Editorial: if lawyers don't publish, AI will answer for them
Editorial: with 63% of Spanish citizens asking AI about legal matters, firms that do not publish have ceased to exist where the client decides.
Something has quietly changed in how legal clients find lawyers. It did not arrive with a new law, nor with a scandal, nor with a price war. It arrived through a window every user opens without thinking: the AI assistant on their phone.
The number that should keep us up at night
Sixty-three percent of Spanish citizens have already asked an artificial intelligence about a legal matter, according to recent sector studies. Not about the weather, not about recipes: about their inheritance, their dismissal, their neighbour, their divorce. And the AI answers them. It answers everyone, at any hour, with a confidence that does not always correspond to accuracy.
The question every managing partner should be asking this morning is simple: when that citizen's AI answers, whose voice is it repeating?
The map nobody drew
Language models do not invent their answers out of nothing. They synthesise what they have found: publications, guides, articles, rulings explained by someone. Firms that have spent years publishing serious analyses of their specialties are, without knowing it, part of the raw material from which those answers are built. Firms that published nothing do not exist on that map.
This is not a theory about the future. It is the mechanics of the present: the client who once Googled "lawyer inheritance Madrid" and compared five websites now asks their assistant and gets one answer. And that answer is built from whoever explained the subject clearly, with verifiable sources and with their name attached.
Publishing was always marketing; now it is infrastructure
For decades, writing articles was seen as the firm's marketing: something partners with time did, an extra that brought occasional prestige. That reading is obsolete. In the new discovery channel, the firm's public knowledge is its infrastructure: what the machines know about you.
A firm specialising in inheritance that has never published a single analysis of the regional variations in forced-heirship rules does not appear when a thousand citizens ask about their inheritance in Asturias or Andalusia. Another firm will. Or worse: an anonymous, unsourced answer will appear, and the client will decide with it.
The trap of keeping quiet "to protect knowledge"
The classic argument against publishing has always been the same: why give away what we bill for? The argument had some logic when the client arrived by referral and the knowledge stayed in the firm. Today it is self-defeating. The citizen who finds your analysis does not stop needing a lawyer; they become a client who already knows you know. And the citizen who finds nothing finds nothing: they will not attribute your silence to prudence, but to absence.
Knowledge hoarded in a drawer feeds no model, attracts no client and differentiates no firm. Knowledge published with rigour does all three.
What publishing well means in 2026
Not everything goes. Publishing for the sake of it, with generic texts a model itself could have written, adds nothing: the AI does not need your filler and the client can tell. What has value is what only a practising professional can contribute: the doctrine applied to real cases, the criteria that do not appear in the manual, the nuance of how the courts in your province are deciding, the honest warning about what can go wrong.
Rigour is also strategy. In a market flooded with synthetic text, verified content with sources and a signature is the scarcest asset. Search engines and models are learning to distinguish it, and clients already distinguish it.
The decision
Every firm will decide whether its knowledge exists outside its walls. Some will decide not to publish and will keep living off their referral network, which is legitimate. But they should know what they are deciding: to cede the space where tomorrow's client is forming their criteria today.
AI is going to answer citizens' legal questions with or without the profession's participation. The only open question is whose knowledge it will answer with. That is decided not in the courtroom or at the notary's office, but in something much more modest: whether this week someone at the firm sits down to write, rigorously and with their name attached, about what they know best.
