Van den Berg & Associes, a 7-lawyer corporate and commercial law firm in Brussels with expertise in EU regulatory affairs, M&A transactions, and employment law for international companies, had a strong track record with multinational clients and Belgian SMEs undergoing international expansion. The firm's website was professional and compliant with Belgian Bar Association guidelines on lawyer marketing. Its LinkedIn presence was active. Its referral network was well-maintained.
The problem the managing partner identified in early 2026 was structural: the firm's prospective clients, international companies establishing in Belgium and Belgian companies navigating EU regulatory requirements, were sophisticated, research-oriented buyers who increasingly used AI assistants for initial supplier identification. When the managing partner tested queries like "corporate law firm Brussels EU regulatory," "employment lawyer Belgium international company," or "M&A legal advice Brussels English-speaking," Van den Berg & Associes did not appear. Firms with broader marketing budgets and less relevant specializations did.
AISOS was engaged for a 70-day implementation designed around the specific compliance constraints of Belgian Bar Association guidelines on lawyer marketing, which prohibit certain forms of comparative advertising and self-promotional claims. The engagement required a strategy that was both AI-effective and Bar-compliant. Our guide on AI visibility for professional services and our AI visibility overview framed the approach. See also our Brussels AI visibility page.
The Challenge
Legal services AI visibility in Belgium faces two compounding challenges: regulatory compliance constraints on lawyer marketing, and the trilingual nature of the Brussels legal market. The Bar Association guidelines limit the type of comparative claims and self-promotional language that legal marketing content can contain. This rules out many standard AI visibility content tactics. At the same time, the Brussels corporate legal market operates in French, Dutch, and English simultaneously, and prospective clients use all three languages in AI queries. A monolingual AI visibility strategy misses a significant portion of the addressable market.
The AI visibility audit at the start of the engagement tested 45 queries across three languages and four practice area categories: EU regulatory, M&A, employment law, and commercial contracts. Van den Berg & Associes appeared in 5 of the 45 queries (11%). In English-language queries, the firm appeared in 2 of 15, always as an uncontextualized mention. In French-language queries, 2 of 15. In Dutch-language queries, 1 of 15. Practice area-specific queries showed the most severe gap: EU regulatory queries returned 0 appearances in 12 despite this being the firm's strongest specialization.
The diagnostic identified three root causes: no structured practice area content that AI systems could use to match queries to specializations; no multilingual structured data reflecting the firm's trilingual capability; and no presence in the non-directory, editorial sources that AI systems use to validate professional services quality in regulated sectors. Understanding AEO for regulated professional services within the constraint of Bar Association compliance requirements shaped every content decision in the engagement.
The AISOS Strategy
The strategy was built around factual, compliant content that documented the firm's genuine expertise and demonstrated service scope without making prohibited comparative claims. Every content element was reviewed against Bar Association guidelines before publication. The content frame was informational and educational rather than promotional, which aligned both with compliance requirements and with the query intent of sophisticated prospective clients who are researching legal service options.
Practice area documentation: AISOS developed six structured practice area pages, each describing the relevant legal framework, the type of matters the firm handles, and the industries and client types typically served. No prohibited comparative claims were included. Content was structured using LegalService schema markup with explicit practice area categorization. Each page included explicit language and jurisdiction signals in structured data. Bilingual versions were created in French and Dutch for the two key practice areas with the highest volume of local-language queries.
Credential and association documentation: A structured page was created referencing the firm's registration with the Brussels Bar Association, individual partner memberships in relevant legal associations (IBA, AIJA), languages of practice, and jurisdictions in which the firm regularly advises. This page used Person and LegalService schema markup. A structured entry was created or expanded in three Bar Association-linked directories and two international legal directories known to be sampled by AI platforms. An llms.txt file was deployed providing AI crawlers with factual positioning information about the firm's practice scope and geographic reach.
Multilingual deployment: Structured data and key content pages were deployed in English, French, and Dutch simultaneously, ensuring that AI systems responding to queries in each language had equivalent access to the firm's service information. Internal links connected practice area pages to the industries section and to glossary entries on relevant EU regulatory concepts.
The Results
By day 70, Van den Berg & Associes appeared in 28 of the 45 original audit queries (62%), up from 5 (11%). EU regulatory queries showed the most dramatic improvement: from 0 to 9 appearances in 12 relevant queries, reflecting the structured practice area content created specifically for this specialization. M&A queries improved from 1 to 7 in 9. Employment law queries from 2 to 7 in 9. Commercial contracts from 2 to 5 in 9. Multilingual query performance improved proportionally across all three languages, with Dutch-language queries showing the strongest relative improvement (from 1 in 15 to 9 in 15).
Inbound client inquiries attributed to online research or AI-assisted discovery increased by 52% in the 70-day post-implementation period. The managing partner received 16 new matter inquiries from organizations that had not previously worked with the firm, compared to a baseline average of 8-9 per equivalent period. Of the 16, 12 were within the firm's target client profile. Six progressed to initial consultations. Four generated new mandates within the measurement window, with a combined estimated matter value of 94,000 euros.
The firm also observed an improvement in the quality of initial brief provided by AI-sourced prospective clients. Clients who had researched the firm through AI assistants arrived with a better understanding of the firm's practice areas and were more likely to have already assessed the fit between their legal need and the firm's documented specialization. Initial consultation efficiency improved, and the rate of matters accepted after initial consultation was higher for AI-sourced clients than for generic inbound inquiries.
Key Success Factors
The decision to prioritize EU regulatory practice area content was the highest-leverage single action in the engagement. Van den Berg & Associes' genuine competitive advantage in this area had never been documented in machine-readable format. Once the structured practice area page was deployed, AI systems that previously had no signal to match the firm to EU regulatory queries had clear, factual, schema-supported content to work with. Building AI visibility on genuine specialization, rather than attempting to appear in broad generic queries, generates faster improvement and attracts better-fit clients.
The trilingual structured data deployment provided a competitive moat that few Brussels law firms have built. Most legal marketing in Brussels is monolingual or bilingual at best. The Dutch-language structured data required relatively modest translation investment but generated a query coverage improvement (from 1 in 15 to 9 in 15) that represents a genuine first-mover advantage in a language where the firm had previously been entirely absent from AI recommendations. For Brussels professional services firms, trilingual AI visibility is a differentiator that is structurally available but rarely exploited.
The Bar Association compliance review process, while adding time to content approval, produced content of higher factual quality than would have been generated without that constraint. Informational, educational content that documents expertise without making prohibited promotional claims is inherently more credible to AI systems than marketing-inflected content. The compliance requirement aligned with AI recommendation quality requirements in a way that reinforced both. Legal firms in other jurisdictions with similar professional marketing constraints should consider their compliance guidelines as a guide to AI-effective content, not an obstacle to it.
Lessons Learned
The most important lesson from the Van den Berg & Associes engagement is that legal AI visibility requires a content approach that is almost identical to what good legal journalism or academic legal publishing requires: factual, specific, educational, and backed by verifiable institutional credentials. Law firms that approach AI visibility with traditional marketing language will consistently underperform those that adopt the informational content frame. The AI systems that recommend lawyers are, if anything, more conservative than the systems that recommend retail products. Credibility signals matter more, not less, in regulated professional services AI recommendations.
The EU regulatory specialization created a unique AI visibility opportunity that generalist Brussels firms cannot replicate. When prospective clients ask AI assistants for legal help with EU regulatory matters, the pool of specifically relevant firms is smaller than the pool of general corporate lawyers. Specialization reduces competition for AI recommendations in a way that is not possible with broad practice positioning. For law firms with genuine niche expertise, investing in AI visibility for that niche consistently produces faster and stronger results than attempting to compete for generic corporate law queries.
Finally, the engagement reinforced that legal AI visibility in Belgium is still in an early stage. The dominant firms in AI recommendations for Brussels corporate law queries at the time of this engagement were not necessarily the strongest practices in the market. They were the practices that had stumbled into adequate AI signal infrastructure, usually through active LinkedIn publishing or extensive legal directory presence. The window for smaller, specialized firms to claim top AI recommendation positions through intentional investment is open. Contact AISOS to assess your current position and the specializations where you can build a defensible recommendation advantage.