By now, most legal marketing teams have heard of GEO. Generative engine optimization (the practice of making your firm’s content more visible in AI-generated answers) has officially entered the legal marketing mainstream. 

It’s showing up at ABA Techshow sessions, in JD Supra primers, and on the agendas of marketing committees that hadn’t heard the term six months ago.

Good. That conversation is worth having.

But GEO is a tactical conversation. And while your firm is focused on tactics, three deeper AI visibility gaps are compounding in your firm’s competitive reputation, your client relationships, and inside your own department.

Thomson Reuters put a number on part of this in their 2026 Great AI Disconnect report: more than half of law firms are using or evaluating generative AI, forty-one percent of attorneys use it regularly, and most clients have no idea. That finding captures one gap. The other two don’t show up in any report yet.

Here is what is not in the room.

The Reputation Gap

AI is already describing your firm to prospective clients. Nobody at your firm has reviewed what it’s saying.

When a general counsel or legal operations professional asks an AI model to evaluate firms in a practice area, they don’t get a list of links. They get a characterization. The AI describes your firm: its reach, its strengths, its positioning relative to competitors. It draws from your website, your directory listings, your Chambers and Legal 500 submissions, and whatever other sources it has determined are authoritative.

By Aries has run cross-model audits encompassing multiple firms, and the findings are consistent. One firm we worked with was described as a regional leader across every AI model tested. Their direct competitors in the same practice areas were being characterized as nationally recognized, with language emphasizing global reach and landmark matters. The competitive framing gap was significant, and it traced directly to language decisions made years ago in Chambers submissions and website copy.

The word “regional” appeared nowhere in the firm’s own materials as a self-description. But the absence of language explicitly claiming national presence meant AI filled the gap with the most conservative interpretation available. Their competitors had been more deliberate. The firms that submitted language saying “nationally recognized” and “global litigation practice” were getting exactly that language reflected back in AI-generated answers.

Small decisions, made in submissions nobody thought twice about, are now producing reputational outputs the marketing team has never reviewed.

What makes this more urgent than GEO: the discovery process is not staying in search. AI agents are moving from answering questions to active vetting, comparing firms against criteria before a human reviewer ever engages. This is already standard practice in procurement and private equity, where platforms autonomously evaluate submissions before a human sees them. Legal operations departments face the same volume pressures. 

According to the ACC/Everlaw 2026 survey, sixty-four percent of in-house legal teams are already expanding their own AI capabilities and reducing outside counsel reliance. When thirty proposals arrive at once, the efficiency argument for AI-assisted screening is identical to what already happens in recruiting, where AI filters candidates before human eyes touch a single resume. The firms whose positioning is stated rather than implied will make the shortlist. The ones still writing for a pre-AI audience may not.

What to do now: Run a cross-model audit. Not just one search in ChatGPT, but consistent queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Compare how AI characterizes your firm against how it characterizes your direct competitors. Then go back to your Chambers submissions, your practice group descriptions, and your attorney bios. If your national presence, cross-border capability, or market-defining work is assumed rather than stated, that assumption is working against you.

The Client Gap

Your clients are waiting for you to say something. The silence is doing more damage than you think.

The Thomson Reuters finding deserves a direct translation for CMOs: your existing clients are reading the same industry coverage you are. They are attending conferences and asking peers how their firms are handling AI. What they are not receiving, in most cases, is a proactive answer from your firm about what AI is doing on their matters, what governance exists, and what it means for the value they receive.

This silence is a choice, even if it doesn’t feel like one. By Aries has had this conversation with CMOs directly, and the hesitation almost always comes back to the same place: the billable hour. 

If AI helped accomplish in four hours what previously took forty, and a client knows that, the partner billing on that matter is exposed. So firms don’t invest in AI workflows that support client work and the efficiency gain stays invisible to clients. 

The silence designed to protect the billable hour is preventing firms from making the one argument that would help them justify their rates as the market shifts: that AI is making their work better and faster, and that the client is the direct beneficiary.

The firms already operating on alternative fee arrangements don’t have this problem. They can say directly that AI is improving quality and efficiency and explain what that means for how they price their work. That is a differentiating message. Most firms cannot make it yet, but the window to build toward it is not staying open indefinitely.

Clients who are already asking how their firm uses AI are not going to stop asking. And “we can’t really speak to that” is not a reassuring answer. It is the opposite.

What to do now: If your firm isn’t ready for a full AI transparency strategy, start smaller. Work with your key client relationship partners on a consistent, honest answer to the question “how is the firm using AI?” Confirm that answer exists. Confirm everyone who might be asked has it. The firms building a client-facing AI narrative now, even a simple and honest one, will be significantly better positioned when the billing model conversation moves from management committees to client meetings.

The Talent Gap

Your most capable AI people are invisible inside your own department. Recruiters already know who they are.

There are people on your team right now who have built something impressive with AI on their own time, without asking permission, because they understood before the firm did that this was not optional learning. Workflows that eliminate research bottlenecks, frameworks that cut preparation time in half, tools that have changed how they do their jobs. Most of them haven’t told anyone.

The incentive to stay quiet is rational. Demonstrating you can do the work faster doesn’t always lead to recognition. Sometimes it leads to more work and no additional compensation.

Meanwhile, AI fluency is the most in-demand competency being sourced in legal marketing right now. The person building workflows in their spare time has a target on their back from every competitor firm that has figured out where the market is heading. You may not know they have it. They do.

The question worth asking yourself honestly: if that person left tomorrow, what would your department actually lose? If the answer is more than you’d like to admit, what you have is not an institutional capability. It is a personal dependency built on someone else’s unpaid learning.

What to do now: Surface what your team has actually built, not what’s been officially deployed, but what individuals are using right now to do their jobs better. Ask directly and without judgment. If someone on your team can be a real-world example of what’s possible with AI, that is a skill with real market value, and it should be recognized as one. Create explicit incentives for knowledge-sharing. 

The message your team needs to hear is unambiguous: sharing what you know makes you more valuable here, not a target for more work.

The Firms That Close These Gaps First Will Be Difficult to Catch

GEO is worth your attention, but it is a single tactic inside a much larger visibility problem: one that runs through your firm’s competitive reputation, your client relationships, and the talent that is building your department’s AI future whether you know it or not.

The firms that will pull ahead are not necessarily the ones with the largest AI budgets. They are the ones that recognize AI visibility as a leadership challenge rather than a marketing tactics problem, and start having the three conversations that are not in the room yet.

Those conversations are available right now. The question is who starts them first.

By Aries works with law firm marketing leaders to close all three of these gaps: auditing how firms appear across AI systems, building client-facing AI communications strategies, and surfacing the internal AI capability that marketing departments don’t know they have. If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, that’s the right place to start.

The post Your Firm Has Three AI Visibility Gaps. GEO Is the Least of Them. appeared first on By Aries.

In 2026, forward-thinking marketing and BD teams are using AI workflows to tackle the administrative grind that’s been slowing them down for years. Not AI as a fancy search engine. AI as an actual system, where one step feeds the next and the output is something you can actually use.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

1. Lateral Onboarding Without the Bottleneck

Bringing on a senior lateral is exciting. The content backlog that comes with it? Not so much.

Between updated bios, announcement emails, LinkedIn posts, press releases, and a cross-selling roadmap, a single lateral arrival can take weeks of marketing bandwidth to execute properly. By that point, the momentum has already stalled.

Firms solving this are running chained AI workflows where one step audits the incoming attorney’s professional history, a second generates the full suite of announcement content across every channel, and a third drafts an internal introduction strategy for cross-selling opportunities. What used to take weeks now takes hours.

2. Brand Compliance That Actually Sticks

When content is written by 50 different attorneys and reviewed by a team of two, brand drift is inevitable. The voice gets inconsistent. Disclaimers go missing. The pitch deck sounds like it was written in 2015.

Some firms are solving this with internal AI reviewers that assess content against brand voice standards, style guides, and regulatory requirements before anything goes out the door. Think of it as a first-pass editor that never gets tired and never misses a flagged term. It doesn’t replace human review, but it gets your team to a much cleaner draft before a real person has to touch it.

3. Turning a Win Into a Campaign

You just got a significant verdict. Congratulations. Now your team has about 72 hours to capitalize on it before the news cycle moves on.

Traditionally, turning a court decision into a press release, an award submission, a client alert, and a thought leadership article could take two weeks. By then, nobody cares.

Firms using AI content workflows can feed the outcome summary in and get targeted, usable drafts out within hours and organized by channel, tone, and audience. The team’s job becomes editing and approving, not starting from a blank page.

4. Webinars That Actually Drive Business

The webinar is done. Now what?

Most firms send a post-event email and call it a day. The more intentional ones are using AI to automate the entire communications loop: invite, landing page copy, confirmation emails, follow-up sequence, and most importantly, a personalized outreach email for the attorney to send to the highest-value attendees.

That last piece is what turns a webinar from a broadcast into a business development conversation. It doesn’t require more effort than what you’re already doing. It just requires a workflow that was designed with that outcome in mind.

5. Pricing Conversations Backed by Data

Fee conversations are awkward enough without having to wing the numbers.

For years, discount decisions and fee structures were based on instinct, relationships, and whoever pushed back hardest. That leads to inconsistent pricing, eroded margins, and clients who don’t fully understand the value they’re getting.

Pricing intelligence tools are changing this. BD teams can now model fee scenarios against historical matter data in real time and show a client exactly what a phased arrangement would cost and what it delivers. That’s a fundamentally different conversation than an arbitrary discount.

The Bottom Line

None of this is about replacing your team or handing the keys to a machine.

It’s about being intentional with where your people’s energy goes. When AI handles lateral onboarding logistics, brand compliance passes, and webinar follow-up sequences, your team gets their attention back. And attention is the resource that actually drives client relationships, business development, and firm growth.

The firms pulling ahead right now aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that got deliberate about how they work.

The post AI Is Doing the Heavy Lifting. Is Your Firm Letting It? appeared first on By Aries.

These aren’t novice marketers. They’re experienced leaders running comprehensive programs: publishing thought leadership, managing multi-channel campaigns, optimizing their digital presence, pursuing rankings and recognition. They’re checking every box on the traditional marketing playbook.

But when the conversation turns to measurement and attribution, something shifts. The confidence wavers.

“We track traffic and monitor rankings. We’re investing in SEO.”

These answers aren’t wrong. They’re incomplete. And that incompleteness reveals a deeper issue affecting even the most well-resourced marketing teams.

Here’s the real risk: Is your firm evaluating your existing marketing infrastructure with assumptions that no longer reflect how clients actually discover and assess legal services?

The environment surrounding your marketing has changed completely. Artificial intelligence isn’t simply another distribution channel to layer into your existing strategy. AI has restructured the entire discovery process: how your firm surfaces in prospect research, how your expertise gets interpreted and summarized, and how potential clients evaluate whether you’re the right fit for their needs.

Your prospects have changed how they search. They’re no longer typing keywords. They’re asking questions. And AI is providing answers, synthesizing your expertise, and making recommendations about your firm whether you’ve optimized for this reality or not.

By Aries sees this creating an immediate measurement crisis for marketing leaders who haven’t yet established frameworks to evaluate whether their firms are even visible in this transformed landscape.

A New Evaluation Framework

This isn’t a marketing audit. Traditional audits evaluate whether you’re executing tactics correctly: Is your SEO optimized? Are your meta descriptions current? Is your content calendar full?

Those questions still matter. They’re just insufficient now.

What’s needed is a leadership evaluation model, a framework that helps CMOs assess whether their marketing can actually achieve its intended purpose in the current environment.

The four lenses for evaluating legal marketing in 2026:

1. Visibility – How and where your firm surfaces when prospects search, both through traditional keywords and AI-powered questions
2. Credibility – How systems and people continuously assess whether you have the expertise to solve their specific problem
3. Clarity – Whether prospects can quickly understand who you help, what problems you solve, and what to do next
4. Conversion and Momentum – Whether your marketing creates familiarity, builds recognition, and generates meaningful conversations

Each lens represents a shift from how marketing success was measured previously. Let’s examine what’s changed.

Lens One: Visibility

The Before and After

Before 2026: Visibility meant appearing in Google search results. Firms competed for keyword rankings and paid for sponsored positions. Success meant being found in search.

Now: When someone searches “ERISA lawyer Austin Texas,” they often don’t see traditional search results first. Instead, they get an AI overview that presents curated information about several lawyers, complete with photos and credentials, before any blue links appear.

The AI makes editorial decisions about who to surface, how to describe them, and in what order to present them. It pulls from your website, Google Business Profile, legal directories, Wikipedia, media mentions, and any other source it deems authoritative.

Visibility now has two components: being found, and being accurately represented when you’re found. You also need to surface for the questions that matter to your ideal clients, not just their keyword searches.

From Keywords to Questions

The more significant shift: prospects aren’t always typing keywords anymore. They’re asking questions.

“What do I do if my insurance claim is denied?” “How do I protect my company’s IP when expanding internationally?”

These questions generate AI responses that synthesize information and cite sources. If your firm has published authoritative, insight-driven content addressing these questions, you may be cited. If you haven’t, your competitors will be instead.

What This Means for CMOs

1. Audit your foundational data in directory listings. 

Information in your Google Business Profile, firm website, legal directory listings, and any Wikipedia entries must be consistent. When AI systems pull from multiple sources, inconsistencies undermine credibility.

2. Shift content strategy from volume to authority. 

By Aries always asks: “If someone could Google this information in 30 seconds, why would you spend time writing about it?”

The content that gets cited by AI shares common characteristics:

• Addresses “what changed, what it means, and what to watch”
• Includes specific data points or frameworks drawn from experience
• Demonstrates pattern recognition across client situations without violating confidentiality
• Published in venues AI systems recognize as authoritative

Test Your Visibility

Use this prompt in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini:

Act as a potential client researching legal services for [firm name] found at [website URL].

How would you describe this firm?
What practice areas stand out?  
Which firms appear comparable?
What is unclear or missing?

Pay attention to which sources the AI cites. If it’s pulling from outdated listings or inconsistent profiles, you’ve identified immediate cleanup work.

Lens Two: Credibility

From One-Time to Continuous

Before: Credibility was something you established once through a polished website, attorney bios, and rankings. You’d refresh every few years and update awards annually.

Now: AI systems and informed prospects assess credibility continuously, pulling from an expanding array of sources and looking for patterns.

When a prospect researches your firm today, they might encounter your website, your lawyer’s LinkedIn profile, an article in a trade publication, a podcast interview, your Google Business Profile, Glassdoor reviews, and Reddit discussions. Each data point either confirms or contradicts the others.

Consistency builds credibility. Inconsistency erodes it.

What Gets Cited

By Aries tracks this in our own marketing. We publish regular content for legal marketers, but when we analyzed which content drives AI referral traffic, two articles dominate:

“10 Examples of Lawyers Using LinkedIn Like Pros” included specific screenshots, concrete examples, and practical frameworks readers could apply immediately.

“Measuring ROI for LinkedIn Marketing in Law Firms” contained proprietary data from six years of client work, specific statistics about what drives results, and quantified outcomes.

These drive more AI referral traffic than everything else combined. Why? They contain information that doesn’t exist anywhere else. The data is unique, verifiable, and immediately useful.

AI systems prioritize content with unique insights, specific examples, proprietary data, or frameworks that can’t be found through a simple search.

Creating Insight While Maintaining Confidentiality

CMOs often ask: “How do we create insight-driven content without violating client confidentiality?”

Four approaches work consistently:

Measure What AI Values

Set up Google Analytics to track AI chatbot traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. Analyze which content drives referrals from these sources. You’ll see quickly what AI systems consider authoritative enough to cite.

Lens Three: Clarity

Why Clarity Matters More Now

A confused mind is an indecisive mind.

When humans struggle to understand who you help and what you do, AI systems struggle even more. And unlike humans who might dig deeper, AI systems simply move on to clearer alternatives.

Clarity matters for comprehension: Can a stranger quickly answer these four questions?

1. Who do you help?
2. What problem do you solve?
3. Why does it matter?
4. What should I do next?

The LinkedIn Clarity Test

By Aries uses LinkedIn as a clarity diagnostic because positioning must compress into a single headline. Here’s a real example from recent coaching:

Lawyer A’s headline: “Juris Doctor”

Lawyer B’s headline (same firm): “IP, Privacy & AI Lawyer | Serving Businesses in Privacy, IP & Technology Transactions”

The difference is immediate. The second headline answers: What does this lawyer do? Who do they help? What specific problems?

The Referral Test

Delisi Friday is one of legal’s most connected referral marketers. Recently, a close family member needed a criminal defense attorney for court in Houston the next day.

Delisi searched LinkedIn for “criminal defense attorney Houston.”

Dozens of lawyers appeared. But scrolling through profiles, almost none clearly identified as criminal defense attorneys in their headlines. Some said “Partner.” Others said “Attorney.” Finding someone who explicitly stated they practiced criminal defense in Houston was surprisingly difficult.

If someone who refers legal work professionally struggles to quickly identify the right lawyer because of clarity failures, how can prospects with no legal industry knowledge possibly navigate this landscape?

Four Clarity Frameworks

Based on what actually works:

Industry Focus: “Healthcare M&A Lawyer | Advising Hospital Systems and Private Equity”
Practice Focus: “Employment Litigation Attorney | Defending Wage & Hour Claims”
Industry and Practice: “Real Estate Attorney for Tech Companies | Office Leases & HQ Buildouts”
Practice and Location: “Estate Planning Attorney | Serving Dallas-Fort Worth Families”

What doesn’t work: “Attorney”, “Partner”, “Lawyer”, or “Juris Doctor” without indicating what you do or who you help.

Test Your Clarity

Use this prompt:

Review this [website/bio/profile] as if you are unfamiliar with the firm.

What services are clearly offered?
Who appears to be the ideal client?
What feels compelling or confusing?
What questions remain unanswered?

If AI can’t articulate who you help and what you do, neither can your prospects.

Lens Four: Conversion and Momentum

Rethinking Conversion

Most firms think about conversion as leads like form fills, phone calls, consultation requests.

By Aries recommends rethinking conversion as a progression:

This progression matters because experienced legal buyers rarely click and call. They research extensively, verify credentials, read content, and assess cultural fit before ever making contact.

The Momentum Test

Many firms pile on marketing activities without evaluating whether any of them actually create momentum.

Would leads dry up? Would referral sources stop calling? Would anything actually stop working?

If the answer is no, reassess that channel’s value.

Case Study: Our Newsletter Transformation

By Aries used to spend hours each month creating a newsletter recommending articles for legal marketers to read. It performed adequately. Open rates were decent. People clicked.

But we realized: nobody was starting conversations with us about it. People clicked to read other people’s content, then left.

We loaded all our newsletter analytics, website data, and YouTube metrics into ChatGPT and asked: “This newsletter isn’t starting conversations. How do we build more momentum?”

The AI recommended: Stop promoting other people’s content. Focus on your best original work that people might have missed.

We redesigned the newsletter to feature our own webinars, articles, and frameworks.

The results:

Before (Jan.-Aug. 2025)

• Average open rate: 36-40%
• Average click rate: 3-4%

After (Sept.-Dec. 2025)

• Average open rate: 40-46%
• Average click rate: 4.8-5.4%
• Most importantly: People started mentioning the newsletter in conversations. They’d reference specific articles. They’d ask about upcoming webinars.

The content created momentum, not just metrics.

Evaluating Your Channels

For each marketing channel, ask:

• Why does this exist? What’s its specific purpose?
• Who is the audience? Be specific.
• Who owns it? And are they equipped to own it well?
• What evidence supports its existence? What data proves it’s working?
• What’s the risk if it disappears? What would actually break?

“Because our competitor is on this channel” isn’t a good enough reason.

The Evaluation Prompt

You are evaluating law firm marketing for leadership decision-making in 2026.

For each content item I provide, evaluate how well it serves its audience using these four lenses:
- Visibility  
- Credibility
- Clarity
- Conversion and Momentum

Score each lens from 1-5 (1=not effective, 3=adequate, 5=highly effective). Be conservative.

Return results as a table with: Channel, Content Item, Intended Audience, Intended Purpose, scores for each lens, Brief Rationale, One Improvement Recommendation.

After the table, include 3-5 bullets summarizing strengths, gaps, and priorities.

Write in plain language for firm leaders. Avoid marketing jargon.

Upload your content inventory and let AI evaluate where you’re strong and where gaps exist.

What This Means for Marketing Leaders

The firms that thrive in 2026 won’t be the ones doing the most marketing. They’ll be the ones who understand how their marketing actually functions in an AI-mediated discovery environment.

This requires:

• Consistent foundational data across every platform where your firm appears
• Content with genuine insight rather than volume of generic updates
• Absolute clarity about who you serve and what problems you solve
• Ruthless prioritization of channels that create actual momentum

The gap between traditional metrics and actual market visibility is widening. The firms addressing this gap now are building market positioning that will compound over time.

The firms waiting for clearer signals are falling behind in ways their current metrics won’t reveal until catching up becomes significantly harder.

Next Steps

By Aries works with law firms to audit their marketing through these four lenses, identify the gaps between current state and AI-era requirements, and build implementation roadmaps that marketing teams can actually execute.

If you’re responsible for marketing leadership at a law firm and you’re uncertain whether your current approach is positioned for how clients actually discover and evaluate legal services in 2026, let’s talk.

The playbook has changed. And the firms that adapt their evaluation frameworks first will capture the opportunities that confusion creates for everyone else.

The post How the Marketing Playbook Has Shifted for Law Firms: A Practical Framework for Evaluating Law Firm Marketing in 2026 appeared first on By Aries.

According to a report from Harvard Business Review visualizing the shift from 2024 to 2025, the public’s relationship with AI has undergone a transformation. Users are moving away from technical tasks like data editing and content creation. Instead, they are turning to AI for personal and professional support.

They are using AI for therapy, for organizing the chaos of their lives, and for finding a sense of purpose. For legal marketers, this is a roadmap. To connect with prospects in 2026, we must move beyond the efficiency narrative and meet clients in these high-value human spaces.

Here are four trends your firm needs to capitalize on to remain a human-first leader in an automated world.

1. Be a Counselor, Not Just a Closer 

The data is clear that there’s a surge in people using AI for therapy and companionship. While I’m not suggesting lawyers should act as therapists, there is a deep lesson here: clients are looking for a listener.

For decades, legal marketing has led with aggression – the fighter, the bulldog, the winner. But in 2026, that language is fading in favor of counseling and partnership.

Your messaging needs to communicate “I hear you” just as much as it says “I advocate for you.” Let’s be honest: the machine can answer a lot of questions. But AI cannot build a relationship. You need to be the human connection that bridges the gap between the prospect’s problem and your legal solution.

2. Sell Order as the Antidote to Chaos

The second major trend is people using AI to organize their lives. My takeaway from this is simple: people are completely overwhelmed. They are using AI to create order from the chaos of their daily routines, and that includes their professional lives.

If your firm offers services in areas like business formation, governance, regulatory compliance, employment law, or corporate contracting, you need to realize that your product isn’t actually a legal document. Your product is organization.

Stop just selling the legal service. Sell the peace of mind that comes from getting a professional house in order. Instead of marketing a Standard Operating Agreement, market the Conflict-Free Business Foundation. Position yourself as the person who silences the noise.

3. Provide Strategy Where Algorithms Fall Short

The era of using AI solely as a Google replacement is ending. We are seeing AI now being used to consult on much more complex use cases. This means your top-of-funnel generic legal content won’t cut it anymore because a basic bot can already generate it.

To stand out in 2026, your content needs to pivot toward nuance and strategy. Tell the stories that help a client understand why their situation is unique.

Generic AI tools or legal bots are great at rules, but they struggle with exceptions. Write about the nuances and the strategic pivots that only a seasoned lawyer can identify. Explain why a one-size-fits-all AI prompt isn’t enough for their particular legal issue.

4. The Authenticity Premium: Marketing for Purpose

Finally, people are using AI to help them find purpose. This means clients are increasingly spending their budgets with firms that stand for something, firms that align with their own personal values.

In 2026, the firms that win will be those with true differentiators. This means being vocal about your mission statements and sticking to your values, such as sustainability, DEI, and women’s initiatives, even when those topics fall out of popular favor. 

Being true to these values and marketing them regularly allows you to connect with clients who are looking for more than just a transaction; they’re looking for a partner who shares their worldview.

The Bottom Line: Relationships Over Transactions

If the HBR data tells us anything, it’s that clients aren’t transactional. They are relationship-focused. AI is a powerful tool, but its rise has highlighted exactly what it cannot do: provide genuine human connection.

By meeting your clients where they are – seeking order, looking for a listener, and searching for purpose – you aren’t just a lawyer; you’re a necessary part of their life’s structure.

The post Beyond the Bot: AI Trends for Client-Centric Legal Marketing in 2026 appeared first on By Aries.

We have all read summaries, overviews, and “recent developments” alerts that say nothing a client could not find elsewhere.

That is not a future risk. It is already happening.

We are all walking through a content landscape that feels increasingly like a vast and hollow corridor. It’s technically perfect, but it lacks warmth and any sign of human life. This silence is deafening. Our job is to fill that silence with the sound of a clear, confident voice. 

The real problem? When lawyers use AI, they don’t realize it’s neutral. It lacks judgment and has no lived experience or accountability. AI cannot take a position, because it doesn’t have one.

This is why perspective-driven thought leadership matters more now than it did five years ago.

“When a lawyer takes a clear stance, explains how they see risk evolving, or shares how nuance plays out in practice, the content immediately signals something AI cannot replicate: perspective, and sometimes even conviction.”

And perspective is not just what makes content memorable to human readers; it is increasingly what makes content visible to AI search engines.

The GEO Shift: Why AI Search Rewards Perspective Over Information

Here is the one sentence most law firms haven’t internalized yet: The place where people find legal expertise has moved from a list of links to a single, cited answer.

AI search queries now average 23 words compared to Google’s traditional 4-word standard, and platforms like ChatGPT now have more than 400 million weekly users. These users are not clicking through link lists. They are reading AI-generated answers that synthesize information and cite a handful of authoritative sources.

This is a fundamental market shift that changes the value of a lawyer’s time. When lawyers take a complex area of law and synthesize it into something actionable and applicable, they are doing two things at once: providing value to the client and creating a citation-worthy source for AI.

Perspective-driven thought leadership is so powerful because it leverages what lawyers already do best, synthesizing and taking a position, by amplifying it through AI-generated answers, using their own words as the source.

Research shows that content featuring original statistics, expert quotes with attribution, and clear point-of-view claims sees 30-40% higher visibility in AI responses.

Neutral content gets ignored, while perspective-driven, data-backed content gets cited.

What AI Can Do vs. What Only Lawyers Can Do

The distinction is not subtle.

AI can summarize a regulatory update in seconds, but it cannot tell a client which provision will become the enforcement priority six months from now, or which compliance gaps create the most exposure in practice. Only someone who has negotiated those deals, defended those audits, or watched enforcement patterns evolve can do that.

And increasingly, only that kind of content gets cited by AI. 

When a firm publishes neutral content, it’s not just a strategic miss; it’s invisible labor. It’s the time of a busy partner and a resource-strapped legal marketer spent crafting a perfectly safe message that lands with a quiet thud in an ocean of identical posts. You worked hard for silence; perspective is the path to a clear signal.

Using AI wisely means understanding what it cannot do and doubling down on the human elements that matter.

The AI Slop vs. Insight Framework: A Practical Evaluation Tool

Need help identifying if your content meets muster? Before publishing any thought leadership content, run it through this diagnostic framework:

Dimension 1: Claim Type

AI Slop:

• Makes broad, unverifiable generalizations
• Uses hedging language throughout (“may,” “could,” “might”)
• No specific data or evidence

Perspective-Driven Insight:

• Makes specific, falsifiable claims backed by data
• Takes a clear position, even if it limits appeal
• Includes at least one concrete statistic or referenced study

Example:

❌ AI Slop: “Companies should be aware that data privacy regulations are evolving and may require updates to compliance programs.”

✅ Insight: “Based on 40 enforcement actions we reviewed from 2026, regulators are now citing the gap between documented policies and actual data handling practices in 73% of consent decree violations, not the absence of policies.”

Dimension 2: Pattern Recognition

AI Slop:

• Repeats what is already public knowledge
• Makes no connection between disparate facts
• Provides no predictive value

Perspective-Driven Insight:

• Identifies trends most practitioners have not noticed
• Connects enforcement patterns to business impact
• Provides forward-looking guidance

Example:

❌ AI Slop: “Recent SEC guidance addresses cryptocurrency disclosure requirements.”

✅ Insight: “The SEC’s March 2025 guidance appears narrow and focused on crypto disclosures. But when read alongside three recent enforcement actions in traditional securities, we are seeing a pattern: the SEC is redefining what counts as ‘material’ digital asset exposure, and most CFOs are using the old framework.”

“Insight is not found in a Wikipedia entry. It is the ability to connect two dots a mile apart, one is the fine print in a statute and the other is the nervous expression on a client’s face during a complex negotiation. That is three-dimensional analysis. Whereas, AI only sees a flat page. Be more human.“

Dimension 3: Structure and Citability

AI Slop:

• Uses long paragraphs with buried takeaways
• Follows no clear hierarchical structure
• Makes claims without attribution

Perspective-Driven Insight:

• Leads with a 40-60 word direct answer to the core question
• Uses clear hierarchical headings (H2/H3 structure)
• Includes inline citations and attributed statistics

Research shows that content with clear formatting, such as headings, bullets, tables, is 28-40% more likely to be cited by AI engines. Beyond AI visibility, structured content makes complex legal analysis accessible to the clients who need it.

Example:

❌ AI Slop: “There are various considerations when implementing privacy controls, and companies should evaluate their specific circumstances in light of the regulatory landscape and internal risk tolerance, among other factors that may be relevant depending on industry vertical and data processing activities.”

✅ Insight (First 60 words): “Privacy program effectiveness depends less on policy documentation than on operational alignment. In our analysis of 50 data breach investigations, companies with board-approved privacy policies still faced enforcement 68% of the time when their engineering teams bypassed those controls in production. The gap between governance and execution is where most exposure lives.”

Dimension 4: The Perspective Test

Before publishing, ask:

• Could this have been generated by a competent AI with no context? If yes, it probably was or will be assumed to be.
• Does this piece reveal how this lawyer thinks, or just what they know? Knowledge is a commodity now, but thinking is not.
• Is there a clear stance, or is everything framed as neutral and safe? Perspective stands out; neutral content disappears.
• Would a client quote this back to us in a meeting? If they do not remember it, they will not value it.
• Does this content include specific data points that AI can cite? Adding at least one specific statistic to every major claim creates a 40% visibility boost in AI search results.

If the answer is yes to the first question and no to the rest, the content will blend into the noise.

Example: AI-Safe vs. AI-Proof Thought Leadership in Action

AI-Safe (Forgettable)

“Recent developments in data privacy law require companies to review their policies and procedures to ensure compliance.”

This is accurate. It is also indistinguishable from hundreds of AI-generated posts published this week. ChatGPT will not cite it, and clients will not remember it.

AI-Proof (Perspective-Driven and Citation-Worthy)

“Most companies believe their data privacy risk is controlled because they have updated their policies.

In enforcement actions, that belief is rarely what regulators focus on. According to our review of 60 FTC consent decrees from 2023-2024, 82% of violations involved documented policies that were technically compliant—the problem was operational drift.

What matters is whether the business’s actual practices align with those policies. We find this gap in 7 out of 10 privacy programs we review, even among well-intentioned companies.

This documentation-versus-reality disconnect is becoming one of the most common sources of exposure in privacy enforcement.”

Why this works:

• Clear stance backed by data
• Pattern recognition from actual casework
• Signals experience through specific client work
• Judgment about what matters most
• Specific statistics that AI engines can cite (82%, 7 out of 10)
• Direct answer structure upfront

AI can assist with structure, but conviction requires human judgment. AI search engines are increasingly designed to cite that conviction, not summaries.

From Source to Destination: Building Trust in an AI-Saturated Market

Wayne Pollack, founder of Law Firm Editorial Services and Copo Strategies, frames the challenge bluntly:

“The key to standing out in this new world of AI slop masquerading as thought leadership is to be THE DESTINATION, not A SOURCE, for content that provides the insights and guidance your clients need to help them work through their legal and business issues.

People go straight to The Wall Street Journal, their favorite podcasts, their preferred creators on YouTube or Substack, etc., when they want information from trusted sources. The Wall Street Journal’s subscribers don’t search Google or ChatGPT for ‘top business publications.’ With a bit of strategy and a whole lot of execution, you can be your target audience’s Wall Street Journal for the kind of work you do.

Create content, network, speak, get publicity—do whatever you have to do to make a favorable first impression on members of your target audiences that compel them to look you up, follow you, and subscribe to your content offerings. Then, consistently provide them with relevant, valuable, and compelling content that convinces them that there’s no better source of this information than you.

Don’t wait for your target audiences to swim across the AI slop-filled thought leadership content pool to find you. Make them want to climb out and find you on the pool deck.”

Being one of many sources clients might stumble across in a search is no longer viable. Generic content, even if technically correct, gets lost in an ocean of AI-generated material that says the same thing in slightly different words.

Becoming the destination means clients do not search for you because they already know where to find you. They subscribe, follow, and refer colleagues to your content because it consistently delivers something they cannot get anywhere else.

This is the power of building a brand and being the source. Not just the source to your clients, but the source to AI search engines.

Why This Matters for Law Firm Marketing Strategy

Most law firms are still optimizing for keyword rankings in a world where the top search result may not even be a clickable link anymore.

The firms that will capture client attention are not focused on publishing more content. Instead, they are focused on creating insightful perspectives that are citation-worthy. This is content that AI platforms recognize as authoritative enough to cite when answering legal questions, and your clients find valuable enough to share with others.

What makes content citation-worthy and share-worthy?

• Specific data and statistics: Content with specific numbers instead of qualitative descriptions.
• Expert attribution: Adding credible references, academic citations, and links to authoritative sources. (Note: We did this here with our quote from Wayne Pollack.)
• Clear point of view: Expert judgment gets cited; neutral explanations get passed over.
• Structured formatting: FAQ formats and hierarchical content structure perform exceptionally well because they match how users query AI systems.

This is already happening. 89% of B2B buyers now use AI tools during the purchasing process, according to Averi. If your firm’s expertise is not showing up in AI-generated answers, you are invisible to the majority of your market.

Reframing the AI Conversation for Law Firms

What used to work in law firm thought leadership won’t get you where you want to be in 2026 and beyond.

Updates that merely restate a development. Alerts that provide no guidance. Posts that say what happened but not what it means.

This type of content was already forgettable. AI just made it easier to produce at scale, which paradoxically makes it easier for clients to ignore.

The firms that will stand out are not the ones publishing more. They are the ones publishing clearer thinking.

In a market where everyone is using the same AI tools, you have two choices. You can join the crowded line of firms using the AI tool to churn the slop, or you can use it to help you dig down to the hard, unshakeable bedrock of your conviction. The content you publish will show which path you chose.

Ready to move from being a source to becoming the destination? The lawyers who treat thought leadership as a core part of client service, not a marketing obligation, will own the attention that matters. And increasingly, they will own the AI citations and become the source, which matters even more.

Start by asking: If ChatGPT were answering a question in your practice area, would it cite your content? If not, stop writing summaries and start sharing judgment.

The post Why Perspective-Driven Thought Leadership Is the Antidote to AI Slop appeared first on By Aries.

She’d spend hours buried in her office doing research. Pulling together market intelligence, analyzing the partner’s practice area, reviewing their book of business, identifying cross-selling opportunities. All of this just to build a skeleton of a plan. Then she’d finally get in a room with the lawyer and walk them through it, and they’d react, push back, add context she didn’t have, and reshape the whole thing.

The prep work was the bottleneck. The actual strategic conversation was the valuable part. But she couldn’t get to the conversation without doing the prep work first.

Now she uses CustomGPTs to build that skeleton. The research, the initial structure, the first draft of strategic recommendations. What used to take her a full day now takes a fraction of that. But here’s what actually changed: she’s not buried in her office anymore. She’s in the room with lawyers, having conversations, gathering insight, and building relationships.

She recently shared this approach with a roundtable of CMOs. Most of them had never heard of anyone doing this.

That gap tells us something important about where legal marketing is right now. And it’s not a technology gap. It’s a mindset gap.

The Shift From Doing to Orchestrating

When most people talk about AI adoption, they talk about efficiency. Faster turnaround. More output. Doing the same work in less time.

But that framing misses the bigger transformation.

The real shift isn’t about doing your current job faster. It’s about changing what your job actually is.

Think about what our BD manager’s role looked like before: researcher, analyst, document builder. She was producing deliverables. Now think about what her role looks like after: strategist, facilitator, relationship builder. She’s orchestrating outcomes.

The deliverable (the BD plan) still exists. But she’s not the one building it from scratch anymore. She’s the one shaping it, refining it, and most importantly, using it as a tool to have better conversations with the lawyers she supports.

This is what an AI-ready team looks like 18 months from now. The mundane, repetitive work gets handled by GPTs, agents, and automated workflows. The humans orchestrate. They review, they refine, they build relationships, they extract insight from subject matter experts, they hold lawyers accountable to business development commitments.

The biggest challenge in legal marketing has always been getting information out of lawyers. They’re busy. They don’t have time for marketing. You have to physically get them in a room and pull the insight out of them so you can turn it into something marketable.

Imagine if your team had more time to do exactly that. Less time buried in research and document production. More time in strategic conversations. More time building the relationships that actually drive business development forward.

That’s not a productivity gain. That’s a role transformation.

If You’re the One Leading This Change

If you’re a CMO or marketing leader reading this, you might be thinking: “This sounds great, but I can’t even get partners to approve a website update without three rounds of revisions. How am I supposed to drive AI transformation?”

Fair. The political reality of law firms is real. Partner resistance, risk-averse management committees, tools that get approved but are so locked down they’re useless for actual strategic work. We’re working with a CMO right now whose firm gave her an AI tool that can’t access the web or provide the kind of insight she actually needs. The technology exists, but the organizational willingness to use it doesn’t.

Here’s what we’ve seen work: stop trying to win the argument with logic alone. Start showing them what their competitors are doing.

This might look like a roadshow presentation that benchmarks your firm’s AI adoption against peers. It might mean surfacing what marketers at competitor firms are sharing in webinars and at conferences about their own AI initiatives. It might mean pushing partners to attend roundtables where they’ll hear from their peers directly, or sending them podcasts where managing partners at other firms discuss how they’re leading AI transformation.

The goal is to plant seeds. Make the status quo feel uncomfortable. Help the management committee see that standing still is actually falling behind.

This is often a longer play than a single presentation. It might involve bringing in outside consultants who can speak to industry-wide trends with more authority than an internal team. It might mean commissioning an audit that benchmarks your AI capabilities against the market. It might mean strategically exposing decision-makers to information from sources they trust more than their own marketing department.

None of this is fast. But it works. The firms that are moving on AI adoption didn’t get there because someone made a compelling deck. They got there because leadership became convinced that the risk of inaction was greater than the risk of change.

Your job isn’t just to advocate for AI. It’s to change the information environment around the people who make decisions.

Why This Shift Is So Hard

Law firms have deep institutional muscle memory that resists change of any kind. AI just inherits all of that baggage.

We see this pattern constantly, even in contexts that have nothing to do with AI. A marketing director proposes reallocating sponsorship dollars away from events where partners consistently don’t show up. The data supports it. The logic is clear. But certain partners have relationships with certain organizations, and those relationships matter more than the ROI analysis.

The sponsorships stay.

This same dynamic plays out with technology adoption. Marketing teams that can’t update the website without partner approval on every word. Business development initiatives that die in committee. Investments that get delayed for years because no one wants to be the one who pushed for something that failed.

When AI enters the conversation, the stated objections are usually about ethics, confidentiality, or quality control. Those concerns are legitimate. Lawyers do have professional obligations around supervising work product.

But there’s another dynamic that doesn’t get said out loud often: AI makes workflows more visible. It creates accountability. And if some lawyers already don’t review their own work as carefully as they should, AI doesn’t create that problem. It just makes it harder to ignore.

That’s a harder conversation to have than “we’re concerned about confidentiality.”

The Humility Piece

Here’s something we’ve learned from using AI in our own work at By Aries, and it’s not what you’d expect.

One of the best use cases for AI isn’t producing content faster. It’s challenging our own assumptions.

We’ll put together a strategy we’re confident in, then ask AI to poke holes in it. Find the gaps. Identify assumptions we’re making about our audience or our ideal client that we haven’t examined. Show us where our technical knowledge is more sophisticated than the average buyer of our services, and where we need to make it more accessible.

It’s humbling. We all want to believe we’re thorough, that we’ve considered every angle before we walk into a room with a recommendation. And then AI points out something obvious that we overlooked.

There’s nothing more professionally uncomfortable than sitting in a meeting and having someone raise a legitimate objection you hadn’t considered. Having to say “I hadn’t thought of that” or “let me get back to you” when the gap was avoidable.

AI doesn’t eliminate that possibility. But it dramatically reduces it. You can stress-test your thinking before you’re in the room, not during the meeting itself.

Now, a caveat: AI can be biased. It has blind spots. It’s not an oracle. But used well, it provides perspectives you wouldn’t have generated on your own. And that makes your work stronger.

This isn’t about outsourcing your thinking. It’s about pressure-testing it.

Where to Start: The Friction-First Framework

When someone tells us they want to start using AI but don’t know where to begin, we ask them one question:

What’s the work you hate doing?

Not the strategic work. Not the relationship-building. The tedious, repetitive, soul-draining work that bottlenecks everything else.

People always know the answer immediately. Chambers submissions. RFP responses. Experience database updates. The prep work that has to happen before the real work can begin.

Once you’ve identified that friction point, here’s how to move forward:

Step 1: Map the process.

Write down every step involved in completing that task. Not the high-level version, but the actual sequence.

Take Chambers submissions as an example. You receive the request. You identify which matters to submit. You determine how to evaluate which matters are worth including. You figure out who needs to give client approval. You schedule time with lawyers to get their input. You draft the summaries. You get them reviewed. You compile and submit.

Most tedious tasks are actually multi-step workflows. You can’t figure out where AI helps until you’ve mapped what help would even mean at each stage.

Step 2: Identify where AI can fit.

Look at each step and ask: could AI assist here?

Maybe AI scans the experience database to surface potential matters worth submitting. Maybe it drafts initial meeting agendas for lawyer conversations. Maybe it creates first-draft summaries based on matter descriptions that lawyers then review and refine. Maybe it pulls contact information from the CRM to identify who needs to approve client mentions.

Not every step will benefit from AI. Some steps require human judgment, relationship navigation, or institutional knowledge that AI doesn’t have. That’s fine. You’re looking for the steps where AI can reduce friction, not replace the whole workflow.

Step 3: Define your inputs and outputs.

Before you build anything, get clear on what information you need to gather (inputs) and what the deliverable should look like (outputs).

Is the output a list of potential matters? A first draft of a submission? An agenda for the kickoff meeting with lawyers? An outline that structures the final document?

Getting specific about the output shapes everything else. A tool that produces “a draft” is too vague. A tool that produces “a 200-word matter summary including client name, practice area, key outcomes, and why this matter demonstrates excellence” is something you can actually build and evaluate.

Step 4: Build and test.

Now you can decide what technology fits. Is it a CustomGPT with specific instructions for this workflow? Is it Copilot features within your existing tools? Is it an integration between your CRM and a drafting tool?

Start small. Build for one specific use case. Test it with one person on your team. Refine based on what actually works. Then expand.

The mindset shift follows the practical value. When someone experiences AI actually solving a problem they hate dealing with, they stop being skeptical. They start looking for the next friction point to address.

The Competitive Reality

One more thing worth saying directly: your competitors are already doing this.

When we need to convince skeptical partners about AI adoption, we don’t lead with abstract arguments about innovation. We show them what competitor firms are doing. The webinars their peers are presenting. The ALM research on AI adoption in the legal industry. The Thomson Reuters surveys showing where the industry is heading.

A marketer equipped with AI can do competitive intelligence faster, build deeper research on prospects, draft better pitches, and get into the mindset of the client more effectively than a marketer without those tools.

When firms restrict their marketing teams from using AI, they’re not protecting the firm from risk. They’re handicapping their marketers in a competition where the other side isn’t similarly constrained.

And this gap compounds. The firms building AI capabilities now are developing institutional knowledge that will be very hard to catch up to later. The best marketing talent (the people who want to learn these skills) will eventually leave for places that let them use them.

The objection we hear sometimes is: “AI can’t replace me, so I don’t see why I should learn it.”

That’s the wrong perspective. The question isn’t whether AI replaces you. The question is whether you’re using it to become irreplaceable.

What Becomes Possible

Picture your team 18 months from now, assuming you get this right.

Your people aren’t buried in research and document production. They’re orchestrating AI tools that handle the first drafts, the data synthesis, the repetitive analysis. They spend their time on what actually requires human judgment: building relationships with lawyers, extracting insight, holding partners accountable to business development commitments, shaping strategy.

The work that comes out of your department is higher quality because there’s actually time to do the prep work well. Lawyers are more engaged because marketers have bandwidth to get them in the room and have real conversations instead of chasing them for input on documents built in isolation.

Marketing stops being seen purely as a cost center and starts being recognized as a strategic function. Because your team is doing strategic work, not just producing deliverables.

That’s the shift. Not “we use AI now.” But “we work differently now.”

Moving Forward

Building this capability isn’t complicated, but it does require intention. You need governance so people know what’s safe to use and how. You need practical training that connects AI to real workflows, not just abstract prompting exercises. You need someone accountable for building and maintaining prompt libraries. And you need early wins that show skeptics what’s possible.

If you want help building that systematically, for yourself or for your team, that’s what our AI enablement program is designed to do. Not just literacy (understanding what AI can do) but fluency (knowing how to apply it to your actual work in ways that change what you’re capable of).

The firms that figure this out will have marketing teams that are faster, more strategic, and more competitive. The firms that don’t will watch their best people leave and their competitors pull ahead.

The transformation is available. The question is whether you’re ready to make the shift.

The post The Real AI Shift: From Doing the Work to Orchestrating It appeared first on By Aries.

Level up from basic AI questions to strategic AI partnership

Most legal marketers I work with use AI like a search engine: “Write a blog post about data privacy.” “Draft an email about our new hire.” Basic questions, basic results.

But AI can do so much more than answer questions. It can role-play as your target client, analyze your positioning against competitors, combine multiple inputs into strategic narratives, and reason through complex marketing challenges.

The difference is in how you prompt it. These 9 prompts show you different AI capabilities most legal marketers haven’t discovered yet from having AI think like a general counsel to building compliance into your creative process from the start.

Whether you’re a CMO building the business case for AI investment, a Marketing Director trying to streamline approval workflows, or a BD Manager looking for tools that actually help lawyers engage, these prompts solve your specific challenges.

1. Problem-Solving Prompt

(Shows AI how to think strategically, not just respond)

Prompt: You are a [role]. Analyze this challenge with these priorities: [priority 1], [priority 2], [priority 3]. Then provide a step-by-step solution that accounts for these realities.

Example: You are a business development manager. Analyze how to position our employment practice for hybrid workplace compliance work when our biggest client is also our biggest competitor law firm’s client, we can’t reference specific matters due to confidentiality, and three partners have different views on messaging strategy.

Why This Works: This prompt allows AI to assume a role and advise you within your priorities, so you can spend less time stressing over how to address all your priorities and more time prioritizing.

2. Evaluation Prompt

(Teaches AI to self-critique and refine outputs)

Prompt: Draft your response as if writing for this [audience]. Then critique it for: [priority 1], [priority 2], [priority 3]. Finally, rewrite to address those gaps.

Example: Draft a capabilities presentation for a pharmaceutical company’s patent litigation panel. Then critique it as if you were their Chief IP Counsel evaluating whether this firm understands FDA regulatory intersections, has relevant Hatch-Waxman experience, and can staff matters cost-effectively.

Why This Works: This prompt helps you evaluate your content from the perspective of your client. This approach creates materials that actually demonstrate you understand their world, not just legal buzzwords you found on their website.

3. Role & Boundaries Prompt

(Demonstrates AI can work within specific constraints and roles)

Prompt: You are a [legal marketing role]. Your goal is [specific legal marketing objective]. Follow these constraints: [constraint 1], [constraint 2], and [constraint 3].

Example: You are a business development manager. Create talking points for a partner’s networking event focused on insurance coverage disputes. Constraints: cannot reference specific client names, needs to differentiate from three competitor firms who will be present, and partner prefers conversational rather than sales-heavy approach.

Why This Works: As legal marketers, we’re often working with very tight constraints from ethical rules to RFP submission guidelines. This prompt helps you create a clear output that will deliver the expected output you need to keep your projects from stalling.

4. Research with Citations

(Performs critical research and provides sources)

Prompt: Research [market opportunity] using only reputable sources like [source type 1], [source type 2], and [source type 3]. Focus on [priority 1], [priority 2], and [priority 3] that would impact [results]. Include in-text references to specific studies, methodologies, or anaylsis, and provide full citations at the end.

Example: Research competitor activity in the Texas healthcare litigation market to support the business case for opening a new Dallas office. Analyze which firms dominate market share, identify recent lateral partner moves, highlight Chambers or Legal 500 rankings, and cite market trend reports showing client demand growth.

Why This Works: Leadership won’t trust market research without credible references. This ensures you get evidence-based insights with verifiable citations rather than vague statements, giving decision-makers confidence in the strategic recommendation.

5. Consistent Voice and Message Into One Output

(Unifies disparate inputs into one cohesive, branded narrative for client-ready materials.)

Prompt: Here are multiple law firm marketing inputs: [input 1], [input 2], and [input 3]. Combine them into one cohesive narrative that maintains brand voice, consistency of tone, and clarity of message across all materials.

Example: Pull from an experience database, a partner’s bio, and firmwide positioning language to draft a proposal section for an RFP response. The output should weave together technical expertise, pre-approved messaging, and biographical details into a single, branded narrative that feels unified and consistent.

Why This Works: Marketers are often handed fragments of information from different sources that rarely sound like they belong together. This prompt ensures AI helps unify those pieces into one branded, client-ready voice, creating polished materials that reinforce firm identity rather than sounding like a patchwork of disconnected inputs.

6. Persona Perspective

(Frames responses through the lens of a specific type of person and their priorities)

Prompt: Answer as if you were a [specific legal decision-maker], applying these considerations: [consideration 1], [consideration 2], and [consideration 3].

Example: Answer as if you were the General Counsel of a publicly traded retail company deciding whether to add a new firm to your employment law panel. Consider your existing relationships, budget pressures from the CFO, need for multi-jurisdiction coverage, and board-level concerns about workplace litigation trends.

Why This Works: Ever wonder why that perfect pitch fell flat? Sometimes it’s not about what you’re saying, it’s about understanding what they’re actually trying to solve (and what they can’t say out loud about their budget).

7. Expert Analysis

(Simulates guidance from outside experts while reminding to consult real professionals on implementation.)

Prompt: Provide analysis as if you were a [specific type of outside expert], offering perspective, recommendations, and potential strategies. Base your guidance on industry best practices and comparable case studies, while noting that a full evaluation from an actual expert should always be sought for implementation.

Example: Act as Edward Bernays (the godfather of PR) advising a law firm on how to respond to a crisis involving a high-profile client. Provide initial talking points, recommended messaging channels, and media engagement strategies. Note that while this advice offers a structured framework, the firm should consult a professional PR agency for full execution and risk assessment.

Why This Works: Just like lawyers often bring in subject-matter experts for specialized guidance, marketers can use AI to simulate the perspective of a PR, branding, business development, or digital expert. It provides a fast, directional analysis that you can build on, while still recognizing the importance of engaging real-world experts for nuanced execution.

8. Institutional Knowledge Leveraging

(Ensures new work aligns with past outputs and established positioning)

Prompt: Using our previous legal marketing materials, case studies, and practice group intelligence, create [output] that draws on institutional knowledge, reinforces consistent themes, and avoids contradictions with prior client communications.

Example: Using our litigation experience database, archived proposals, and past Chambers submissions, create a first draft of a cross-practice RFP response that highlights consistent strengths and avoids reusing outdated positioning language.

Why This Works: Unlike the Consistent Voice and Message prompt, which unifies fragmented inputs into one branded narrative, this focuses on leveraging the firm’s existing body of work to maintain continuity over time. It prevents contradictory statements or reinventing the wheel, ensuring the firm sounds consistent across pitches, alerts, and proposals.

9. Phased Project Execution

(Translates big ideas into structured, actionable projects with deadlines and workflows.)

Prompt: 1. Legal marketing goal: [specific positioning or business development objective]. 2. Deliverable: [specific legal marketing output]. 3. Next action: create the deliverable with appropriate legal disclaimers, compliance considerations, and approval workflow.

Example: 1. Goal: Position our restructuring practice as the go-to firm for distressed healthcare transactions during economic uncertainty. 2. Deliverable: Outline for a three-part webinar series targeting healthcare CFOs and private equity sponsors. 3. Next action: Create the series outline, including CLE credit applications, speaker coordination with conflicts checks, and follow-up nurture sequence for attendees.

Why This Works: Turns “wouldn’t it be great if we…” conversations into actual projects with real deadlines and someone assigned to handle the CLE applications. Because good ideas don’t matter if they never happen.

Why These Actually Work

Here’s the thing about legal marketing: the constraints aren’t bugs, they’re features.

When you can’t name-drop clients, you have to get creative about demonstrating expertise. When everything needs three approvals, you learn to build consensus into your process. When your audience can spot faux thought leadership from orbit, you get really good at substance.

These prompts work because they embrace the weird realities of legal marketing instead of pretending they don’t exist. The result? AI that actually helps you do better work instead of just doing work faster.

And honestly? Once you start using AI that understands your world, going back to generic prompts feels like trying to explain your job to your cousin at Thanksgiving. Possible, but painful.

Look, we know legal marketing is complicated. From client communication to digital marketing and content creation, every campaign must balance law firm marketing priorities with compliance and confidentiality.

At By Aries, we help firms figure out how to use AI for social media content and broader marketing strategies without losing the strategic thinking that makes legal marketing actually work. If you want tools that understand your constraints and help you generate relevant content that maintains a strong digital presence, let’s talk.

The post 9 ChatGPT Prompts Every Legal Marketer Should Know appeared first on By Aries.

This premium has accelerated from 49% just two years ago, signaling a fundamental shift in how the legal market values AI fluency.”

To read the full article as published by Law360, click here.*

*Subscription required.

The post Law 360: AI-Powered Biz Development Can Democratize Rainmaking appeared first on By Aries.

Let me guess, you’re spending hours crafting social media posts, writing thought leadership pieces, and trying to track what’s actually working. Meanwhile, your lawyers are asking when they’ll see more clients, and your marketing budget feels like it’s disappearing into thin air.

Sound familiar?

Here’s what I’ve learned after helping dozens of law firms transform their marketing: Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t just reshaping industries, it’s about to make your marketing life infinitely easier. But only if you approach AI for law firm marketing the right way.

Why Law Firms Can’t Keep Ignoring AI Marketing for Law Firms

Look, law firm marketing has always been resource-intensive. You know this better than anyone. Between creating content, monitoring analytics, supporting business development, and trying to attract ideal clients, your team is stretched thin.

But what if I told you AI could help you:

• Automate time-consuming marketing tasks without losing that personal touch
• Save time while actually improving quality
• Generate data-driven insights that tell you exactly what your potential clients want to hear
• Personalize client communication at scale (yes, even for sensitive data situations)

For legal professionals juggling multiple practice areas, AI provides a way to prioritize efforts, reach specific audiences, and attract more clients without burning out your team. And honestly? It’s not optional anymore.

The Three Stages Every Firm Goes Through (Where Are You?)

I’ve noticed that not all firms are at the same stage of AI marketing adoption. Most start here:

• Stage 1: Transactional AI – You’re using AI like a fancy writing assistant. “Hey ChatGPT, write a blog outline for me.” It’s helpful, but you’re barely scratching the surface.
• Stage 2: Collaborative AI – Now you’re getting somewhere. You’re leveraging AI-powered tools to actually improve your content creation process. Think: “Analyze my SEO data and suggest new content topics that my ideal clients are actually searching for.”
• Stage 3: Strategic AI – This is where the magic happens. You’re implementing AI as a powerful tool to guide firm-wide marketing efforts, prioritize leads, and generate new business systematically.

Here’s the tough love: The firms that progress to Stage 3 strategic use of generative artificial intelligence will see AI move from novelty to necessity. Everyone else will be playing catch-up.

The AI Tools That Actually Matter for Legal Marketing

The AI technology landscape feels overwhelming, right? Here’s what I recommend to my law firm clients and tools that actually move the needle:

• ChatGPT is your go-to for drafting, refining, and repurposing social media content and articles. It’s like having a writing assistant who never sleeps.
• Perplexity combines machine learning with real-time research, perfect for competitor scans and understanding what’s trending in Google search.
• Claude excels at creating long-form AI-driven content and editorial analysis. (Full disclosure: I love Claude for strategic thinking.)
• Gemini helps law firms analyze large datasets and multi-format content—great for firms drowning in information.
• Notebook LM is a game-changer for turning webinars, transcripts, and podcasts into actionable summaries.

Scannable takeaway: Don’t just collect AI tools like shiny objects. Pick 2-3 and actually implement them into your marketing workflows to maximize efficiency.

Learn some of our go-to prompt structures for using AI in your marketing here.

Let’s Talk About the Elephant in the Room: Security and Ethics

With every innovation comes risk, and ethical considerations are especially important in legal marketing. One wrong move with client confidentiality and you’re looking at serious trust issues.

Here are the non-negotiable guardrails for AI in law firms:

• Client confidentiality comes first. Never, ever upload confidential files to public tools. Period.
• Security isn’t optional. Use enterprise AI technology that’s been vetted by your IT team, not whatever free tool you found online.
• Human review is mandatory. AI can hallucinate (make stuff up), so all outputs need human oversight before they see the light of day.
• Practice prompt hygiene. Give AI context. Your audience, practice area, and desired tone, to get reliable results every time.

By creating a prompt library and AI powered tools framework, you ensure that AI marketing for law firms stays safe, consistent, and scalable.

Using AI for Content That Actually Converts

Content is the backbone of legal marketing from blog posts to social media updates to client alerts. But here’s where most firms get it wrong: they’re guessing what topics will resonate.

AI helps you stop guessing and start knowing. Here’s how:

• Identify high-performing topics straight from your analytics
• Generate new content ideas tailored to specific demographics
• Repurpose marketing campaigns across multiple channels without starting from scratch
• Automate follow-up tasks like emails and reminders to lawyers

Real example: Instead of letting your lawyers’ ideas about thought leadership drive your content strategy (sorry, but not every partner knows what clients actually want to read), use AI to scan your website analytics. Let it suggest articles that match actual search volume and SEO focus, plus what your clients say matters to them.

This ensures your content creation targets the right audience and gets read by your ideal clients.

AI in Business Development (AKA Getting More Clients)

AI in law firm marketing goes way beyond content. It’s a secret weapon for business development:

• Draft simplified BD plans that your lawyers will actually follow
• Map cross-selling opportunities by practice areas you might have missed
• Generate personalized engagement plans for high-value clients
• Identify new contacts in your CRM and prioritize strategic relationship building

By analyzing both your CRM data and external sources, AI helps you attract more clients, improve client satisfaction, and strengthen relationships without the manual detective work.

What’s Coming Next: The Future of AI Marketing

Ready for this? The future of AI in marketing for law firms is moving fast:

• Ambient AI – Think always-on monitoring of your marketing efforts, client signals, and competitor actions. No more manual checking.
• Hyper-Personalized Campaigns – We’re talking custom dashboards, ROI calculators, and curated briefings for specific audiences.
• Agentic AI Workflows – Moving beyond individual prompts to end-to-end processes where AI continues research, drafting, and publishing while you focus on strategy.

Future-ready firms won’t just implement AI tools, they’ll design AI-driven processes that give them a sustainable competitive edge.

Why Humans Still Win (And Always Will)

Before you panic about robots taking over, breathe. AI can save time, reduce resource drain, and increase efficiency like nobody’s business. But it cannot replace:

• Human creativity and brand nuance (clients can smell fake from miles away)
• Risk judgment and ethical decision making (sorry, AI isn’t passing the bar exam)
• The ability to connect with clients authentically (relationships still matter)

The winning formula? Leverage AI for scale while keeping humans in the loop for trust, context, and those crucial gut-check moments.

Your Action Plan: Turning AI Into Strategy

The legal industry is at an inflection point. Firms that embrace artificial intelligence in marketing now while building proper governance and scalable systems, will position themselves as leaders.

Those who delay? They risk losing visibility, clients, and opportunities to more agile competitors.

Key takeaways for law firm marketers: To effectively engage your audience across multiple platforms, see Building an Engaged Audience – By Aries for practical strategies.

• AI for legal marketing helps you save time and create more impactful content (finally)
• AI technology provides scalable insights, but requires strong security and ethical considerations
• Smart implementation supports both content creation and business development workflows
• The future is in agentic workflows and hyper-personalized experiences
• Human marketers remain essential for authenticity, reputation protection, and strategic guidance

Ready to Stop Playing Catch-Up?

At By Aries, we help law firms implement AI in legal marketing responsibly and strategically. Why? So your marketing team can focus on what humans do best: building relationships and driving measurable results.

Is your firm ready to transform how it markets, creates, and connects?

Let’s discuss how to implement AI in a way that builds visibility, safeguards your reputation, and attracts your ideal clients.

The post Stop Guessing What Clients Want: The Smart Law Firm’s Guide to AI Marketing appeared first on By Aries.

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:

1. How generative AI tools should be used,
2. Which employees have access, and
3. 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:

1. How are prospects interacting with our content on the website?
2. What actions do prospects take compared to cold prospects?
3. How are prospects finding our website and what information are they consuming?
4. 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.

The post AI Marketing for Law Firms | The Role of AI in Legal Marketing appeared first on By Aries.