How small and mid-sized firms keep tabs on competing attorneys, watch for practice-area expansion, and catch reputation changes — using a five-minute morning email instead of an associate's research hour.
See product details & pricing →Every senior partner has had the same Monday morning conversation: "Did you see McAllister Group hired someone from Cravath?" Sometimes it's true. Often it's three weeks old. And there's no shared process — one partner saw it on LinkedIn, another from a client, a third missed it entirely. Meanwhile, the firm two floors up just expanded into your busiest practice area and you'll find out at the next bar association lunch.
Most firms either ignore competitive intelligence entirely, or assign it to whoever's least busy — usually an associate or marketing coordinator who spends two hours every Monday tabbing through eight competitor websites, four Avvo profiles, Super Lawyers rankings, and the local Business Journal. The output is a Word document nobody reads, generated at a fully-loaded rate of $250/hr, that's stale by Tuesday morning.
It's all out there. The problem isn't access — it's the manual labor of watching for it. Competing firms broadcast their moves constantly:
But monitoring all of it manually is exactly the wrong job for a $250/hr resource.
Across personal injury, family, immigration, business, and criminal defense, these are the signals that actually predict competitive moves.
When a competitor adds a new practice area page to their website, they're announcing intent. A PI firm adding "Wrongful Death" usually means they hired or are recruiting a partner. A general practice adding "Trademark" means they're chasing your B2B clients.
Lateral movement between firms tells you who's building, who's losing, and which practice areas are heating up. New attorney-bio and "join our team" page changes on competitor websites are caught in the nightly check.
When a competing firm's Google rating moves or its review count jumps, their referral pipeline is heating up. Pay attention — yours is being compared.
Business Journal mentions, bar association newsletter notes, press releases about big verdicts — all moments when a competing firm gets a credibility bump that translates to referrals.
A surge of one-stars on a competitor in the same week is a market signal. A flood of five-stars suggests they ran a campaign you should know about. Weekly rating and review-count snapshots track velocity, not just totals.
Competing firms updating their consultation forms, pricing pages, or hero copy is a sign they're A/B testing for conversion. If their landing pages are getting better, your shared keywords are getting harder.
1. Identify your competitive set. Most firms have between five and ten direct competitors — usually the firms across the street, the firms across town with overlapping practice areas, and one or two regional players moving into your geography. We help you build that list (and adjust it as it shifts).
2. We watch the signals listed above. Competitor websites are checked every night and land in the next morning's brief; Google ratings and BBB are checked weekly; local news is searched for every competitor on your list.
3. AI ranks what's actually meaningful. A new associate hire matters. A typo fix on a competitor's About page doesn't. The AI is instructed to separate real competitive moves from cosmetic edits, so the email isn't noise.
4. You read five minutes a morning. Coffee in hand. You see what changed in your competitive landscape since the last brief — and you're done. No associate billing for "research time." No marketing-team Word docs nobody reads.
MyIntelBrief works for the firm shapes that don't have a competitive intelligence department:
Solo practitioners who need to know what the three firms taking their referrals are doing — without spending Sunday evenings reading bar association newsletters.
Boutique firms with two-to-six attorneys, where the managing partner does competitive intel as a side job and increasingly doesn't have time for it.
Mid-sized firms with formal marketing functions, where the CI work currently lands on a marketing coordinator's plate alongside seven other things. We replace the manual research, the coordinator does the strategic interpretation.
If you have ten attorneys or more, you may already have someone doing CI manually. The question is whether that person should be doing creative work or tab-switching between competitor websites.
Free demo first · 4 free weekly briefs for your email, no card · then from $39.99/mo, no long-term contract
Not ready for a card? Run the free demo, then get 4 free weekly briefs on your own business — just your email. Free for 4 weeks first. Pay only if you want more.
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