Prompt Engineering Mastery for Law Firms (Podcast)

This episode explores how lawyers can use prompt engineering frameworks to strengthen EEAT, improve content quality, and accelerate modern legal SEO strategies.

John Maher: Welcome to AI SEO for Law Firms, the podcast that cuts through the tech noise to give you the exact roadmap for dominating search everywhere optimization and landing high value cases. From McDougall Interactive, I’m John Maher, and with me today’s our founder, John McDougall. Today we’re talking about prompt engineering mastery. Hey, John.

John McDougall: Good morning, John.

What Prompt Engineering Means for Attorneys

Maher: Yeah, so John, what is prompt engineering and what can an attorney get out of mastering it?

McDougall: Prompt engineering is getting better at using prompts for AI in a way that’s more systematic. And one of the really big things you get out of AI in general is a higher IQ in a way or an assisted IQ. I think Peter Diamandis mentions, for example, like a 40 point increase or whatever it is, and that’s going to accelerate as we reach artificial general intelligence or the whatever you want to call it, a super intelligence type of thing. When you’re using AI, human plus AI assistance, you are more capable than just a person doing the same task in most cases.

You also get structure and speed. So for creating content, and we’re talking mostly about AI SEO for law firms kind of stuff. So you want to speed up your ability to make content and quality, thought leadership based content, and to satisfy Google EEAT. And so making a EEAT-ready outline for a blog post where you are showing Google that you’re an expert or first your experience, like your case studies or who you work with, that you’re an expert, that you’re an authority, and that you’re trustworthy. And Google actually says that trustworthiness, like your Google reviews and various trust factors, credibility factors to do win super lawyers type of thing, that’s the most important to Google out of those four things.

I would say the second most important is probably the experience which they added right after ChatGPT came out because it used to be experience, authority, and trustworthiness or authoritativeness. And they added that extra E because people can game the system with AI content, but it’s harder to game if you have to prove that you actually have experience. So anyway, I think AI can increase your IQ, your speed, and help you generate these kind of structured content workflows.

Generating High‑EEAT Legal Content with Better Prompts

Maher: So how do we use a prompt to generate content that to your point, actually guarantees high EEAT signals instead of just getting a generic outline?

McDougall: The key is to stop asking AI, “Just write a blog post,” and start using prompt engineering frameworks like the CRISPE model, sounds like a cereal, like CRISPE AI-Os or something like that. It’s an acronym, but it’s powerful because it forces us to be specific. CRISPE means we give the AI number one context–what’s the background, the role–who are you a lawyer, an SEO expert, the input–what data are you working with, the steps–what are the actions, persona–who are you talking to, examples or exceptions–what does the final output look like? And let me give you an example. We used the CRISPE framework to generate the entire strategic content plan for a book titled Your Family’s Guide to Medical Malpractice Lawsuits. Instead of generic filler, the AI acted as a seasoned SEO expert and gave us both the book structure in the exact podcast interview blueprint. And I’ll read the chapter titles and notice how each chapter is a high value topic designed to capture search traffic.

So Chapter 1, The Critical First Steps: Recognizing Medical Negligence, Statute of Limitations, Protecting Your Rights to File a Claim. Chapter 3, Proving Damages: Valuing Your Medical Malpractice Case. Chapter 4, The Litigation Process From Discovery to Trial. Chapter 5, Finding the Right Attorney: Credentials and Case Experience. Chapter 6, Final Resolution, settlements, verdicts, and appeals.

AI gave us a podcast plan and this is what we’d record for Chapter 2 for the book. The podcast title is Does the Clock Start Now: Navigating Statute of Limitations in Medical Law. And here are the five conversational questions it gave us designed to elicit comprehensive EEAT-rich answers for the book draft:

What is a statute of limitations? And you could make that a little longer, but just for brevity here in terms of the question. What are the typical risks involved if a family waits too long to contact an attorney? Can the statute be stopped or told for certain individuals such as minors or those under disability?

This integrated output proves that when you use a strategic framework like CRISPE, you get an authoritative multichannel content engine, not just a generic article. I won’t read the whole prompt, but you can get a downloadable list of the AI SEO prompts for your law firm on the blog post when this goes live with the transcript. And the prompt is pretty staggering that I generated, I was almost tempted to read the prompt in the podcast, but I think it’s over the top.

Maher: Yeah, you said it’s like almost a page long or something.

McDougall: Yeah, I mean it is just for kicks, but well, for the listeners you won’t get this, but for anybody watching the video, I mean it’s a full page and…

Maher: Gone are the days when you’re just searching in Google for one or two keywords.

McDougall: Yeah. But interestingly, I mean I think a lot of people are not aware of the level of depth you can use for prompting, so they’re just whipping off these little statements. I may be sort of extreme often when I’m using… I use Gemini app on my phone a lot and I use the pro version of that and the pro version of ChatGPT. I use Claude and Perplexity and Grok, a lot of things, but those two main ones all the time. And on my phone, I’m constantly talking to Gemini. You and I have joked, you’re like, “John, really? Again, we’re having a conversation.” I have to stop to use AI. It’s almost absurd at this point, but I’m like, “I need my IQ boost.” It’s like I need my coffee.

But some of my prompts are almost absurd like when I’m just home alone in the morning and before my family wakes up and I’m just talking to Gemini maybe for business advice, McKinsey level business strategy advice, whatever. My prompts sometimes are way over the top. It might take me five minutes to just talk into… I’m giving it so much context and I get these wild, deep research things. I mean, sometimes I’ll just turn it on to thinking mode so it just comes back quickly. But deep research in Gemini is incredible. I do them every day and I have these Google Docs where the output is this massive amount of research and that’s the big shift really with old SEO and using Google is like you search and 10 blue links come up and you click them and you have to go do all this work.

But robots are now doing that work for us, and I’m kind of using it as crutch and I’m running an SEO agency for 30 years now. But I don’t think it’s bad news for us because if we were selling only the old SEO, it would be bad news, but we’re helping people get at the top of AI. But the point is that prompts can be very long. You can make them very off the cuff and they’re probably going to be reasonably effective. But the CRISPE framework will work better I think, and frameworks like it, and that’ll work, whether it’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Claude. Claude is a really good one for writing. Sounds a little more human in some ways. Anyway, so those are some tips for that.

Maher: I think one of the things that people, and maybe lawyers in general, forget with this is that you get out of something what you put into it.

McDougall: That’s a good way to phrase it.

Maher: That’s kind a common phrase that you think of, but it’s really true with AI as well that the I in CRISPE, that input is so important. And for example, we recently had some changes in the industry that we needed to do for a client and kind of revise their homepage text a little bit. And when I just sort of generically said like, “Hey, give me some advice for how to revise the homepage because of this and this,” it gave me some generic text back. But when I inputted the transcript from a conversation that we had with the client and inputted that to get the client’s exact thoughts into the AI model, then what it spit back was much, much better and was much closer and more aligned with what the client was thinking and what we know what their thoughts and their knowledge were. So yeah, I think that a lot of people don’t realize that you can actually upload Word documents and things like that into AI.

McDougall: Talk about context. You gave it… How long was that call we had with the client? Like an hour?

Maher: Yeah, it was an hour-long call or something like that, and we put the whole transcript into the AI and said, “Now, use this to help us to reframe the home page text.” And it was like, “Oh, okay, well, based on that I would change this, this, and this.” And it was much, much better. The output was much better in that case.

McDougall: We’re able to show that to the client very quickly and then say, “If you like the structure, let’s give much more human input now and we want to be careful.”

Maher: Now, let’s have our writer actually write it and make it sound good.

McDougall: Right. And I think it sounded pretty good, what you came up with, pretty quickly, and it was so intelligent how it was able to, in a very abbreviated way, get the key points across. But yeah, then give it that… If it’s on the right track, then give it the human touch and you’re golden.

Human Guardrails Lawyers Need for Safe AI Use

Maher: Right. So obviously given that, we can’t just, like you said, give it a short prompt and get back output and then just go and hit publish and just publish this generic AI content. What are some of the key human guardrails that lawyers must have to maintain factual accuracy and avoid penalties?

McDougall: Well, obviously human guardrails, right? Because there are hallucinations, and again, you and I joke all the time how I’m sometimes over the top using AI for everything, for the research, again. I don’t push the easy button, it makes stupid AI slop. It’s like the opposite of what we do. We do podcasts and videos and thought-leader content and we use AI for the assisting of it. But having done so much of it and being so excited by the IQ boost, I’ve also started to get pissed off lately too because I made a research list of websites the other day and I was so excited that it gave me this amazing list of certain types of sites.

And then I go to click them and half of them are freaking 404 errors. They’re not even live. So I mean, you got to be very careful what you’re publishing. Obviously for a lawyer, it’s a whole nother level. Or another guardrail would be HIPAA compliance or all kinds of things. And lawyers, you guys know this, but you got to be careful throwing into AI like private information. You can, to a degree, mitigate some of that with like in ChatGPT, you go to the settings and you turn off allow us to use your conversations in AI to train our model.

I think that’s a nice little guardrail for starters to not feed AI everything you’re saying to it. But the main thing is think of the AI output as a draft and a very helpful way to get things sped up, but by no means just trust everything it says. You can get into quick trouble. And lawyers, there are some famous lawyer examples of totally made-up case studies. They’re insane, right? Certain things at trial. I forget some of the examples, but pretty outrageous. Can get disbarred if you don’t fact check.

Advanced Prompt Engineering for Competitive Legal SEO

Maher: Right. So beyond creating new content, what’s one advanced way that we can use prompt engineering for a quick competitive edge?

McDougall: I’d give two examples. So they both fall under competitive and conversion gap analysis, meaning a fundamental principle or tactic of SEO for many really decades is putting keywords into the title tag, the meta description, the heading, the first sentence, the bullets, the text. And then over time, it became you need to use LSI keywords. I don’t know, what was that, John? I don’t know, 15 or so years ago. We’re like, wow, we say LSI, people think we’re fancy, an algorithm, but LSI is like latent semantic indexing or semantically-related keywords. So that very early SEO is like this exact keyword you stuff in like medical malpractice or personal injury lawyer, dog bite lawyer, MA, over and over and over and people… Early SEO, you kind of get away with a lot of that and you’re over kind of stuffing. I mean, we were never very… We tried to be classy about it.

That was one of our from 21 years ago when you started with me, we’re like, “Hey, we’re putting the keywords in but we’re careful about how we do it.” But that early days of that was put in these exact keywords or one phrase eight times or whatever it was, we weren’t big on keyword density. Only in the ’90s when I used WebPositionGold, did we do that, like way back. But now AI can take what was a semi lame keyword density analyzer and just put this one keyword the right amount of times or Yoast has that, right, like the WordPress plugins and people like… Oh, well, we had that one client where they had an marketing assistant and when she started working with us, she was just out of college and she wanted to impress, I think, the team. And she’s like, “I saw in Yoast that the keyword density is wrong on some of that’s content you’re creating.”

We’re like, we’re ranking for 15,000 keywords worth $150,000 a month and we’ve got a thousand-page website that when we started was a 50-page website. Let’s not get overly wound up about the exact keyword density that Yoast or like SEO plugin pack, whatever tool, Rank Math something says. But with that said, I think one of the cool things about AI is you can put in, if you want to rank for let’s say intellectual property lawyer or again dog bite lawyer Massachusetts, you take your competitors, search Google for that, find a couple top three ranked pages, feed it to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever and your page and say, “Tell me what they’re doing for SEO that I’m not doing.”

And even if you want reoptimize my page to be more in line with the right main… Given the target main keyword. And we’re not only doing that now, we’re asking. We’re trying to rank for questions that people are asking in AI. You can use Answer the Public to come up with those questions, et cetera. But anyway, you feed the keywords and the questions you want to come up for. You show AI the competitors pages and your page and then you say, “Optimize it.” There are other tools like Rankability. You could put that into a tool or like surfer SEO, like similar. I think MarketMuse might do the same, where it will show you the keywords that are missing but in a very simple way without all these other tools, just ask for what you need to do that you’re not doing versus the competitor. So that’s like on-page SEO gap. You can just do keyword gap too.

We use Semrush typically for that, but you could just say what keywords does their website use that I don’t? That’s another one. But for the final piece of this is conversion optimization. You can do the similar gap analysis. So take those same pages that you just grabbed. Sometimes you can just technically tell AI like crawl and then put the URL and it will force ChatGPT to crawl the page. Or you could put it in Word Docs or PDF or something like the competitors pages. Hit the ad files. That’s a simple way to do it if you want to guarantee you just get it right in there. Like, hey, here are these three documents of the three competitors pages and my page. And now instead of analyzing the on-page SEO or the keywords, analyze for their conversion optimization and persuasion principles because Google is not only looking at content and backlinks to your website.

And now with AI, are you AI structured with key takeaways and things like that? But they’re looking at your user experience, your load time. Do you load ideally in under two seconds minimum you got to be loading in under three seconds. But Google has stated in the Department of Justice inquiries with them that they rank based on content links and user experiences is another one. So both for purposes of ranking better in Google and just getting more customers from the same amount of either SEO clicks or ad spend, Google Ads or meta ads going to your website. If you want your website to convert better, you say, “What are the conversion optimization tactics that my competitors are using?” And again, you could say, think a conversion rate expert like Brian Eisenberg, our teacher from our master certification or Tim Ash. There’s different conversion experts. So think this type of person and tell me what to do. And you might put in more context. For example, do they use persuasive headings with the customer language like the word you, not we do this and we do that, but we, we, weeing all over yourself.

The story brand kind of thing. You speak in the words of the customer and to the customer. You’re having a real conversation. A lot of people don’t know to do that. So the law firms like, “Since 1995, we’ve done this.” I’ve been guilty of that, but now I know better that you want to say you’re having this problem and maybe agitate that problem and then show them your solution. And then the various six principles of influence from Dr. Cialdini, you could even mention that in the prompt like keep an eye out for things like social proof and authority and reciprocity. Do they have an ebook or some top of the funnel call to action, not just free consultation? Do they have live chat? What are the various calls to action they have? What are their value propositions compared to ours? Again, do they speak in you language or only me, me, me language?

And then you’ll get back a whole list of things that you can do to improve your website and you can immediately go make changes to your site and get a lift in conversions. And if you’re spending a lot of money with lawyer clicks costing sometimes hundreds of dollars or even tens of dollars, even 20, 30, 50 bucks a click’s a lot of money, you want to increase your conversion rate. So that’s an awesome use of AI because most people haven’t studied conversion optimization like with the books that we have on that. So those are other things to do.

AI Tools Beyond ChatGPT for Law Firms

Maher: So lawyers are probably familiar with the basic AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT. What are some other AI tools that law firms can use prompts with?

McDougall: Yeah, there are, I think it’s estimated over 14,000 AI tools right now and many AI SEO tools. Overwhelming, right? But I would say big buckets that we’ve been teaching and studying ourselves and then teaching, we have a course in Massachusetts through the workforce training fund where you can study with us for free, technically, and we’re teaching various AI tools. And one cool thing that we’re teaching that I love is vibe coding and Replit and Lovable are the more like user-friendly for your non-programmer… You and I can program a little bit, but we’re not full-time programmers. So Lovable and Replit, you talk to the vibe coding tool and it’s kind of an odd thing to say, vibe coding. Some people in the industry don’t love it, but you basically give it the vibe of what you want. Think like like a SEO agency owner and give me a set of free SEO tools for your… Give me a list of free SEO tool ideas that I can create for link pinned on my website.

And we did this, we have a mcdougallinteractive.com/free-seo-tools and they were made with AI and we were doing that years ago, but it was so expensive. Now, it’s crazy. You just talk to the robot and it just makes these tools, it’s incredible. And then you can either post the Replit or Lovable link or you can embed them into your site. But again, it’s a prompt and you talk back and forth and it outputs programming code. For lawyers, an example is like a map. We did like a dog bite map of what to do after you get bit by a dog in Massachusetts on the North Shore. Where do you go in each town? You can click on the town and you see the dog related-

Maher: The animal control officer.

McDougall: …animal control and all that. Yeah. And the laws, now there are certain leash law type of situation is a little different in different towns and I knew some of that, but actually making the map made us more aware of that. And of course we’re using AI to scrape that stuff. So that’s where the human guardrails come back in and we have to go back and forth with our attorneys and make sure that that’s accurate. But it’s pretty crazy that we can put these widgety funky things on the website in outreach to the local media and get local backlinks and national backlinks and public relations from that. And that again, starts with a prompt in talking to a robot. So Lovable and Replit for that.

And our latest presentation we gave for social law library, like a CLE type of thing on AI SEO for law firms. I used Gamma, I think it has 50 million users. And I just talked to the robot Gamma, I think it’s gamma.ai, and it was crazy. I mean, I gave it my script for a YouTube video I’m about to make like the 10 key things to know about AI SEO for law firms and it took that and made a presentation in front of my eyes. It was crazy. It was populating with images and everything, like a 60-slide presentation.

Now, I had to do some work to refine it, and at first it was… Actually, we gave it also to Salem State College Enterprise Center, and we wanted to make a non-lawyer version of it. So I was able to, after a lot of going back and forth talking to the robot to take its first draft of the presentation and then make it better, then I’m like, oh, I need a version where you kind of strip out the so focused for lawyers, but instead of having to go into PowerPoint and just do all that, you just talk to it. It’s crazy. I was able to export it to present in PowerPoint, which I prefer because Gamma, it’s like an online responsive thing. You can scroll up and down. The slides are more like a website. But anyway, so Gamma is another one. Nano Banana, if you haven’t tried it, is out of control.

It’s an image generation tool where, I mean, it’s just staggering. I’ll give an example in eCommerce to not a lawyer thing, but just to show what it can do. If you take a woman in a yoga outfit and you want to sell prom dresses, you can just say, “Here’s an image of a woman in the yoga outfit. Here’s an image of the prom dress we sell. Put that same woman,” it might be your model or someone at your store. You just put her in this dress, now have her sitting on a bed or sitting in a chair, whatever. Now, put her in a T-shirt. It’s crazy. These tools are… We had to make some pictures of a certain type of house, and it was amazing. We couldn’t find it in Stock Photos, but Nano Banana did it right away. And there’s prompt text to image.

So you can create a brand new image or again, upload an image and then manipulate the image. But what the AI can do that a graphic designer would’ve cost a lot of money or an ad agency to do, and right in front of your eyes is just mind-boggling now. Same with the last one I’ll mention. I mean, that’s again, thousands that are out there and maybe a hundred that we use or so. Google Veo 3 is crazy for video. And I think we’re kind of at the point where we’re getting at that point where people can make their own Hollywood movies in a way. I mean, it’s going to take a while, but some people are doing it certainly right now. Google Veo 3 gives you pretty short clips. There is a way to extend them, but you just using a prompt, describe the type of video you want.

You could say, have John Maher and John McDougall from McDougall Interactive at a lemonade stand selling their book, make it funny. Like it’s something about our law firm marketing book. Just whatever you can imagine. And in front of the lemonade stand, have a volcano with lava and bang, it’s right there. And then just one law firm example. So it’s really fun just for family, just for goofing around. But Justin, one of our paid search managers did one, because I was pushing, I’m always pushing the counterbalancing when we do ads. Not only Google pay-per-click ads for lawyers because they’re so expensive, still very effective in many cases, but meta ads can be a pretty good deal. But prompting with Veo 3 to make Facebook ad videos and Justin made one with Bigfoot, and I mean, it’s goofy. So I mean, not every lawyer is going to do this. I mean, our mesothelioma lawyer client, for example, is not going to have Bigfoot on a goofy thing when people are dying of cancer.

But for auto accidents, I mean it’s a little looser. You’ll see kind of a trend of people on Instagram. Some of our clients like some of the slightly goofy stuff. Some of it gets over the top silly, but it was actually crazy effective like the cost per lead was crazy low and it was Bigfoot first, like, “Hey, when you get in a car accident,” blah, blah, blah. And then he’s skydiving, the next slide, the next little scene, he’s skydiving, he’s still talking. And when you look at it, you think this is just kind of stupid and goofy, but it’s killing it. I mean, the conversion rate is crazy.

Maher: It really catches people’s attention.

McDougall: Because it turns people’s heads. It’s that head turning kind of thing. The scroll stopping when people are in Facebook. So depending on the audience, again, your typical local car accident client, that’s fine. Or you could make more sophisticated ones like we do some things, explainer videos on mesothelioma and lung cancer and things like that. AI-assisted stuff like that is fantastic. And again, it comes down to that CRISPE model again, or just giving it the persona and some context at the very least. So I’ll leave it at that. But those tools alone will give you just a massive amount of increase in IQ and just creativity and output and then rankings, and of course leads from that.

Maher: All right, well, that’s really great information, John. Thanks again for speaking with me today.

McDougall: Sounds good, John. Talk to you later.

Maher: And thanks again for joining us on AI SEO for Law Firms. If you’re ready to stop losing high-value cases because of outdated SEO, subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And for a deeper look at your firm’s current AI strategy, visit mcdougallinteractive.com for a free audit.