Unscripted SEO · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Lem Garcia, personal injury attorney and owner of Lem Garcia Law
When Lem Garcia opened his own personal injury practice in 2014, most of the firms around him had almost no reviews on Yelp or Google. He saw the gap and went all in on it. On this episode of Unscripted SEO, Lem walks through how that early bet on reviews shaped his firm in the Los Angeles area, why he thinks content written by an agency at volume all starts to sound the same, and how a $1,000 scholarship turned into links from colleges. We also get into AI, what it might do to legal staff, and whether Skynet is real. (He says yes.)
Lem didn’t come from a family of lawyers. He majored in journalism because he wanted to tell other people’s stories, then decided he could make more of an impact with a law degree. He graduated in 2011, had a hard time finding a job, and opened his own office. The people walking in mostly needed help after car accidents, so he moved his practice to personal injury full time.
Reviews were the gap nobody else was filling
I asked Lem how he adapted his marketing as clients moved from the phone book to the web. His answer was specific. He noticed that firms weren’t collecting reviews yet, and he decided to get more than all of them:
“And that was really what made me have the capacity to build the practice where it is today, is to focus in on the reviews before everybody else was doing it.”
The method wasn’t clever. Do a good job, then consistently ask clients to leave the review. That’s it. The catch is that it stopped being an edge once other firms caught on. Lem calls what came next a “really big arms race”: whoever can get the most reviews, and whoever can produce the most and best content, ranks higher.
He also named the problem that comes with an arms race. When I asked about his biggest challenge of the last five years, he said it’s competing in a market where some of the reviews out there “may not always be left by previous clients.” His own rule is to do it properly so the firm lasts: “it’s also the right thing to do, of course.” I told him about a business owner I’d consulted with who paid for spam blog comments on Fiverr, and yes, that page did move. You can move the needle with junk. I’d still rather find partners, podcasts and local events that hold up.
Content that sounds like you is how you stand out
Personal injury looks a lot like car dealerships to me. One firm in one city is doing roughly what another firm is doing two towns over. So how do you stand apart? Lem’s answer is that most firms look at their competition and copy it, and the copy is the problem. Somebody shopping for a lawyer might visit five websites, and yours has to read differently from the other four.
He was blunt about volume content. If you hire a company that’s going to crank out content for ten firms this month, “all that content is going to be very similar.” His fix:
“But if you’re writing the content yourself or you have a lot of sit-down meetings with the writer, then you’ll be able to have content that does stand out to the potential customers.”
You don’t have to write every word. You do have to know the message you want to deliver, and you have to put it in front of whoever is writing.
A $1,000 scholarship that earns links from colleges
When I asked Lem for the most creative marketing he’d tried, he went straight to his scholarship. Students write an essay about making an impact in the field of law after they graduate, and the winner gets $1,000. The students get help. The firm gets something too:
“through the scholarship we’re getting backlinks from from the university to the colleges that post that scholarship”
Lem also does the offline version: booths at the mall, at running events, at local high schools, middle schools and junior colleges, wherever the community is holding something. And he mentioned youth baseball and other local teams, whose websites can link back to a sponsor. I pointed him to ZipSprout, which surfaces local sponsorship opportunities by city, from art walks to fun runs to canned food drives. I wrote more about the scholarship side on SEO Arcade, and Dmytro Perepelytsia’s episode on local backlinks covers the partner side.
AI isn’t new to his clients, it’s just faster
I asked Lem whether he worries about clients getting bad legal information from ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. He doesn’t, at least not yet. People have always walked in saying they heard something on the internet. AI is the same habit, just more advanced:
“I think clients understand that they’re still looking things up on the internet and AI is just putting all those things together and ultimately they still do trust the advice of a professional.”
That puts more weight on how your own experience comes through in your marketing, because that’s the part an AI answer doesn’t carry. If you want to know what the assistants are actually saying about your firm, it’s worth checking your visibility in ChatGPT on a schedule rather than guessing.
Staffing is where Lem gets worried. Today the output still needs a lawyer to review it. As it gets more accurate, the oversight shrinks, and he thinks that’s “a really big concern for the industry,” for paralegals, legal assistants and attorneys alike. His firm doesn’t use AI tools right now. He’d rather have a person do those tasks, and he’s keeping a very close eye on it.
The bubble that explodes instead of bursting
I brought up the dot-com bubble and the pets.com sock puppet. Is AI a bubble that pops, or a real shift? Lem didn’t hedge:
“Instead of a bubble bursting, it’s gonna be a bubble exploding and just taking over.”
Then, when I mentioned the robot-uprising movies we all grew up on: “Skynet’s real.” His other line stuck with me more. When the car showed up, the horse and carriage companies said it’d be fine. “What happened to them?” Don’t be a buggy whip manufacturer. I wrote about the bubble question from the small business side in SEO inside the AI bubble.
Lem is growing his Southern California practice and hopes to expand to Northern California once the systems at his current office are solid. Find him at lemgarcialaw.com or on Instagram at @lemgarcialaw. 🎧 Listen to the full episode or watch it on YouTube, and subscribe to Unscripted SEO so you catch the next one.
Lem Garcia’s comments are his own views on marketing and the legal industry. Nothing in this episode or article is legal advice.
