less than it used to be. Publishing eight thin, verified-but-generic pieces a month is not obviously better than publishing two that contain something only your firm knows. If review capacity forces you down to two, that is a constraint worth accepting rather than routing around. And no honest vendor can tell you what any of this will do to your rankings, because nobody controls that. What a reviewed process reliably buys you is different and more concrete, a site that does not misstate the law under your own name.
One more tradeoff people avoid saying out loud. Some AI-drafted, properly reviewed content is better than some human-written, unreviewed content. The variable that matters is the review, not the origin. A vendor who swears they never touch AI while shipping unverified copy is more dangerous than one who uses it openly and checks the work.
Start With The Questions
Send the ten questions this week. Read the answers against the last month of delivered work. If the answers are specific and the pages hold up under a citation check, you have a vendor worth keeping and you can stop worrying about the tooling. If the answers are vague and the pages fall apart in twenty minutes, you now know that before a prospect or an opposing counsel does. Rubiks builds law firm content on a documented workflow with primary-source citation verification and attorney sign-off recorded before anything goes live, and we will tell you plainly which parts of a draft came from where. Talk to Rubiks and we will run the citation check on two of your existing pages first, so you can see what your current process is actually producing.