AnswersFor a professional services firm

Which firms does an AI assistant name when a client asks who to instruct?

A general counsel asks an assistant which firms handle a cross-border dispute in a named jurisdiction, and the answer comes back naming a few by name. The journey ends in an enquiry rather than a checkout, so the whole of it turns on that list. What decides it is the directories, ranking guides and sector press an assistant reads, and whether your own pages state plainly what you do and where you are admitted.

What does a client ask an assistant before they ever call a firm?

They ask about the matter rather than about firms: who to go to for this problem, in this sector, in this jurisdiction. The assistant answers with a small number of named firms, and a firm it does not name never reaches the shortlist at all.

Three shapes of question carry most of a firm set. The matter itself is the commonest: a specific problem described in the words of the person who has it, with the discipline left for the assistant to work out. The discipline in a named place is the broad one that decides who is on the list at all. And the explainer question, the one asked before any firm is named at all, carries as much weight here as either of those. Alongside all three sit the constraints a client types: the jurisdiction, the sector, the size of the team, the credentials and the panels you sit on.

Head to head comparisons between two named firms do happen, on the larger mandates. That is a different question from the one that put the names on the shortlist in the first place, and it is worth separating: winning the comparison is worth nothing if the shortlist was drawn without you.

What a client types is a description of a matter, in their own words, and that is the intent an assistant answers when it decides which firms to name. Buying language is rare enough in a firm set to be read as an outlier, because the journey ends in a conversation rather than in a transaction.

Why does the jurisdiction decide as much as the practice area?

Because a firm can act for anybody inside the jurisdiction it is admitted in and for nobody outside it. An assistant that has the discipline right and the jurisdiction wrong has produced an answer the client cannot use.

This is what makes a firm different from every business tied to a building. A restaurant or a practice is chosen partly because of where it sits, and the sources that decide those answers are maps and local listings. Nobody instructs a firm because the office is convenient, and a client will happily instruct a firm in another city without giving it a thought. What they will not do is instruct one that cannot act where the matter sits.

So the placement an assistant has to get right is a pairing rather than a single fact: this discipline, in this jurisdiction. Both halves have to be legible on your own pages, because that is where an assistant goes to settle what you do and where you do it. A practice-area page that describes the work and never says which courts, which regulators or which markets it covers is a page that can be quoted into an answer for the wrong country.

Firms with several offices carry an extra version of the same problem, because the assistant has to tie an office to a jurisdiction and a jurisdiction to a team. Where that connection is stated plainly it holds up. Where it lives only in a footer address, it is being inferred.

Which sources decide whether your firm is named?

Professional directories, ranking guides and regulator registers carry the most weight, together with the trade and sector press where firms are named alongside a matter. Your own practice-area pages and partner biographies are what an assistant reads to decide what you actually do.

The directories and the registers do a job here that no other category has an equivalent for. They are the places a client would check anyway, they state credentials in a form that can be read rather than claimed, and an assistant leans on them for the same reason a client does. A firm described well across those is described well by the assistants.

Sector press sits beside them and does something the directories cannot: it names firms against specific matters. A report naming who acted on a deal or a case is a sentence tying your name to a kind of work, which is exactly the connection an assistant needs when somebody describes a matter rather than a discipline.

Professional threads matter too, in a quieter way, because that is where one person recommends a firm to another by name. The consumer review platforms are read as well, and they occasionally carry a firm, so a review sitting on one is worth having without being where the weight falls. The weight falls on the directories, the registers and the sector press, and that ordering is what the reading is built on.

Do the questions asked before any firm is named count for anything?

They count, and they are read on their own terms. A client asking how a process works, what a rule now requires or what a matter usually involves is at the beginning of a professional relationship, and the answers they get shape what they believe long before a shortlist exists.

For most business types this family sits alongside the others. For a firm it is one of the three that carry the set, and it is where the relationship starts, because professional work is bought on confidence and confidence is built by explaining something well before anybody has been engaged. A firm whose thinking is the thing an assistant reaches for when a client asks how something works has done the groundwork for every later question.

These questions are measured as part of what clients are told, and they are kept separate from the figures about being recommended. That separation is deliberate and it protects the reading: an explainer question has no firm to win, so counting it as one would make a set full of good explainers look like a set full of lost mandates. Keeping them apart means the recommendation figure answers only the question it was asked.

What is read on our own site, when the fee is quoted against the matter?

Whether the contact and practice-area routes resolve, whether the firm, its offices and its regulated identity are machine-readable, and whether the pages show they are current. Fees are quoted against a matter, so a firm is measured on what it does publish, and a missing price list is treated as correct behaviour.

A firm is measured on the things a firm has. The pages that say what you do, the people who do it, the identity that says you are entitled to act, and the routes a client uses to reach any of it. Publishing a fee is not one of those things: professional fees are set against a matter and quoted, so having no price list is the correct posture for a firm and is treated as correct rather than counted against you.

Currency is the reading that earns its place most often. A page written before a rule moved is still a page, and it is the one an assistant is most likely to quote back at a client who is asking about the rule as it stands now. Where the law or the regulation has moved under a practice area, a page that shows it is current is worth more than a page that is longer.

The routes are the third, and they are the least glamorous and the easiest to lose. A practice-area page linked from an answer has to open, and a contact route offered beside your name has to go somewhere a client can use. Both are checked because both are how an answer turns into a conversation.

What has to be true before a recommendation becomes an enquiry?

Four things: the right practice area, the right jurisdiction, the people or the credentials a client would check, and a contact route that resolves. Those four are the whole of the step for a firm, and every one of them sits on your own pages.

This is the last of the five steps and for a firm it is called Engaged. It reads whether the recommendation survives the final hop: a client who has just been handed your name goes looking for the partner who does this kind of work, the admission or the accreditation that says you can act on it, and a way to get in touch. Every one of those is on your own pages or it is nowhere.

Everything it reads sits at the end of the journey, which is the part of a site nobody rereads once it is built. A firm can be named accurately in the right jurisdiction and still leave a client unable to confirm who would actually run the matter.

The step is built from what a firm has: placement, people, credentials and contact. For a shop the same step reads price, stock and the route to a basket, and swapping one set for the other is the whole of what changes here.