I asked ChatGPT to Recommend a Personal Injury Law Firm

I recently asked ChatGPT, “What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago??

Actually, first I ask “who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?”

ChatGPT couldn’t handle that one, so I modified the prompt.

ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four?

That’s all well and good. But then I asked, “Please list your sources.” And ChatGPT replied:

Now I’m not here to suggest to you that you need to pay for premium listings in any of these directories. However, it does support a point that SEOs have known about for a long time. Directories play a role in how the machines organize information. It’s true for search too. The trick of course, is to try to get a better understanding of what sources of information matter and to what degree. Fortunately, ChatGPT seems to be sharing these readily. But did ChatGPT actually use these sources? Could this be an example of some kind of hallucination? Is ChatGPT bound by its programming to only provide reliable sources justified by its training data?

When I performed the same prompt for New York City (can you guess which 10 firms) and asked for sources I got:

Very similar to what SEOs would expect search engines to be using, including:

• News
• Academic papers
• Client reviews
• Industry recognition

Furthermore, when performed these same prompts over and over again, I got different lists of law firms.

I’m not suggesting that the entire internet is abandoning Google for ChatGPT, or even Bing for that matter. However, I would advise anyone who markets to potential clients online to research the sources that matter. I only provided a few high-level examples here. There are a variety of prompts that can help you dig much deeper into how these machines populate lists like these.

To me, this is just a natural extension of market research that folks have been doing for a long time. Be curious and have a healthy bit of skepticism about the results you get. But there’s little doubt that these tools can deliver tremendous value in a variety of legal marketing contexts.