The Google Illusion: Why Search Results Are Not Due Diligence

This article was originally published in ALM’s Law Journal Newsletters, here.

By Matt Winlaw, CEO & Managing Director, EDD Group

Law firms operate in one of the most risk-sensitive environments of any profession. Confidentiality, reputation, trust and ethical conduct are not aspirational ideals; they are the foundations on which firms win work, retain clients, attract talent and protect their licence to operate.

Every decision to onboard a client, partner, lateral hire, contractor, consultant or expert witness carries risk. Yet despite the increasing complexity of that risk, many firms continue to rely on onboarding practices that have not kept pace with the digital world in which their clients and people operate. The result is a widening gap between how risk actually manifests today and how it is assessed at the point of onboarding.

A Digital Reality, Assessed with Analogue Tools

We now operate in a fully digital environment. Every individual and organisation leaves behind an extensive digital footprint: public commentary, media coverage, litigation history, regulatory references, online associations, behavioural signals and reputational markers that may span decades and jurisdictions.

Despite this reality, onboarding decisions are still often based on surface-level checks. A Google search. A LinkedIn profile. A CV or client intake form. A limited reference or Know-Your-Customer process. Individually, these tools provide fragments of information. Collectively, they create a false sense of assurance.

The Google Illusion

Google has become the default first step in both candidate vetting and client onboarding. It is fast, familiar and widely perceived as good enough. If nothing adverse appears, the assumption is often that the risk is low. For law firms, that assumption is increasingly dangerous.

Google was never designed to assess reputational, conduct or integrity risk. Its algorithms prioritise relevance, popularity and recency — not completeness, historical depth or contextual accuracy. It surfaces what is easily indexed, not what is buried across time, platforms and jurisdictions. Research from Cornell University indicates that search engines index as little as 4% of the total web, meaning the deep web is estimated to be more than 25 times larger than the surface web most people search every day. Any given Google search may return as little as 0.03% of the information that exists online.

What Google routinely fails to reveal includes older material that predates modern indexing, activity conducted under aliases or secondary digital identities, patterns of behaviour across multiple platforms and time periods, adverse media outside mainstream search-optimised outlets, litigation, enforcement or regulatory references not designed for public visibility, and associations, networks or conflicts that only become apparent through holistic analysis.

In effect, Google confirms what a subject wants you to see. It does not reliably show what a firm needs to understand to make a defensible onboarding decision.

The Digital Client and the Digital Legal Professional

This challenge is particularly acute for law firms because they onboard more than employees. Firms onboard clients, counterparties, experts, consultants, vendors and strategic partners — each bringing potential reputational, regulatory and financial exposure.

Legal careers are increasingly fluid and mobile. Lawyers move between firms, practice areas, jurisdictions and sectors. Clients operate through complex corporate structures across multiple regulatory regimes. Professional identities — both individual and corporate — are carefully curated online.

At the same time, digital behaviour has become one of the clearest indicators of judgement, values and risk tolerance. Public statements, media commentary, online interactions and affiliations often surface warning signs long before issues emerge inside a firm or client relationship.

The problem is not a lack of information. It is fragmentation. A CV shows employment history. A client onboarding form captures declared facts. A reference reflects a moment in time. A Google search reveals what is easiest to find. None of these, on their own, provide a defensible understanding of reputational or conduct risk.

Where Traditional Screening and KYC Fall Short

The scale of the problem is material. According to HireRight’s 2025 Global Benchmark Report, which surveyed more than 1,000 HR and risk professionals worldwide, more than three-quarters of organisations identified discrepancies during screening in the prior 12 months.

The most common inconsistencies involved prior employment history (64%) and educational qualifications (47%). Similar gaps increasingly appear in client onboarding, beneficial ownership disclosures, sanctions exposure and adverse history representations. These are not merely operational failures. They are risk failures.

When Shallow Onboarding Becomes a Liability

In the legal sector, the consequences of onboarding failures extend far beyond administrative cost. The United States Department of Labor estimates that the cost of a bad hire is at least 30% of first-year wages. For senior legal hires, that represents significant financial exposure. For firms, the deeper cost is reputational: regulatory scrutiny, malpractice exposure, partner liability, client confidence and firm-wide credibility.

The same logic applies to client onboarding. Accepting a client with undisclosed litigation history, sanctions exposure, regulatory investigations or ethical concerns can trigger enforcement action, conflicts issues, loss of other clients and long-term brand damage.

Research from The American Lawyer has found that 30% of lateral partner hires deliver less than half of their expected book of business in their first year, with an additional 21% delivering only half to three-quarters. Most onboarding failures are not caused by a single missed check. They occur because risk signals were dispersed, incomplete or never connected.

AI-Enabled Misrepresentation Raises the Stakes

The verification challenge is intensifying. Generative AI has made it easier to fabricate credentials, manipulate digital identities and obscure adverse history. HireRight’s 2025 report found that one in six organisations globally experienced confirmed identity fraud during hiring, with an additional three in ten unsure whether it had occurred.

A November 2025 report from Greenhouse found that 91% of hiring managers had caught or suspected AI-driven candidate misrepresentation, including fabricated backgrounds, AI-generated interview scripts and deepfake video interviews. Nearly one in five reported direct exposure to deepfakes.

For firms onboarding senior professionals or high-risk clients, surface-level checks are no longer merely insufficient — they are structurally incapable of detecting modern risk.

Speed Versus Depth Is a False Choice

In competitive legal markets, firms often feel pressure to onboard quickly. There is a persistent belief that deeper due diligence slows decision-making and costs opportunities.

In practice, the opposite is true. Manual workflows, disconnected vendors and fragmented data introduce friction, duplication and delay. When intelligence is centralised and analysed systematically, firms gain both speed and confidence. Rigour and efficiency are not competing objectives. When designed properly, they reinforce one another.

From Screening to Decision-Grade Onboarding Intelligence

Traditional onboarding treats vetting as a point-in-time compliance exercise: complete the checks, document the outcome and move on. In a digital world, risk does not begin or end at onboarding.

What firms need is what we call decision-grade onboarding intelligence: an integrated approach that moves beyond basic screening to provide the depth of insight required to make genuinely informed, defensible decisions.

This means analysing digital footprints across surface, deep and dark web sources; assessing social media activity, adverse media, litigation and regulatory references; mapping associations and conflicts of interest; and evaluating reputational risk over time rather than in isolation. This approach does not eliminate risk. It enables informed, defensible decision-making — particularly for senior hires, partners and high-risk clients.

What Leading Firms Are Doing Differently

Firms adapting successfully have shifted their mindset. They no longer view onboarding — of clients or people — as an administrative hurdle. They treat it as a strategic risk decision. Their approach is layered rather than superficial, intelligence-led rather than search-driven, centralised rather than fragmented, and auditable, consistent and defensible. Enhanced due diligence is no longer limited to M&A or third-party risk. It is becoming a necessary standard across client and employee onboarding, where reputation, governance and trust are paramount.

The Question Firms Should Be Asking

The most important question in modern onboarding is no longer, “Did we Google them?”

It is: “Do we have a clear, defensible understanding of the reputational and conduct risks associated with this client or individual — and can we stand behind that decision if it is later challenged?”

In a fully digital world, reliance on search results does not reduce risk. It creates the illusion of certainty.

Firms that lead in the years ahead will be those that move beyond that illusion and adopt decision-grade onboarding intelligence to protect their people, their clients and their reputation.