When Everyone Has AI, What Sets Your Firm Apart?

Karin: This is Counsel Cast, and I’m your host, Karin Conroy, your marketing co-counsel. Each episode I sit down with leaders in strategy, innovation, authority, and growth to tackle the decisions law firm owners struggle with most. We go beyond the trends and dig into the approaches that help your firm grow with more focus and less chaos.

Karin: Today’s episode is one I think a lot of law firm owners need to hear right now, because for the last couple of years, the conversation has been all about AI, how to use it, how to adopt it, how to not fall behind. But here’s the real question. No one is asking What happens if everyone has it and the playing field is flattened.

If every law firm has access to the same tools, the same technology, the same capabilities, then AI is no longer an advantage or a differentiator. So what actually sets your firm apart? That’s what we are getting into today with TJ Robertson. One of our council cast 

collaborators. Now we have these repeat guests that we really focus in on because we’ve just had such great conversations and I feel like these are people we wanna bring back intentionally.

These are conversations we wanna continue to have and make a plan for that. So we are gonna talk about AI, of course, ’cause everybody’s talking about it. But we’re gonna talk about what is really going on when everybody’s using it. And then there’s a lot of problems, like we’re all seeing the problems.

Talking about a lot of that, but the title for today’s show is 

When Everyone Has AI, what Sets your Firm apart? So tj, thank you so much for being here again.

TJ: Yeah, I’m so excited to be back.

Karin: Awesome.

TJ: since the

Karin: I know I was, I meant to look at how long ago the last conversation was, but I feel like it was maybe what, eight, nine months ago? Something like that last year.

TJ: as well have been eight or nine years with, with how

much has happened. 

Karin: Yeah. That’s actually so interesting, I feel like in this AI world, ’cause it, it does move so quickly. so I, I, I did mean to go back and look at our conversation and we’ll link to all of that and all the, that good stuff. But let’s gonna talk about where we are now first versus what we were talking about before.

 and then what are people doing wrong? What are, what mistakes are people making?

TJ: I think, like you said before, when we talked eight or nine months ago, if you were using AI at all, you were keeping up. You were ahead of most people.

Karin: And now it’s, and now everyone kind of realizes like, oh, this is the future. I have to be using AI. It’s getting smarter and in some ways it’s, it’s getting easier if you just go to the base model and you ask it to do something for you, it’s, it’s better than it

TJ: was eight or nine months ago. But I think we’re also finally starting to see what this might look like when it’s integrated naturally into businesses and, and we’re seeing a few businesses that are doing it really well.

and then a lot that are, not doing it so well.

Karin: I was just thinking of an example I saw, I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn and it was someone was talking about how their, their daughter had this sort of medical emergency and they were trying to get ahold of. Let’s just say it was a hospital.

I, I can’t remember exactly the whole scenario. And it was this clearly very urgent situation and the whole kind of phone system and way of reaching someone was AI and it was a disaster. And it was in this moment when it was like. 

No, this is not the place for it. This is really bad. And you know, I’m kind of in this desperate moment where I don’t have the time or patience to deal with the problems of your system.

I feel like that’s kind of a good example in terms of like where you can implement it too quickly and really in a sloppy way.

TJ: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it’s, I think it’s gonna start to matter a lot more or already is how you implement it and

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: or where you implement it. ’cause I’ve had similar situations where I called Verizon when I was traveling overseas. My phone wouldn’t work,

Karin: Yeah,

TJ: it wasn’t automatically kicking in for the international travel.

And

Karin: right.

TJ: and I just explained it in natural language and it was like, hold on. And then like 30 seconds later, it’s okay, it’s fixed now.

Karin: Nice.

TJ: I didn’t have to wait on hold or anything.

And so I think there,

Karin: when it’s amazing and you know that you probably would’ve waited on hold for an hour and then you might’ve got someone who may not have understood it as clearly and whatever. do you have any kind of guidelines or frameworks or anythingFor people to think about this in a way where it’s like, okay, I feel behind, but I also am worried at the same time, and like, where do I find the correct safe path, but not without falling behind.

TJ: I think that it’s really hard to predict what AI’s gonna look like in the future. And the biggest risk when you start investing a lot of time and resources into building AI systems is you don’t know if the next model release or the next product release is gonna completely nullify all of your work.

You put, you build this whole workflow and then cloud says, oh yeah, we just integrated that into. Now you don’t need to do that.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: But there’s, there’s a few things that I think we can safely say. it’s always gonna be valuable. AI’s not gonna be able to do this without you,

and it’s, right now it’s your knowledge base

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: skills.

And so I, I think the, the main mistake people are making right now is they’re trying to find tasks that humans are doing that they can just give to AI.

Karin: Uhhuh.

TJ: what can I turn into a prompt that I can just give to Claude and then it does it for me.

And when you think about it that way, the answer is not a whole lot.

There’s, there’s really not much. And, and so I think a lot of clients are like, what’s this big thing? Or not clients, companies, I,

Karin: yeah.Sure.

TJ: there’s just, anyways, a lot of ’em are just thinking what’s this big fuss with ai? I tried using

Karin: Yeah. It was a mess. Yeah.

TJ: I, I think like we should be reframing that and thinking. What if AI was handling the whole process,

Karin: Yeah. Yeah.

TJ: and then we find those areas that it can’t do and we put a human there.

Karin: Okay. So gimme an example of that. ’cause I had, the question I had that I feel like aligns with this is where, how do we make it meaningful where it isn’t just, you know, everybody hears these nightmare stories like you’re saying, and I hear this from my clients too. You hear this from your clients and they’re like, ah.

I don’t know. It sounds like a mess. I, I’m thinking it’s a no for me. You know, like I just don’t even wanna try it because that sounds messy. And obviously you and I, I am in there all day, every day I’m using it. I see so much value and meaning and like, where it’s really, it’s changed things so significantly.

And so how do we. Get people to kind of, you know, find that place where they’re more comfortable and they’re, they’re more like me and you, you know, they’re like, they’re like, get it, butthey’re not creating waste from it.

TJ: Yeah. And I’m really interested to hear how, how you have this set up. I’m guessing

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: things I’ll talk about here are things that you’re doing. I think a lot of us that are kind of working on this individually are converging on some of the same

Karin: Absolutely. Sure.

TJ: And yeah, it, for me, it all starts from 

why can’t AI do the whole process?

maybe the process I’m most familiar with is, is writing articles

Karin: Yeah, sure.

TJ: if you’re a firm, you should be writing articles on, on

Karin: Yeah. Blog content. Yeah.

TJ: and so when you start to think about why can’t AI do this, the most obvious one is it doesn’t have the context.

 it doesn’t have the context on, on the, the legal matter, or it doesn’t have the context on my firm and me personally.

Karin: The actual cases I worked on, the things, that people said to me, the way they felt about these things. Like the finer details of that work. Yeah. Okay.

TJ: So I think, so that’s, and then the other piece of it which we could address separately is, is just your, your intuition and, and, and your, your TA at knowledge that, that’s harder to, to document, but the context point. I think there’s two types of context you need to provide. It’s, there’s context on your organization

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: there’s context on the, the industry or, or subject matter.

But that’s the, the one thing I think every company should be doing right now is building that context on their, on their own company, building a knowledge base.

Karin: Okay.

TJ: We call ours our, our brand ambassador, but it’s, it’s all.

Karin: An AI knowledge base, right?

TJ: A knowledge base for your AI

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: you, you shouldn’t need a knowledge base for humans anymore.

Karin: Right.

TJ: bases for be for AI because it’s, once you have that, it’s, it’s way more efficient for the human to just go through the AI than actually looking through a knowledge base.

Karin: Okay. So describe to me, ’cause I have this and I do this for. Probably most of our clients also, this is where we start. And describe to me what that looks like for, you know, broadly, obviously, without, you know, kind of keeping things anonymous with your clients and everything, but what does it look like on your side?

And then I can kind of describe what that looks like for us. ’cause I think this is also going to vary for every single business. 

TJ: Yeah. And, and what you’re using this knowledge base for will determine some of how it’s structured and, and who’s using the knowledge base. So these are all things to think about.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: talk, I’ll talk kind of broadly and then more specifically how we do it at our agency. however you do it, it’s gonna be a series of markdown files that’s.

That’s just what AI likes most. It likes markdown

most AI can access spreadsheets or other forms of data if you need to, but it, it really prefers markdown, which if you don’t know, is just a text file with some really simple formatting to help it understand headings and bullet points and that kind of stuff.

Karin: And when you put it in, in, let’s just say Claude, it’s the one that’s like the.md. So just to be real clear,

TJ: Yeah. Do MD

Karin: yeah.

TJ: and you want a lot of information.

the plan is AI is gonna be deeply integrated into your company. It’s

gonna be anything that an AI can do better than a human. You want the AI doing, and that’s what that entails, is gonna grow a lot over the next few years.

We’re already seeing it progress very quickly this year. And so I would think about it in terms of what. Important for at least one person on our team right now to know.

Karin: About your firm? Yeah. your firm? about your, your clients, about your team. what you’ll find is that’s a lot of information.

Yeah.

TJ: so I think, to start, start with the important stuff. Don’t get overwhelmed by it, but you’ll be building on this knowledge base. Every time more information comes on. And we could talk about how to do that as well. But it’s ultimately gonna be dozens if not hundreds of documents. And some of those documents are gonna be dozens, if not hundreds of pages long.

And then you need a good way to index that and make it easy for the AI to find the information it needs. ‘you don’t want reading all that documentation every time, you ask it a simple question. 

And so you need some. index that describes each of the documents and what can be found in there.

So it, it looks in the right place, and then you want that document to be organized so it can just parse through the headings and find that chunk of information that it really needs.

So the, I think the first question you, 

you need to decide is, are you storing this knowledge base locally on your hard drive or are you storing it online

We store ours in Google Drive. And, and that’s because we have a big team and, and they’re all working in the same knowledge base. 

Karin: Yep. And it integrates really nicely with Claude. And like you can just go in and, tell Claude, yeah, this is the one. And you don’t have to actually attach anything if you have a Google Drive connector. it’s just, that’s such a nice thing.

TJ: but there are advantages on storing it locally,

Karin: Yeah, I would honestly say for most law firms, you’re gonna wanna do both, you know, and just for safety and all of that stuff. And Google Drive may be problematic for some law firms, just depending on privacy settings and things like that. So you gotta figure out what works for your firms. So this is gonna be another one of those answers that it depends on what works for you guys, both in terms of like your own file structure and privacy issues.

TJ: so yeah, the, the major disadvantage with storing it locally is now you have to have some kind of version control set up if you have multiple people using it.

Karin: Yeah, it’s messy. Yeah.

TJ: Yeah. Something like that. so some people will just have their own local knowledge base with just stuff that’s important to them,

Karin: Yeah. If you’re a solo firm, it’s probably fine. But I would say the local, I usually recommend that just as sort of a backup, and this is just, you know, Under really weird conditions if your, cloud version somehow dies and then the local version survives. Like, this seems really backwards, but somehow it could happen.

Like in theory.yeah.

TJ: think the biggest advantage of it being local is it’s much easier for the AI to keep those documents updated.

Karin: Yeah. Yeah.

TJ: organize and add information those documents. You want the AI figuring out. Where things need to go so that you can, you get off a call with a client, you just give that call transcript to the AI and it figures out how to organize any important information in there.and if you, if you have things stored in Google Drive, at least right now with Claude, it can’t make those updates for you.

and that’s, it’s a big tax that we play pay right now. I think that’ll be solved soon. But right now Claude will just tell us, make this update here and we’re manually copy 

pasting. 

Karin: the way what I’ve been doing to solve that issue is I use notion, and notion to me, if you’re not familiar with it, I highly, highly recommend it because it’s basically like Google Drive on steroids. so I’ve described it to other people and so let me just give you a visual example of how I use it in my.

Personal life for travel planning. And so when we were on a recent trip over spring break and it broke out the plans day by day and each one had a sub page and each, and then I had this extensive Google map that was customized based on all the stuff I had saved from Instagram. And then it will cross-reference that, put that in the plans, and there’s one main index file that links to everything broken out by day.

So this is something I just don’t feel like, I think you could theoretically set that up in Google drives in a similar way, but it’d just be way more complicated as opposed to notion where you’ve got. A main cover page with links to all of those sub pages. And it’s just really pretty, there’s like these charts where it’s okay, today’s Tuesday, here’s what you’re doing for lunch and here’s some options.

And you know, so it’s really nicely organized in a really easy to access kind of way. So I, I recommend Notion quite a bit, and I’m on the free plan.

TJ: Oh yeah,

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: I, so we actually use Notion for our task management, and we use it for client portals too. I’m obsessed with Notion. I,

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: a large amount of money. and, and their, their, their AI is actually really good

Karin: It’s so nice. Yeah.

TJ: but so the reason I haven’t, and maybe I’m wrong here, because I’ve noticed that. it has to make a, so we use Claude

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: really in the weeds here, but,

Claude has to make a tool call to Notion every time it retrieves a document where if it, if you upload a Google document, it’ll actually copy the contents of that document into its own folder. And so it, it just has to do what’s called a project knowledge search.

Karin: Okay.

TJ: And so I don’t know if that matters enough and maybe, maybe I should be switching to Notion.

Karin: Yeah, I dunno. I think you just need to kind of check it out. I feel like you know, what we can do in this episode is just sort of present the options and I feel like once again, this is gonna come back to whatever works best for I, I don’t know if Notion has problematic privacy issues because that’s not something I really care about when I’m doing my.

Trip planning and stuff like that. but for a law firm, that’s probably something you wanna be looking into. but I just like to present options and whether it works for each firm, who knows, maybe, but you know, just think about the options that are out there and the way people are using it.

And, maybe that works for your firm or maybe you need to take that, tweak it and find some other software that does the exact thing that you need.

TJ: Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s good. I think the important thing is, is that documenting everything that

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: base, because it’s, once you have the

Karin: Yes.

TJ: really easy to move it to another platform.

Karin: It is. And I will say the reason I stuck on notion is because as I was building out big projects, so not trip plan, I mean trip planning actually is a big, big project, but let’s say actual work, client projects and stuff, especially back when I was very much all using chat, GPT.

It’s all over the place and trying to keep track of all of it was really messy and trying to pull it into different documents and stuff. So for me it was an organizational challenge and like just trying to keep things organized and whatever your system ends up being, finding a way to keep everything in easily accessible, organized, you know, kind of system is a huge hurdle in, you know, whatever work you’re doing.

TJ: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: asked a lot. I don’t know if this would be helpful, do you think to your, your viewers, but, I get asked a lot about what documents, how we arrange those

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: that going too deep?

Karin: No, I think that’s great.

TJ: Okay, great. So yeah, so we have I think nine documents that we create for each of our clients, and

Karin: And this is, are we kind of referencing back to sort of this core, knowledge base that you were talking about? Okay.

TJ: yeah, this is how we, this is how we structure a default knowledge

Karin: Okay.

TJ: different markdown files and how we, we label them to make it easy to, to retrieve. And, and then from here we’ll build it out. We’ll get more documents based on. What information is

Karin: Sure.

TJ: we, we have one document that’s just a company overview.

Karin: Okay.

TJ: the assumption is that document’s gonna get pulled on every request. It’s just the most important information about your, your law firm.

Karin: Yeah, this is a law firm in Atlanta that you know, does criminal def defense, criminal defense, the name of the firm? Is this like the very broad, descriptive, information? Okay.

TJ: And then, we have one that’s, we call it business context. And the idea here is you’re storing all the information about your business that you want the AI to have access to, but that you wouldn’t share publicly.

Karin: Okay. What’s an example of something like that?

TJ: and this would be like your, your, your positioning in, in the market

Karin: like your strategy.

TJ: Yeah.

Karin: Okay.

TJ: Strategy,yeah, you’re, yeah. Anything, points, things that are, that

Karin: Got it. Okay.

TJ: and, and the, the way we do it is on every dark document, at the very top we label this is either an internal document, don’t talk about any of this in any kind of output that you make.

That’s client facing.

Karin: Yep.

TJ: Or this is content, source meaning you can, you can pull directly from this. You can quote it

Karin: This can go public.

TJ: yeah.

Karin: Yep.

TJ: or, and then we have a third one, which is content guidance, which is, you should read this anytime. You’re gonna create content, but don’t quote it.

Karin: Got it. Oh, that’s cool. Okay.

TJ: Yeah. That was one of the early problems we had with the knowledge base, was that it kept leaking in this internal information

Karin: Yeah, that could be really messy. Yeah. Especially for law firms where it’s okay, here’s a list of case studies. We can’t use these actual names because we have privacy issues. And then if all of a sudden Claude was like, and Joe Smith, blah, blah, blah, and it’s stop. We can’t say that. Yeah.

TJ: For law firms especially. Yeah, it’s, it’s

Karin: Yeah.

Sure.

TJ: and so yes, we’ll put that at the top of the document and then also in the project instructions where we index each document, we’ll label these ones are internal use only. These are project agencies or project source.

Karin: Okay. That’s a really clever way to organize it.

TJ: It took a few iterations, but yeah, that’s, and I’m sure we’ll iterate more from

Karin: Of course. Yeah. This is where you’re at now.

TJ: yeah. We have one document that just lists every important page on the website. We have

Karin: Okay.

TJ: name of the page, the title, and the, the topic of that page.

Karin: Yeah. ’cause you know, like not to totally derail this organization’s conversation, but I would say that even before we started, a lot of firms think that you can just start with the website. Then, you got all the information you need on the website, and it’s no, no, no, that’s not what we’re talking about.

That’s one piece of it, and that’s valuable. But, we’re talking about a lot more extensive, you know, complicated, complex sort of, information about your firm. That’s, and the more we have, the better the work is gonna be.

TJ: A hundred percent and your, your website can end up being really repetitive, right? Important

Karin: Right.

TJ: gonna be on many pages. It’s just, it’s not very efficient for the, the model to try to pull from there. And it

Karin: Yeah,

TJ: tool call where,

Karin: right?

TJ: I think your website should absolutely be the first place you scrape information from when

you’re building out the knowledge base.

But yeah, it needs to be organized

But it’s not all encompassing. It’s definitely not going to give us everything we need for the thing that you guys call a knowledge. Knowledge base. We call it brand ambassadors.

Karin: Oh, sorry.

TJ: speak it, I say, I say knowledge based generically. ’cause I think that’s becoming the

Karin: That’s what most people are calling it. Okay.

TJ: Yeah. yeah. And, and the, the main advantage of the internal Pages document is internal linking. So when we’re creating content for SEO, we want to know, when we mention this term, we’re linking to this page.

And

Karin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TJ: let’s see what order to go through. We have, oh a, a document all about competitors.

Karin: Oh, yes.

TJ: these are the competitors. So don’t mention don’t, don’t promote them in your content, but

also just know this 

Karin: Don’t use their content, but be aware of it strategically. also think about if you didn’t have that defined where you just threw a competitor, and their website into sort of a, you know, mess of a organization and all of a sudden it was being used in the wrong way, that could be really problematic.

TJ: Yeah. And Mo most firms don’t wanna link to their competitors that, you know, if we’re, if we’re doing external linking to try to like back up a source, you probably don’t wanna be throwing your competitors a back link.

Karin: No. Yeah,

TJ: So it’s good for it to know. we have a document just about the people in the firm, so just everything about you and anyone else that’s there.

Karin: and this is gonna be different from the bio pages. If there are pages about those people on the firm, this is gonna be more, more in depth.

TJ: Yeah. Yeah.

Karin: Okay.

TJ: yeah, all the information you can possibly think of. We typically will have that being a public facing document, so we, we just put things that we’re happy to share

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: on there, but yeah, we go as deep as possible.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: one just on each of your practice areas and, and just going through how you handle each of those, just detailed information.Then we have one document called Crucial Content Guidelines, and this document for a new client, it’s completely empty, and then every time we get feedback on content, we have Claude add any generic feedback to that document. And then the next time we create content, it has to, it uses that as like a rubric to make sure.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: and that’s, that’s really important is to make sure that however you set up the process, it’s iterative. So

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: time you use it, it’s getting better at

Karin: It’s learning and growing. Yeah. Like those images we all have of the, robots from like horror movies.

TJ: Yeah. Set up your

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: like robots from a horror

Karin: Yeah. There you go.

TJ: like Terminator

Karin: Yeah. I’m also picturing like little shop befores, you know,

TJ: yeah. Okay.

Karin: like the plants that are coming in.

TJ: That’s, yeah, that’s one potential version of the future

Yeah. into right now. But you, you wanna be on the right side of that

Karin: right. Well, I feel like there is a whole contingency of people who really believe that is, that is the only thing that’s happening right now is the robots are taking over and, and it’s, you know, all gloom and doom.

TJ: yes, AI sentiment is, is very right now.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: but yeah, as a, as a law firm, you can use that to your advantage if you’re.

Karin: Yeah. Well, let’s finish talking about so did that kind of encapsulate your, your, the pages that you have or,

TJ: The one more page is

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: like a brand voice and style guide.

Karin: Okay. All right. Because I will say I was, I was waiting for that one. that’s where usually where we start, that’s kind of the stuff that we, that people usually have on file. okay, what are the fonts?

What is the, what are the colors? What are the styles that we’re using? But there should be some, like if it’s done well, your brand guide or your brand book or whatever your. You know, whoever put that together calls it. There should be some language indicators and signals in there too. So these are the types of things we say about ourselves.

These are the things we don’t say. you know, and in addition to design, guidance. So we, we usually start with that. Give us your logo, get, give us that kind of stuff. And then we go into a lot of similar ideas. We don’t call ’em the same thing, but similar ideas in terms of. Finding more and more and more information and data that we can just pull in and build this, you know, knowledge base or your brand ambassador, whatever you call that thing inside of your AI of choice.

so why, why is it important to do all of this work and not just say, okay, here’s our website, here’s some general content, you know, go write us some blog posts. And Or social media.

TJ: yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s not entirely intuitive. It’s, it’s really only once you do this that you realize how powerful it is.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: I, I think people really underestimate how much of our current work could be handled well and reliably well by AI. this just that, this is one of the two missing pieces I think is, is just really fully understanding. Every detail of your business.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: So yeah, I think, and, and really iterating on it. that’s, I think people get stuck with AI or they give up on it because they, they get something back that they can’t use.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: and what I think a lot of us are finding is if you can really document and articulate every single reason that, that that output was unusable. The AI, once it’s set up right, can figure out how to avoid all those mistakes next time, and that iterative process is where the magic happens.

Karin: Well, that iterative. Iterative, why am I having a hard time with that word? Iterative process? I feel like this is something I say in almost every AI episode. this is not something entirely new when it comes to marketing. This is kind of a core marketing concept to begin with. I’ve said for years that when you try a campaign and it doesn’t go the way you wanted it to, you know, you don’t instantly have.

A million dollars of cash in hand. that’s not, I, I don’t like to calling it failure. And I, and I don’t do that just because, I still wanna get paid. Even though you think that wasn’t good. It’s not that. It’s because it’s data and this is data we can learn from. And so even when we’re designing stuff, because that’s usually where our firm is starting, we’re starting with the visuals and the design and kind of pulling all those pieces together when.

client says to us, no, I don’t like this version. I will spend almost more time on the reasons they don’t like it, versus, oh yeah, this looks good, because there’s some really good data there. Like, why don’t you like it? You know, and why does it not work? Because that’s really valuable to know, okay, this is the path we don’t wanna go on, and we’re gonna put like a big, you know, do not pass.

Because what, what’s the blank there? what is the things we can know about what doesn’t work is, you know, just as important and valuable. And that is the same with AI. So trying the these things out and. Experimenting and getting that garbage and being like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why is that garbage? What was it so bad about?

It was really bad ’cause there was like 17 M dashes and there was like all of this AI slap. Oh, okay. So can we define that bad stuff in a way that it avoids all of that and we kind of teach it and we’re like feeding that plant in a little shop of wars.

a hundred percent. Yeah. We, we do the same thing. I, whenever we bring on a new client, I tell them the first article we give you is gonna have a lot of mistakes

Yep.

TJ: I just ask you to spend 20 minutes going through

Karin: Yep.

TJ: really telling us why

Karin: Why? Give us the information that we can use to build this, not just for this article, but to learn and iterate. so what other kind of reset things, where people are, I feel like they’re using these experiences as a reason to just walk away from AI and instead kind of how can they reset their thinking about this in terms of like, this is just part of the process and it’s worth it in the end.

What, what other ways do you kind of address that with your clients in terms of making the plans and, you know, please stick with this, you know, it’s not all bad.

TJ: Yeah, I mean, it’s. It’s, it’s just really understanding at a fundamental level how much AI is already capable of, if it’s given a fair shot,

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: if it’s, if it has the context and the intuition that a human has, the advantage of can do so much. And that’s not to say we should fire all our humans.

I, I think we’ll probably get to

Karin: how humans are, I think, becoming more valuable.

TJ: But it’s really a lot. And, and, and if you’re paying attention to the model releases just in 2026, Opus 4.6. Opus 4.7. right now, I think next chute T model, it’s probably dropping as we’re speaking. It seems like they were already testing it, and it, it looks incredibly powerful. it’s moving, I think, faster than most of us anticipated, at least

Karin: Yeah. Well, okay. I, I feel like that’s the good transition because the, the whole point of this conversation is if AI has leveled the playing field, how can we use it to differentiate and set ourselves apart? So let’s talk about that. so let’s say you.

Feed all this information into it, and you and I were both talking about how we use it all the time and it, it has changed the way I take vacations and, you know, all that stuff in like amazing ways. But let’s talk more specifically about. How do you then use it to rise above what everybody else is doing?

Because it does feel like everybody’s using it. And I’m starting to see a lot of the same type of things. And even when people are using like this, you know, don’t use this AI slap language, then it’s like there’s a new version of the AI slap language, you know, the next day.

so how do you. differentiate? How do you do better and use it in a strategic advantage?

TJ: I don’t know where to start here. So we, we use it in essentially every, service that we offer our clients. It’s, it, the, the core of the work is done by AI,

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: and the thing we spend the most time on outside of client relationships is just iterating on these systems.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: and, and it does, it does take some work.

 It’s worth really thinking about how much time you wanna dedicate to, ’cause you can just keep making it better.

And you probably don’t want your entire company focusing all their time on just improving your AI systems.

 And so I think that that’s where you really have to think like. is there one person on our team that just loves doing this already? And if

Karin: Yeah,

TJ: if they’re not already doing it, they’re not the right person for it.

Karin: ‘

TJ: cause there’s nothing stopping them.

Karin: Yeah. 

TJ: so if you, if you have that person, I think you just empower them to do more of that.

And

everyone else just kind of uses the tools so you’re not getting bogged down. And that if you don’t have that person, I think you, you either find that person or you find an agency that’s already doing that thing

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: really well. but I, I think. 

There’s no shortcut

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: and that, that’s I think one of the misnomers I had, I, I assumed that the smarter and the more capable these models got, the easier they would be to use.

Karin: And in one sense that’s true, but like yeah. To really use them at the top of their capabilities, it’s challenging. It, it, it

It’s a lot of work. Yeah. I think that’s what’s something I’ve been finding probably in the last few weeks too, is because the more, like you were saying, they’re releasing new things, you know, weekly. And I see these skills and these different things and I start getting into it, and I’m a very tech savvy person, and there’s times when I get way in over my head and all of a sudden I have to kind of pull back and I’m like, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Why am I building like a rocket ship to Mars when all I need are the following three things? You know, you know, it’s just, wait a minute. You know, I, maybe that’s, maybe that’s part of our advice is that, wait a minute idea like. Pullback for a second. You know, is this, what do you need here?

TJ: exactly. Yeah. And that’s, I think that’s the perfect framing is, is really think about like. Where am I likely wasting my time?

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: you’re wasting your time if the models are gonna be able to do this thing you’re building outta the box within the next year or so. And so kind of understanding what capabilities are likely coming can be really helpful and that, that’s why I say like that knowledge base, it doesn’t matter how smart chat BT gets, it’s never gonna be able to build your

Karin: Yeah. Yeah.

 To go back to this idea of let’s say that we stayed focused, we stuck with you know, some kind of a knowledge base we, the firm spent, because like really building out that knowledge base, that should take some time, like all of those documents that should, it shouldn’t just be like we’re copying and pasting from the website, like we said earlier.

Okay, so we put the time in, whatever. Now how can we use that knowledge base? To be better and different than the firm down the street that is thrown together, some blog posts and whatever. And I can kind of tell they’re using AI and it’s not great, but it’s not the worst. And how can we elevate our stuff to differentiate and also use AI

TJ: Yeah, I, I think the best use of your time right now is developing skills that you alluded, alluded to earlier,

Karin: yet?

TJ: that’s like our whole agency right now. The, the, the work that’s done is, well structured knowledge base at the, at the bottom, and then skills being used on top of that.

Karin: By skills, you don’t mean go out and learn how to play badminton. You’re like, you’re talking about like Claude skills or whatever the equivalent is in a different platform. Yeah. Okay.

TJ: yeah. And, and so yeah. So yeah, back up a little bit. 

What are skills? so yeah, skills were invented by Anthropic. It was their idea. Very simple concept. It’s now adopted by all the model makers, so

you can use skills in Gemini, Chacha, bt, they’re not as integrated yet, but it does seem to be just the standard way that you provide instructions to the model on how to do a specific task.

Karin: Yep.

TJ: And there’s nothing magical about the, the format of the skill itself. It’s just another markdown file.

It’s essentially a prompt template. It’s going to explain it, and then it can also have alongside it a folder of reference documents. So it’s just a way to structure a prompt.

 A

task. again, the magic happens in the iteration.

Your knowledge base is there to contain context about you, your company, your industry, and you’re gonna iterate on that by updating it with new information or, or better information. Skills are where you store context around specific tasks. And so if you write that.blog post and it gets something wrong about your company.

You need to update your knowledge base.

If you write that blog post and it just gets something wrong with the, the structure or, you know, some, something from an SEO point of view or a quality point of view, then you’re updating the skill

 that’s the, the flow you kind of want to get into

Karin: The format that you wanna think about it. I think that’s a really clear explanation because it’s so confusing getting into all this stuff and it’s all really pretty relatively new. Like when you start looking at how, recent, I mean, you know, I’ve been, you and I have been doing this for a few years, but even a few years, that’s not that old.

TJ: Yeah. Yeah. No one’s an expert yet. We’re

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: figuring this out as we go.

Karin: Well, according to my podcast guest requests, there’s lots of experts,

TJ: Yeah. There have been since like a month after chat, GBT came out,

Karin: right?

TJ: Yeah.

Karin: Yeah. You should see, anyway, I digress.okay. I think that’s a really clear, good way of thinking about it in terms of, The knowledge base versus the skills and how you, how they interact and how you keep those as living documents that are constantly updated and upgraded, in order to make ’em better over time.

Any tips in terms of like actual things? I know you guys do a lot of content based, SEO based content and things like that. Anything that people should be focusing on or not doing, that’s more kind of outdated. As they kind of think forward and look at what their plans are. and I know that’s such a broad question because you work across different industries and not just with law firms, but is there any obvious thing that you see where you’re like, oh gosh, please stop.

TJ: yeah. Yeah. There’s, there’s lots of stuff. yeah. So we, we can talk about, a, a few things that just are a waste of time

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: and a few just misses. so the biggest waste of time I see in SEO is spent on technical issues,

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: and I think a lot of people have this misconception that SEO is, is mostly technical work

Karin: Yeah. Page loads. Speed and,

TJ: Yeah.

Karin: yeah.

TJ: some technical work is important. If, if page pages are broken. If your website’s not able to be indexed or it’s not loading, then yeah, that’s top of the priority list. but if you’re spending, you know, dozens of hours trying to improve the performance a little bit, don’t do that for SEO.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: it’s worth it to you just to have a faster website, great.

But it’s not gonna make a big difference in your rankings.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: Your, your rankings are gonna improve, by either. Lemme back up a little bit. The way I think about it is now you have a, a certain amount of authority in Google and that allows you to rank for a certain number of search terms.

Karin: Yep.

TJ: You should have a piece of content targeting each of those terms that you already have the authority to rank for before you do anything else.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: that’s, that’s where you’re gonna see the biggest lift.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: If you’ve exhausted that, then you need to focus on building your authority, and as your authority builds, then the, the, set of topics that you could be ranking for builds as well. And then you need to develop that content as

Karin: Yeah, I think, yeah, that’s great advice. ’cause I do get a lot of, inquiry calls where that’s the first thing they’re talking about is, okay, we got this report because you’ve seen this, where they get the email and it’s. Some like automated audit type thing and it’s your site is so slow, you’re basically gonna die tomorrow.

you know, and it’s you know, and there’s a good amount. It obviously works because they wouldn’t keep sending it this out if, you know, they didn’t get a certain amount of response. and.

TJ: 1700 errors that that gets someone’s attention pretty

Karin: Yes. And they’re like, what? the worst is when that’s a client and they come and they’re like, what are you even doing?

You know? It’s 

TJ: Yeah. I didn’t realize those. We had 1700 errors. Yeah. And Yeah.

the, the thing to understand there is yeah, the automated tools, they, they

Karin: They’re garbage.

TJ: yeah. They’re, they’re, they’re automated and

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: like your title tag being too long as an error, when it’s really, there’s no detrimental impact on

Karin: Yeah. They just make stuff up there’s a problem and you need to give us money to fix it. you know, so whatever with that. but people do get worried about that because they’re, they’re not really sure how this stuff all works. And so it sounds like it might be. Real and whatever. gosh, I, one of my first core pieces of advice is, come on, if it doesn’t sound right, and if it’s coming from like Nigeria, let’s take it with more than a grain of salt.

Like not just a grain, maybe a bucket of salt. let’s just, you know, It’s probably not true and they probably just need some money. but there, there is a, a large number of people that focus on that page speed and the technical side of stuff, as opposed to the things that, you know, actually move the needle, which is this authority and building your reputation and all that.

And the problem with that, I see over and over with the authority and the reputation is it’s harder to define. And it’s harder to actually quantify. And so the page speed is a thing that they can just say, ’cause it’s got a number. And so it’s an easy target, whereas authority, like you need a strategy, you need some, you know, there’s a whole lot of work that’s gonna go behind making that happen.

TJ: And it’s not as easy to scare someone about that. Hey, your authority is low. This thing, like, how do you scare someone with that? Yeah. And people will use, domain authority,

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: as, as that metric. But yeah, that, that’s, that’s just a measure of

Karin: That’s only a tiny piece of it.

TJ: of the people linking to you.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: it’s not an accurate metric.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: it’s just one part of it. Like you said,

Karin: Awesome. Okay, so it is time for the book review, and I feel like this really, this book really ties in. tj, what’s the book that you’re gonna recommend for the audience for this episode?

TJ: it’s, it’s a classic, good to great.

Karin: Yeah, this was one that, way back when I was still doing corporate marketing, working for Century 21, the, CEO sat me down and said, you, you’re gonna start by reading this.

TJ: That’s great.

Karin: but where, what, I mean there’s a lot of concepts in that book, but what do you think kind of ties in with this? I, you know, all of these things that we’ve been talking about.

TJ: Yeah, I, I think. A lot of people are, or a lot of businesses are focused on, on how do they replace the people in their business and cut costs. ’cause, ’cause that seems to be the big opportunity right now.

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: but I, I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it. I, I think that with AI, you’re gonna be able to be so much more productive.

You’re gonna be able to increase your quality by so much that. If a human on your team can just make that process 10% more efficient, they’re gonna be worth a tremendous amount.

Karin: Right.

TJ: And, and, and really, like you were saying before, if if everyone’s using AI

Karin: Yeah,

TJ: and not everyone’s using it, well, but I I do think that

Karin: it’ll get there,

TJ: yeah.

And the, the companies that aren’t using it well aren’t gonna succeed. And, and so if you’re using it well, you, you’re pretty soon you’re gonna find yourself in a situation where you’re only competing with other businesses that are using it Well.

Karin: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a 

race to the bottom. I do feel like that’s, it’s not dissimilar to the way like pay per click and you know, the old school SEO stuff used to be, and I used to have this same conversation, if SEO is your entire. Marketing strategy, that’s gonna be a problem because first of all, you gotta do some good work.

TJ: Let’s start with that. Like you need to be a good lawyer. And second of all, you have to have a reputation that is based in things that exist in the real world as opposed to just on Google. And so let’s start with that. And I feel like this AI is amplifying that, you know, even more so.And so if, every firm has found a way to really integrate AI and become more efficient, then people become the differentiator.

Karin: Yeah. And that’s good news because that means, if you’re a horrible lawyer, I don’t have a marketing strategy for you, like, you know, I’m sorry, but it’s gonna be really hard. And that’s good news for the good lawyers though, because if you are doing good work.

And you have a combination of strategic AI and you’re using things efficiently and you know, as a human, people wanna refer business to you because they know you do good work. This is gonna be good for you.

TJ: Yeah, a hundred percent. And,

Karin: Yeah.

TJ: I do really think that’s where everyone’s focused on AI right now. But I think you can kind of just focus on the things that you know aren’t gonna get replaced by AI.

Including your humans and really just doubling down on the things that, that humans do best now and are likely to continue doing best for a few years. I think those companies are really gonna succeed long term.

Karin: Man, I was gonna ask you for a big takeaway, but I feel like that was it. Like that, that’s it. it just keeps coming back to being human and doing the great work and then using this as a tool and making things more efficient and, in some ways, like finding ways of, you know, elevating the work.

Based on what you already know as a human, you know, what the work that you did as a human for other humans. but yeah, I feel like that’s, that’s it. And that’s the takeaway. So I don’t need to ask for another one.

TJ: Alright, I nailed it.

Karin: Awesome. Exactly. That was efficient. Did you use AI for that one?

TJ: Ne next time, next

Karin: Yeah. You’ll get it.

TJ: here. Yeah.

Karin: Awesome. TJ Robertson is the founder of TJ Digital, and, we will have all the links, including the link to your page on the collaborator section of the council cast, website and the episode page, and all of that good stuff. but thank you so much for being here.

TJ: Great. Yeah. Thank you for having me. It was a blast.

Karin: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Council Cast Podcast. Be sure to visit our website@councilcast.com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform.

See you on the next one.