Originality.ai, which has a tool that detects AI-generated and plagiarized content, released a report in April showing a dramatic rise in AI-written reviews for U.S.-based law firms. It was the first report from the company about law firms.
According to the report, the volume of AI-generated law firm reviews has surged by 1,586% since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
In the first few months of 2025 alone, the report estimates that AI likely wrote 34.4% of all online law firm reviews.
To conduct this study, Originality.ai used an application called RapidAPI to pull about 5,000 samples of Google business reviews of law firms between 2020 and 2025 in bulk. Madeleine Lambert, director of marketing and sales at Originality.ai, noted that some generative AI tools existed before the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022. The rate of AI-written reviews before 2022 was low, the study found.
The company then cleaned up the list to make it scannable and fed it into its tool, where it identified the law firm reviews that had a high probability of being written by AI.
While the tool can flag reviews that were likely composed by AI, it has a key limitation: It can't determine the intent behind the reviews. That means it can't distinguish between a genuine client that used AI to help write reviews and potentially deceptive reviews authored by the law firms themselves.
Speaking to Law360 Pulse, Lambert posed the question, "Does that mean that people are just getting better at leaving reviews, or does that mean that there's some sort of manipulation happening?"
Originality.ai found that the top practice areas where AI review is most prevalent are personal injury, criminal law, immigration law and family law. Although the study couldn't identify the size of the law firms with AI-written reviews, Lambert said it appeared that the firms in the study are mostly smaller based on those practice areas.
Of the cities analyzed in the study, Boston had the highest percentage of AI law office reviews at 58.3%. The researchers determined that by analyzing the prevalence around a geolocation.
A representative from the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, the organization in the state that maintains lawyers' ethical standards, declined to comment.
In one striking example shared with Law360 Pulse, Originality.ai flagged a 2025 review for an unnamed Arkansas-based small law firm. The review opened with the phrase, "Here is the revised review," which is a telltale sign, the company said, that the user had pasted output directly from an AI prompt. The language, Originality.ai noted, is consistent with default phrasing generated by tools like ChatGPT when revising text.
"We call that the smoking gun example," Lambert said.
A representative from the Arkansas Bar Association did not respond to Law360 Pulse's request for comment.
Lambert said the company's researchers pick contentious industries that people generally don't like for their sector studies. This is to inform consumers about what they might encounter when hiring these services.
"People don't like having to hire a lawyer," Lambert said. "It's a lot of money to spend on a lawyer."
Assuming some of the AI-written reviews were fabricated, there could potentially be ethical violations.
Hilary P. Gerzhoy, a partner at HWG LLP who serves as chair of the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee and a member of the American Bar Association's Ethics and Professional Responsibility Committee, told Law360 Pulse that she's never heard of lawyers using AI to write reviews, but several ethical standards pertain to this.
Rule 7.1 of the ABA's Model Rules of Professional Conduct prohibits lawyers from making false or misleading communications about their services.
"A lawyer is equally prohibited from instructing a third party — AI or otherwise — to do what a lawyer himself cannot do," Gerzhoy wrote in an email to Law360 Pulse.
Steven Badger, a partner with Barnes & Thornburg LLP and former chair of the Indiana State Bar Association Legal Ethics Committee, said that posting an AI-generated review of a lawyer's services is problematic under Rule 7.1.
"Under the rule, even a truthful statement is misleading if it omits a fact necessary to make the statement as a whole not materially misleading," Badger wrote in an email to Law360 Pulse. "I think most people assume that a review is written by an actual client, which wouldn't be true with a review generated by AI."
Additional ABA comments on Rule 7.1 also say that communication that "truthfully reports a lawyer's achievements" could be deemed misleading if it creates unjustified expectations about client results.
Furthermore, it is also a Rule 7.1 violation to make unsubstantiated claims about services that would lead someone to believe that those claims are substantiated.
Gerzhoy said that to the extent that firms are using AI-generated reviews and holding them out as client reviews, that implicates Rule 8.4(c), which prohibits conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.
"A client testimonial must be a verbatim quote," Gerzhoy said. "Those verbatim quotes need to come with disclaimers if they create unjustified expectations."
The rise of AI-created law firm reviews might leave potential clients in a bind. Lambert said consumers shopping around for a lawyer should take online reviews with a grain of salt.
As for law firms that encourage clients to leave reviews, Lambert said they should tell clients that using AI to write actual reviews could hurt business credibility.
And of course, using AI to make fictitious reviews is extremely problematic.
"If you are generating your own reviews to basically manipulate the review ecosystem, that is going to catch up with you and it's going to hurt you in the long run," Lambert said.
--Editing by Robert Rudinger.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Gerzhoy's title on the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee. The error has been corrected.
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