It's official: One Way, a Montreal agency specializing in influencer marketing, content production, and digital strategy, has signed a mandate with Groupe Légalex, a notary firm based in Montreal and Quebec City. The agreement puts One Way in charge of positioning audit, content strategy, search engine optimization, and ongoing editorial production for the firm, a mandate that arrives at a pivotal moment for Quebec's notarial industry.

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Because beyond the announcement, there's a question that actually matters to business owners and future property buyers alike: how people choose a notary today, and why that's about to keep changing faster than most expect.

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A Legal Advisory Market in the Middle of a Shift

Quebec is heading into one of the largest waves of business transfers in its history. According to the latest quarterly report from Repreneuriat Québec, the rate of business transfer intentions jumped to 7.8% in the first quarter of 2026, the third-highest level ever recorded in the province, representing close to 16,000 Quebec businesses considering a sale or succession within the next year. A study unveiled at the Sommet du repreneuriat, held at the Palais des congrès de Montréal this past March, further confirmed that businesses that go through a transfer show productivity gains of more than 11% compared with those that stay under the same ownership.

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Behind nearly every one of these transactions sits a notary: drafting agreements, structuring the corporate side, protecting shareholders, and handling the succession-related estate planning that often comes with it. For a firm like Légalex, which already supports individuals and businesses in business law, real estate law, and family law, that economic reality points to a clear opportunity, provided the firm is visible at the right moment, to the right audience.

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On the residential side, Montreal's market is holding its own as well. Data from the Association professionnelle des courtiers immobiliers du Québec for spring 2026 shows prices rising moderately even as transaction volumes soften, a trend the association attributes to a shortage of new listings rather than any drop in demand. Neighbourhoods such as Ahuntsic-Cartierville and Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie remain particularly sought after for single-family homes and plexes, which continue to draw multiple offers and sell quickly, a pattern that, mechanically, keeps a steady volume of notarized transactions flowing through those neighbourhoods.

Legal Research Is Increasingly Filtered Through AI

There's a quieter shift underway too, and it matters just as much: the way Quebecers search for a legal professional is changing in nature. According to Université Laval's Académie de la transformation numérique NETendances 2025 survey, 52% of Quebec internet users had already used a generative AI tool by October 2025, up from 33% a year earlier, and more than half of those users now turn to one on a weekly basis.

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In practical terms, that means a growing share of searches around real estate law, wills, or business succession no longer run through a simple list of Google results, they run through a synthesized answer generated by a tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. A firm absent from the content that feeds those answer engines risks becoming invisible at the exact moment a business client, or a family buying their first home, is looking for trusted guidance.

A Mandate Built for Two Distinct Audiences

That's precisely the angle behind the mandate given to One Way: build a brand authority that speaks both to the business clientele, entrepreneurs navigating a business transfer, real estate investors, SME owners, and to the residential clientele, whether that's a first-time buyer in Rosemont or an estate plan being drawn up in Ahuntsic.

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The mandate is built around four workstreams:

• A positioning audit, to map out where Légalex currently stands in a fragmented notarial market, where trust and proximity carry as much weight as name recognition;
• An SEO and GEO content strategy, designed to rank well on Google while also being citable by AI answer engines, the two approaches reinforce each other rather than compete;
• Technical optimization of the website, a baseline requirement so that content, however relevant, can actually be crawled and understood by traditional search engines as well as generative AI crawlers;
• Ongoing editorial production, covering real estate law, business law, wills, and protection mandates, to position Légalex as a recognizable reference over time rather than through one-off pushes.

A Brand Authority Built to Last

"Our job is to build a lasting brand authority for Légalex, one that can hold up against both Google's algorithms and the new AI-driven answer engines," says Stevens Dorcelus, founder of One Way.

This mandate ties directly into the mission of democratizing access to legal services that Légalex has championed since its founding, at a time when a first legal consultation, whether for a business transaction or a family matter, increasingly starts with a firm's digital visibility.

One Way will be tracking the early results of this collaboration over the coming months, particularly around organic visibility for Légalex, notary in Montreal.

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