The Empty Wall
On August 21, 1911 (115 years ago next week, if you’re looking for an email idea)…someone stole the Mona Lisa.
More than a century later, it sounds like the heist of the millennium.
But Leonardo da Vinci’s painting occupied a very different place in the culture back then.
Per historian James Zug, “The ‘Mona Lisa’ wasn’t even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre.”
In fact, it took 28 hours for anyone to realize it was gone.
But something shifted.
Newspapers around the world covered the theft. J.P. Morgan was a suspect. Pablo Picasso was questioned. Some people even wondered whether the German Kaiser was involved.
And when the Louvre reopened after being closed for a week, crowds rushed inside to see…
The empty wall where the painting used to be.
The painting itself hadn’t changed, but awareness of it had. According to Zug, da Vinci’s painting became famous “literally overnight.”
There’s a useful lesson here for law firm owners:
Attention creates value.
Not competence or expertise. Not even actual value.
Attention.
There are enormously talented lawyers doing terrific work every day…and in most cases, nobody outside their immediate circle knows about it.
So how do you solve it?
Here’s what we recommend to all our clients:
Show up every week.
One email is easy to ignore. An email every week for a year means someone encounters your name 52 times. Familiarity accumulates, so by the time they need a lawyer, you aren’t just the person who helped them out eight years ago…you’re the person who’s been emailing them personal stories and practical insights each and every week.
Give people something to remember.
Don’t make every email a legal FAQ. Talk about yourself. Your kids. Or the dog you treat like your son. Share strange cases. Talk about mistakes, victories, movies, clients, hobbies—or write about an art heist that took place over a century ago. Give people an anecdote that sticks, and they’ll remember it. And when they remember it, they’ll remember you.
Be who you say you are.
As you work to establish your voice in emails or LinkedIn posts or anywhere else you’re sharing more information about who you are, make sure the version of yourself clients are developing a relationship with and coming to trust is the person you are in real life. If you’re working with a talented team to channel your voice (no judgement here!), just make sure they do the work of figuring out who the person that’s speaking really is. Otherwise, when a potential client does meet you in person, the goodwill you’ve cultivated could be squandered.
And if you’re still afraid to write about who you are, or are worried whatever you write won’t be considered high class, high quality, or high art, never forget: People lined up outside the Louvre to look at an empty wall.
We start every client relationship with a 1-hour creative call, giving us a chance to walk a mile in our client’s shoes so we can write 500 words in them.
Four Quick Email Ideas: Robert Redford Edition
Here are four emails you can write next week (he’d have been 90 on Tuesday, August 18), or next month (to commemorate the first anniversary of his passing on September 16).
All the President’s Men
Redford’s Woodward and Dustin Hoffman’s Bernstein don’t crack the Watergate scandal through one brilliant revelation. They keep pulling threads, checking records, calling sources, and finding small details that eventually become impossible to ignore. Can you think of a case where a seemingly minor fact, document, deposition answer, medical record, timestamp, etc. eventually became part of a much larger narrative? What was the detail? How did you find it? What would have happened if nobody had looked closely enough?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Redford and Paul Newman as Butch and Sundance are used to outrunning everyone—until they encounter people who simply refuse to quit…and it ends up costing them in the end. Have you ever faced opposing counsel, an insurance carrier, a prosecutor, or another party who was unusually relentless? Or have you been the person who refused to let something go? Tell the story of a case where persistence mattered more than brilliance. When did you realize, “This isn’t going away”?
The Sting
Look…you don’t need an angle here. Everyone should write emails about the Sting all the time. The angle can be “Have you seen this movie? If not, stop reading and go see it.” But if you need a different angle, this incredible long-con of a film depends on a powerful man believing a version of events that has been carefully constructed for him in another classic featuring Redford and Newman. Can you think of an instance when a case similarly hinged on a jury’s perception of which story was the real one? Or fell apart at the last second because of a masterfully told lie?
The Natural
Look…you don’t need an angle here either. The Natural is a classic, especially as MLB post-season rolls around. Redford’s Roy Hobbs loses years of his career before finally getting another opportunity to become the player he thought he could be. Can you recall a client whose case represented a genuine chance to rebuild after something went badly wrong? Or, more personally, was there a point in your own career when you thought you’d missed an opportunity—only to get another shot later?
DRATGPT
No matter your opinion on AI tools and LLMs, you’ll want to pay attention to news coming out of Germany.
A Munich court recently held that Google could be directly liable for allegedly false statements generated by its AI Overview feature.
The reasoning is important: Google wasn’t simply providing a link to somebody else’s information. Its AI had taken information, synthesized it, and produced a new answer.
A wrong one.
Drat!
Germany’s media regulator has now gone a step further, saying that AI-generated summaries from services like Google and Perplexity should be treated as content created by those companies themselves.
While German media law shouldn’t necessarily dictate how you/your firm operate when it comes to AI, the principle behind the decision (which Google has appealed) feels increasingly relevant regardless of where you practice: just because you’ve outsourced the writing doesn’t mean you’ve offloaded the responsibility.
As firms use ChatGPT or Claude or other up-and-coming tools to do more than just brainstorm a few ideas for blog posts. Lawyers are using AI to write emails, summarize documents, create website copy, prepare client communications, and answer questions that may eventually leave the building with the firm’s name attached.
Imagine ChatGPT drafts an email to your clients and invents a statistic (seen it).
Or gets a deadline wrong (seen it).
Or summarizes a new law incorrectly (definitely have seen it).
Or straight up cites cases that don’t exist (YIKES).
The individuals impacted aren’t going to think, “Wow…more like DratGPT, am I right?”
Wrong.
As far as they’re concerned, your firm said it. The technology may explain where the mistake originated, but it doesn’t magically transfer ownership of the mistake somewhere else.
This isn’t meant to be read as an argument against using AI.
But the more capable these tools become, the more important it is to establish a very simple internal rule: AI can help create. But a human still has to own.
Somebody should know what is being sent, why it says what it says, and whether they’re comfortable putting the firm’s reputation behind it.
“DratGPT” may eventually become one of the most common explanations for how a mistake happened.
But that doesn’t mean it’ll ever become a good excuse.
How are you using AI? How are you safe-guarding against the things it still gets wrong? Reply and let us know!