Most legal marketing leaders we talk to believe they’re growing, but the numbers suggest otherwise.
Every conversation we have with leadership right now is focused on how AI saves time. Hours recaptured on content drafts. Research that used to take a day now takes an hour. First passes on RFPs that used to require a full afternoon are now finished in minutes. These are real outcomes. We are not dismissing them.
But when saving time becomes the default goal, the focus shifts to shrinking instead of growing. What we need most in this moment of AI are leaders who can create growth strategies, not just compression strategies.
The Tell Is in the Goals
We had a conversation a few weeks ago with a marketing leader evaluating agencies. He told us his frustration: he’d asked his firm’s leadership what goals they had for the marketing investment, and the answer was “we just want more clients.”
That’s not a goal. That’s a desire.
We’ve seen the same thing play out in AI conversations across firms of every size.
“We want AI to save us time.”
“We want AI to help us be more efficient.”
“We want to see ROI from AI.”
These aren’t goals either. They’re aspirations dressed up in the language of strategy, and you cannot build a real implementation on them.
Years ago, our founder, Jessica Aries learned this distinction when she was a leader at a firm going through a values and mission exercise. A consultant pushed her firm to stop describing who the firm aspired to be and start getting honest about who they actually were, how they actually worked, and what they could realistically achieve with the systems and foundations they had in place.
It was an uncomfortable exercise. It was also the most useful one she went through with that firm, because the firm couldn’t build toward a real destination until they knew their actual starting point.
The same discipline applies to AI. Before you can use it to grow, you have to be honest about what you’re actually trying to achieve, and whether what you’re calling a goal is really just a wish.
When we lack concrete goals, we default to the only metric that feels easy to track: time saved. But that path leads to a dangerous destination.
Shrink vs. Grow: Which Direction Are You Pointing?
When efficiency is the lens, reduction is the only result that is easy to measure.
Cost savings has a floor. You can compress content production time by 40%. You can cut research from four hours to 45 minutes. You can automate the first pass of competitive analysis. Once you’ve done all of that, you’ve optimized everything compressible and built a version of your marketing department that’s cheaper, faster, and increasingly obsolete.
Here’s the problem with pointing AI at compression: the ceiling of shrink is the floor of someone else’s growth.
While your team is focused on reducing the hours spent on content production, other firms are using that same technology to create content that is more relevant, more precise, and more closely aligned with what their clients actually need. While you are cutting costs, they are building capabilities. And over time, that gap only widens.
When firms use AI primarily to shrink, they risk perfecting a version of legal marketing that is already obsolete.
Growth requires something different. It requires goals that are specific enough to actually be pursued, measured, and achieved, not desires that feel like strategy until someone asks what they mean.
Real AI goals looks like this:
- We want to reduce the average time it takes to publish high-quality, client-ready commentary on major regulatory or industry developments by 40% over the next 6 months, using AI to summarize source material, generate first-draft outlines, and identify client-facing angles, while maintaining our existing quality and review standards.
- We want to increase visibility for our commercial real estate practice in AI chatbot responses by 20% over the next 12 months, measured through quarterly audits across the five AI platforms our target clients use most, by using AI-informed content optimization to improve how often our lawyers, insights, and firm are cited or surfaced in relevant responses.
- We want to increase cross-practice engagement among existing clients by 15% over the next 12 months, measured by the number of qualified cross-practice introductions, matters, or client conversations generated, by using AI to surface relevant client alerts, industry trends, and internal relationship opportunities that connect client needs to the firm’s broader capabilities.
These goals have a baseline metric, a defined target, a timeline, and a clear way to measure progress. You can build a strategy around them. You can tell whether they’re working. Most importantly, they are not focused on speeding up the work. They are focused on making the work more effective.
“We want more clients from AI” has none of those things. It’s a direction, not a destination.
What Growth Actually Looks Like
Growth with AI operates on two levels, and most firms aren’t doing either.
The first level is enhancing what you already do.
The work exists. AI makes it sharper, more grounded in client reality, and more directly connected to what actually matters to the people you’re trying to reach.
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is the clearest example. The traditional model: decide what you want to say, write it, publish it, hope it resonates.
The growth model looks different. You’re monitoring your clients’ LinkedIn conversations, aggregating the questions they’re asking publicly, pulling insights from call recordings, and using AI to identify the specific issues keeping them up at night right now. Then you’re writing directly to that.
The difference between thought leadership that gets saved and shared versus thought leadership that gets politely ignored is almost always specificity, and AI gives you the data to be specific in ways that weren’t previously possible for leaner teams.
Proposals & Pitches
Proposals and pitches work the same way. Most firms still produce proposals that describe themselves rather than proposals that reflect a deep understanding of what the client is actually trying to achieve. AI-assisted preparation changes that.
You can show up to a pitch with a brief that reflects the client’s recent strategic moves, their industry’s current pressure points, and the specific outcomes they need from outside counsel, and connect your firm’s capabilities directly to those outcomes.
This type of proposal isn’t about efficiency; it’s again about effectiveness.
Client Intelligence
Client intelligence is a growth activity that most marketing teams have never had the capacity to do properly.
Understanding key clients and prospects at depth, what they’re up against, what concerns are shaping their decisions, and how they need to prepare for regulatory and market shifts used to require research hours that simply didn’t exist. AI changes that capacity without diminishing the quality of the insight.
Your team can walk into every client conversation better informed than they were the quarter before, and your lawyers can advise with the kind of specificity that makes clients feel genuinely understood rather than generically served.
Market Intelligence
Market intelligence operates at a different level.
Instead of focusing on clients, market intelligence is about understanding the landscape in which your firm and your clients operate. It looks at:
- Where is the market moving?
- What regulatory shifts are coming?
- What competitive dynamics are reshaping practice areas?
- Which industries are contracting and which are growing?
AI can continuously monitor, aggregate, and synthesize signals across all of this, feeding your firm’s strategic thinking about where to build capability, where to develop visibility, and where the next wave of client needs is forming before it fully arrives.
Instead of reacting to the market, your firm can position itself ahead of it with AI.
The second level is recognizing where AI is changing the marketing model itself.
This shift goes beyond improving existing workflows because it introduces an entirely new playing field.
AI is actively reshaping how clients find, evaluate, and hire law firms. When a GC asks a chatbot for the leading firms in their area of need, the response isn’t just a search result. It’s a synthesized assessment of your firm’s positioning, reputation, and relevance.
We recently ran an audit for a client and found that AI described them as known for a practice area where the key partners had already left, while simultaneously downplaying the practice areas they were actively investing in.
The fix was straightforward, but they had no idea this was happening. They were invisible in the conversation, reshaping how their future clients evaluated them.
That is what a shrinking mindset misses entirely. Cost savings do not protect against it, and efficiency alone is not enough to close the gap. Only intentional, goal-driven growth can do that.
The Conversation You Need to Have
If you’re a CMO or marketing director trying to make the case for AI investment, the cost-savings argument feels safe. It’s quantifiable. It’s defensible. It answers the managing partner’s question in the language leadership already speaks.
But it also invites a logical follow-up: if AI is making your team more efficient, why does the budget need to stay the same?
The firms getting this right aren’t reporting time saved. They’re reporting what that time became: more tailored pitches, more targeted thought leadership, client intelligence that makes their lawyers the best-prepared people in the room. They’re not talking about compression. They’re talking about capability.
The goal of AI in legal marketing isn’t to do what you’ve always done with less. It’s to do what you’ve never been able to do at all.
That argument requires real goals. Not “we want more clients” but a specific practice area, a measurable visibility target, a defined timeline. Not “we want AI to save time” but a concrete description of what your team will do with that time and what growth outcome it’s pointed at.
Your partners will never push back on an AI investment that’s demonstrably building the firm. They will eventually question one that’s only making operations cheaper.
One Thing to Do Before Your Next Leadership Conversation
Before your next leadership conversation, pull the AI goals your firm is currently operating against and run each one through this stress test.
If you can’t answer “Yes” to all three, you are operating with desires instead of goals. And desires don’t survive budget season.
- The Baseline Check: Does it have a specific starting metric? (“It currently takes us 10 days to publish a client alert.”)
- The Impact Check: Does it have a defined target outcome that moves the needle on growth, not just speed? (“We will increase our pitch-win rate by 10% through AI-driven prospect intelligence.”)
- The Accountability Check: Does it have a realistic timeline? (“We will achieve this by the end of Q3.”)
Your next step is to rewrite one. Make it specific enough that you could report against it in 90 days and know unambiguously whether you’re on track. That’s your growth foundation, and that’s the conversation that shifts AI from a cost line to a capability investment.
