Sep 9, 2026 · 11 min · 8 segments
Somewhere in Brisbane on a Tuesday night, at about half past ten, somebody opens their phone and types a question they would not say out loud to another person yet. It is not the name of a law firm…
Nathan GillisHost
The question they type is something like, what happens to the house if we separate, or...
My employer stood me down and I don't know if that's allowed or do I have to go into court if someone ran into me? Notice what none of those contain.
what the trouble is that they're in and the search is a diagnostic rather than a commercial enterprise so five years ago that search should return you know 10 blue links and the person clicked into two or three and if one of those was a law firm's article then that firm got to make a first impression at the exact moment that the problem was most present with the searcher That's the moment we build our contact strategies around.
And it's a good moment because the person who's scared and reading your explanation of their situation is a person who now associates the relief they get from your answer with your name.
It's just that now it happens on the results page itself or inside an AI assistant and your firm's either in it or absent from it.
So today, what appears in front of someone? Well, at the top of the page, there's a generated answer, several paragraphs long.
written in careful, hedged language, explaining the general position and the exceptions and the fact that it depends on circumstances.
And then off to the side of it, there's three or four little source chips, and those are the names that got credited for the answer.
And you'll see the little logos in there as well, or whatever's extracted from the website where that answer came from.
The follow-up's almost always some version of, so who do I talk to about this in Brisbane? Or what should I ask a lawyer if I do go and see one? Or how much does this cost? And now the assistant is being asked to recommend.
And it recommends from whatever it considers authoritative on that subject in that place.
So I've run this test a load of times and the answer at that point is overwhelmingly a directory.
There's research published in the States that looked at this specifically and found that legal directories appear in the first 77 or so percent of AI answers to questions about hiring a lawyer.
Um, Actual firms turn up further down, if at all, and when a firm does turn up, it's almost never because they're the best one available.
The question they type is something like, what happens to the house if we separate, or...
My employer stood me down and I don't know if that's allowed or do I have to go into court if someone ran into me? Notice what none of those contain.
what the trouble is that they're in and the search is a diagnostic rather than a commercial enterprise so five years ago that search should return you know 10 blue links and the person clicked into two or three and if one of those was a law firm's article then that firm got to make a first impression at the exact moment that the problem was most present with the searcher That's the moment we build our contact strategies around.
And it's a good moment because the person who's scared and reading your explanation of their situation is a person who now associates the relief they get from your answer with your name.
It's just that now it happens on the results page itself or inside an AI assistant and your firm's either in it or absent from it.
So today, what appears in front of someone? Well, at the top of the page, there's a generated answer, several paragraphs long.
written in careful, hedged language, explaining the general position and the exceptions and the fact that it depends on circumstances.
And then off to the side of it, there's three or four little source chips, and those are the names that got credited for the answer.
And you'll see the little logos in there as well, or whatever's extracted from the website where that answer came from.
The follow-up's almost always some version of, so who do I talk to about this in Brisbane? Or what should I ask a lawyer if I do go and see one? Or how much does this cost? And now the assistant is being asked to recommend.
And it recommends from whatever it considers authoritative on that subject in that place.
So I've run this test a load of times and the answer at that point is overwhelmingly a directory.
There's research published in the States that looked at this specifically and found that legal directories appear in the first 77 or so percent of AI answers to questions about hiring a lawyer.
Um, Actual firms turn up further down, if at all, and when a firm does turn up, it's almost never because they're the best one available.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
