Imagine a world where law firm marketers can work smarter, not harder, thanks to the power of AI. This is possible with AI Marketing for Law Firms.
The emergence of AI in various industries has paved the way for a revolution in marketing strategies for law firms, simplifying and streamlining internal processes like never before, while creating new challenges and obstacles to overcome.
A recent survey conducted in March 2023 of law firms in the U.S., U.K. and Canada by Thomson Reuters found that although 91% of survey respondents were aware of generative AI and ChatGPT, only 3% of respondents were using it due to confidentiality concerns.
Despite these concerns, we feel confident that many firms will embrace AI in the future and that finding applicable use cases for leveraging AI while maintaining confidentiality will be key. In addition, we have found many applications for AI for business professionals in law firms that can greatly reduce time and resources and free up law firm business leaders to focus on more strategic initiatives that lead to long-term law firm success.
This article aims to demonstrate the practical applications that law firm marketers and business development professionals can leverage with AI to streamline their internal processes, free up their time to focus on strategic initiatives and higher-level work.
Article Breakdown:
- Understand the importance of adopting AI technology to stay competitive in the digital age;
- Learn how law firms can leverage AI marketing to be more productive;
- Consider the privacy and confidentiality risks associated with AI and how to get ahead of those; and
- Identify and leverage the different tools and prompts we’ve tested to help law firms and legal marketers better understand and predict their client needs and improve workflows while maintaining client confidentiality.
What is AI Marketing?
AI marketing, also known as artificial intelligence marketing, is all about using smart technology and algorithms to boost your marketing strategies.
With AI, you can dig into heaps of data to uncover valuable insights about your clients and prospects, their preferences, and trends. This helps you tailor your marketing messages to each individual, making them feel special and engaged.
In addition, AI can help to streamline repetitive tasks so law firm professionals can free up their time for more important strategic work. And when used correctly, AI can be akin to having a super-efficient marketing assistant who never gets tired.
AI marketing has the power to simplify mundane tasks and improve law firm marketing efforts.
Defining the Different Aspects of AI
It’s not uncommon to hear plenty of technical terms thrown around when it comes to AI. We want to clarify what those terms mean and help our readers fully grasp the difference between these terms:
- Generative AI – a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating or generating new content, such as images, text, or even music, that is original and resembles human-created output.
- AI Generated Content – any type of creative output, such as text, images, music, or videos, that is generated or produced by artificial intelligence algorithms or models.
- Machine Learning – a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on developing algorithms and models that enable computers to learn and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed.
- Predictive Marketing Analytics – the practice of leveraging data analysis and statistical modeling techniques to forecast future customer behaviors, preferences, and trends, to make informed marketing decisions.
- Natural Language Process – this is the ability of computers to understand natural human language like humans and perform repetitive tasks as a result.
Ethical & Confidentiality Considerations for AI
Although generative AI has been around for some time, access to it in its latest form is new for many, and its practical applications, as described in this article, are many. Nevertheless, By Aries would be doing our readers a disservice if we did not clearly articulate the risks associated with using generative AI.
Some of the most common risks include copyright infringement, inherent bias in generative algorithms (which are fueled by natural language processing), overestimation of AI capabilities (just read this article for a horror story of what not to do), and the creation of deep fakes, among the risk of privacy and confidentiality.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT use large language models, including mixed data sets, to scrape information from the internet. (And we all know how reliable the internet is, in general, for factual information.)
Furthermore, when law firms use client information with AI tools, they must be mindful of client confidentiality and consent. The ethics rules dictate that using client information without a client’s consent violates privilege. To hammer this in we want to acknowledge what our friend Foster Sayers, Co-Founder and General Counsel at VirtualEDU, said recently: “It’s glaringly obvious from OpenAI’s ChatGPT FAQ that there should be no reason to believe any conversation or information will be kept private or safe from human eyes.” In other words, do not use tools like ChatGPT with privileged or confidential information – period.
With that being said, it is important to note that any law firm considering using AI marketing tools to speed up processes and workflows and make their legal marketers more efficient should consider implementing an AI policy that identifies:
- How generative AI tools should be used,
- Which employees have access, and
- What information can be input into the tools.
Furthermore, law firms should train their employees to effectively and appropriately use the tools to protect confidential information and the firm’s and its employees’ privacy.
How to Use AI Marketing at Law Firms | Practical Applications in Legal Marketing
Here’s a secret nobody shares – AI is everywhere. From autocorrect to your smart thermostat, AI is all around us and can be extremely powerful but also quite infringing when misused. We sent out a poll to our LinkedIn followers and asked them where they plan to use AI in their marketing and the vast majority said in their content marketing efforts.
Thus, we wanted to explain some of our favorite AI marketing tools that will enhance a law firm’s marketing needs.
AI for Content Ideation and Curation
How many of us have sat down to come up with something novel and interesting to write about in our area of expertise only to feel lost and annoyed? One of the most common questions lawyers ask us when we coach them on social media is: “What do I share?”
Nobody wants to annoy their clients with irrelevant, boring, and untimely content. We know from Greentarget Group’s annual survey that this is the fastest way to lose your clients’ attention and be removed from their inboxes.
Well, thankfully, AI has a lot of amazing tools to help get the creative juices flowing when it comes to ensuring your content is relevant, timely, and, most of all, interesting to your clients.
Artificial Intelligence for Outlining Ideas for a Client Alert
ChatGPT is a free AI tool that can help combat the blank cursor effect many lawyers and legal marketers face when drafting content and messaging. In this example, we asked ChatGPT to provide us with an outline with five bullet points for an email on a legal subject, and ChatGPT immediately offered a starting point for us to continue writing.
Tool: ChatGPT by Open AI
Prompt: Write an outline with five bullets for an email legal update in the voice of an authoritative lawyer on <subject>.
AI to Explore Different Topics for Content with SEO Impact
Ever wish identifying a relevant, timely, and search-friendly topic was easier? With artificial intelligence and the power of tools like Keywords Everywhere and ChatGPT, you can streamline your keyword and topic research by integrating the two tools. Enhance your law firm marketing search engine optimization efforts by letting Keywords Everywhere create the perfect prompt for you. In addition to doing keyword research, you can do more in-depth SEO prompt creation, like developing meta descriptions, find long-tail keywords, and create keyword strategies.
Tool: Keywords Everywhere Extension for ChatGPT
AI for Content Discovery – Finding New Ways to Provide Authority and Thought Leadership
We build the Marketing Moment newsletter entirely from the AI-suggested content and ideas we pull together from Feedly. Using Feedly, our team can type in relevant keywords and curate a custom newsletter that comes to our inboxes each morning with the latest news surrounding the topics we find most important for our digital marketing agency serving the legal industry. We then use this newsletter to curate our custom newsletter, The Marketing Moment, each month with the most important topics we find relevant to lawyers and legal marketers.
Tool: Feedly
AI in Content Creation for Law Firm Marketing
Value-driven content is crucial for marketing a law firm because it establishes the law firm’s expertise, builds trust with potential clients, and positions the firm as a valuable resource in the legal industry. By providing informative, educational, and relevant content, law firms demonstrate their understanding of clients’ pain points and offer solutions to their legal concerns. Value-driven content showcases your firm’s knowledge and helps clients make informed decisions.
But high-quality value-driven content can be time-consuming and require resources that many firms cannot afford to spare. So, using AI generated content creation is a great way to do more with less.
Here are a few examples of the Content Creation that can be done with AI Marketing Tools:
AI for Better Headlines
Using a tool like Headline Studio, law firms can analyze the headlines they write for their client alerts, new articles, and other thought leadership. Utilizing an AI tool like this will help law firms understand how they can improve their headlines to entice their target audience to read their thought leadership.
Tool: Headline Studio
Headline: Important Legal Update: Remote Work and Salary Requirements in Job Postings
Simplify Your Content for Your Audience’s Consumption
When giving feedback, leaders are always told that “clear is kind.” This is true when giving feedback and communicating complex information, like legal content to the masses.
One of the simplest ways to assess the readability and clarity of your content is with the free Hemingway App. This app allows law firm marketers to quickly assess if it’s time to adjust their content to make it easier to read. For example, we pulled the first article on JD Supra to show you just how complex some legal writing can be and give you easy suggestions on fixing the content to make it easier to read.
Tool: Hemingway App
Improve Your Marketing and Sales Messaging
Feel like your copy needs a refresh and want to try a proven copywriting framework to get your creative juices flowing? Using Keywords Everywhere with ChatGPT, law firms can use one of the common copywriting frameworks (AIDA, PAS, BAB, FAB) to refresh their copy and make their marketing really shine.
Tool: Keywords Everywhere with ChatGPT
AI in Social Media – Digital Marketing with AI
Generate Better LinkedIn Post Content
By Aries has coached hundreds, if not thousands, of lawyers on how to use LinkedIn effectively, and one of the most common questions we get is about sharing recognition and accolades. So, we created a simple and easy prompt that can be added to ChatGPT that writes a solid first draft of a LinkedIn post.
Tool: ChatGPT by Open Ai
Prompt: Write a LinkedIn post announcing that I have been recently named/awarded <recognition> for <practice area or work>. Don’t use the words “honored” or “humbled” and mention that this award is given to lawyers based on <criteria for being recognized>.
Share Better Content Based on What’s Worked in the Past
One of our founder’s favorite secrets to writing great content on LinkedIn is Taplio. Recently, Taplio integrated with ChatGPT4 and is now helping its users write better content faster and with less headache by generating content based on their past performing content.
Tool: Taplio
AI for Determining the Best Time to Share Content
When sharing content for our clients and for our agency on social media platforms, we rely heavily on Sprout Social’s ViralPost AI to help us schedule content when our audience is most likely to see it. This AI feature is built into many platforms including tools like CoSchedule, Hootsuite, Sprinklr, and Sendible, but our agency tool of choice is SproutSocial. So, we have a screenshot below showing you how we use this tool.
Tool: Sprout Social
Natural Language Processing for Social Listening
Want to know the coolest part of AI? It can aggregate tons of information into actionable data that becomes useful marketing intelligence. Understand your clients’ sentiments and pain points regarding the latest events or news, and uncover opportunities to stay ahead of trends. Plus, tools like Brandwatch help law firms stay ahead of bad press and missteps like the ones we saw happen a few weeks ago with some large firms.
Tool: Brandwatch
AI in Image Creation – AI Tools for Visuals
Lawyer Headshots that May (or May Not) Have Glasses
In a pinch, AI headshots could be a way to get a lawyer’s headshot up on the website, but we honestly cannot say we recommend this approach to professional headshots. For one, our founder Jessica Aries, wears glasses and all the glasses shots she received back from AI SuitUp the tool we used, were unfortunately awful. We’ve included an example below.
Tool: AI SuitUp – Use the code TikTok50 to save 50%
Remember to avoid wearing your glasses in the shot, or you may get this. Are they there or not!?
Images that Convey Even the Most Obscure Ideas
Do you ever wish your marketing materials were better? Visuals are a key part of communicating a concept or idea, but those who have worked in law firms long enough know that images of gavels and law books are tired concepts many law firms want to avoid. So, how can you find interesting, unique visuals, and not too gavel-heavy? AI.
Note: The copyright laws around Midjourney-created content is still vague, so we need to wait to see how this will all play out when it comes to who owns these images.
Tool: MidJourney
Prompt: an abstract depiction of a law firm where men and women work together from diverse backgrounds. use bright colors
AI in Analytics & Data
When data has meaning, it can prompt action. One of the most powerful aspects of AI is its ability to take large swaths of data and give it meaning. For example, when a marketer assesses that a law firm’s recent client alert related to a particular legal topic is getting more traction than its other content on the website, the marketer can suggest that the practice group or industry group create more content, develop a campaign around the content, or develop more targeted information around the topic.
Can past behavior dictate future action? What happens when a law firm marketer is equipped with the knowledge that past data indicates something in the future is more likely?
In some cases, this predictive analytics is obvious – H-1B season comes every year around the same time for immigration law firms, and trademark lawyers know that when the USPTO office raises its trademark filing fees, they will likely see an influx of clients.
But what about predicting the success of a new office launch in a new location or launching a new industry group? Can this data be gleaned from predictive analytics? You betcha.
Analytics Tools that You Might Already Have that Do a Good Job
One of the most popular tools for aggregating website analytics data to help it tell these stories is Google Analytics. A free tool offered by Google, Google Analytics recently went through a complete re-design to its latest version – Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Note: If you haven’t upgraded to GA4, you have just a bit of time left, so make that transition.
Google Analytics allows you to aggregate data and use Google Tag Manager to help identify events that impact your prospect’s experience on your website, so your marketing team can aggregate this data and use machine learning to understand trends better, identify potential opportunities, and predict how future campaigns will perform.
Using Google Analytics 4’s Intelligence tool, we can ask Google specific questions and get its machine learning capabilities to spit back an answer.
We have coupled events with the Intelligence tool to help our team better understand questions like:
- How are prospects interacting with our content on the website?
- What actions do prospects take compared to cold prospects?
- How are prospects finding our website and what information are they consuming?
- What type of content keeps users engaged the longest on our website?
Tool: Google Analytics
Analytics Tools that Turn Up the Heat (and Your Predictive Capabilities)
This wouldn’t be an article on AI marketing if we didn’t dive deep into analytics tools we think give legal marketers a leg up when it comes to analytics. Our favorite at the moment is one called Smartlook, which allows us to identify not only where errors on a website pop up, but also how prospects interact with our content, where they get stuck or lost, and how we can improve our overall campaign results with simple design fixes.
Furthermore, we use Smartlook’s heat maps functionality to identify where our most important content should go on a page and how best to layout our landing page designs. We then use this information to help plan our campaigns and ensure our top-priority content gets seen.
Here are just a few of the questions we have answered for ourselves using Smartlook:
- Is a landing page too cluttered, making prospects miss our call to action or button?
- Are there too many fields on the lead magnet? Should we omit some and/or require less?
- How can we help our prospects find useful content to help them make a case for our services faster on our landing pages?
- Is there a better way to display our services so it’s easier for our prospect to understand our services from the navigation?
The best part? Our prospect’s data stays private. The tool automatically blurs out sensitive data points like names, phone numbers, and other information our prospects may not want us to know while browsing.
Tool: Smartlook
Getting Started with AI Marketing
When and if your firm is ready to dip its toes into AI Marketing, we highly recommend starting with a clear policy and good training. These tools are wonderful at helping legal marketers become more efficient but do carry some risks.
To get started practicing with these tools, we recommend downloading our Small ChatGPT Hacks to Save You Time and Brain Power & Get Inspired, which explains some of our favorite ChatGPT hacks in greater detail.
