Most businesses that want press coverage have to manufacture a reason for it. They roll out a new product, announce a rebrand, or trot out an executive to talk about their financials or industry economic trends.
Most plaintiff firms have the opposite problem. The work generates news as a byproduct, continuously, just by the nature of the stories they need to tell to best advocate for their clients.
A complaint gets filed that describes conduct few, if anyone, outside the defendant company knew about. Legal briefs are lobbed back and forth, which is built-in conflict that has core news value. Discovery surfaces key documents. An expert finding contradicts years of public assurances. A verdict or settlement sends a message or changes how a business operates.
These are not marketing angles dressed up as stories, but actual stories about identifiable people, with stakes, conflict, and resolution, which is more than most industries can say about anything they do.
And most of it is siloed to the courtroom and never sees the light of day, meaning no durable public record outside a hard-to-reach court docket.
Here is a starting point for changing that. Six things. Most take an afternoon. One takes about five minutes.
- Pull your last ten resolved matters. Mark the ones where a person with no legal training would understand why it mattered. It will not be all ten, and it may not be the ones you are proudest of from a legal standpoint.
- For each one you marked, search your firm’s name and the case. Find out whether any public record exists outside the docket. Note how many produced nothing.
- Look at what is coming. Identify the next filing, verdict, or settlement you know is on the calendar. Decide now, before it happens, who outside the courthouse would care and why.
- Name three reporters who cover your practice area or your region. If nobody in the room can, that is a noteworthy finding.
- Ask what your firm does externally the day a complaint is filed, or a verdict or settlement comes in. Note whether there is a process or whether it depends on who remembers.
- Stop paying for press release newswire services. PR Newswire, Business Wire, PRWeb, and EIN Presswire were devalued by Google years ago, and AI treats them much the same. Newswire releases are considered paid content that does not signal real authority, and reporters do not rely on them either.
Most firms find the second one uncomfortable and the fifth one revealing.
Why this matters now
The systems answering legal questions assemble their answers from what independent parties have published. The Toronto data showed roughly one citation in fifteen coming from a company’s own site. Directory listings are free and available to everyone, which makes them a floor rather than an advantage.
The one category that can actually distinguish one firm from another is coverage that somebody else decided to produce. And coverage that somebody else decided to produce requires something worth covering.
Plaintiff firms have that. They generate it constantly, as a condition of doing the work at all.
It is also healthy to take a hard look at all your vendors and determine whether you are getting the value you were promised, and whether it is still meaningful today.
The full report, including the research behind this series, is available here: The Plaintiff Lawyer’s Guide to Being Found in the Age of AI.
RebuttalPR is a litigation communications firm built for the plaintiffs’ bar. Through earned media, thought leadership, and the stories your cases produce, we build the authority and reputation that clients look for and that AI relies on. Our team are veterans of AAJ, state trial lawyer associations, and Public Justice. We do this work because we believe in the plaintiffs’ bar and the clients it serves. If something here raises a question about your own firm, reach us at the form below.
