Using AI in law firm marketing

Used cleverly, AI can turn tasks that used to take an hour into tasks that are done in moments, and then checked and tweaked in minutes. So, what are the top examples of AI being used today by marketing teams?

Ben Trott, the founder of Marketing Lawyers, explains. (Updated 19 November 2024)

(Note: This article was written to accompany the webinar Current AI and automation in law firms, on 14 November 2024. More detail (including many more examples of AI in use) is now being added, as a result of feedback from the other legal sector marketing experts on the Law Firm Ambition team.)

The time-saving element is the biggest benefit of using AI for your marketing. These are exciting times. With training, a team of three can produce the results of a team of six. Allow your team to explore the many marketing AI tools on offer, as some can provide quick wins.

Creating marketing content

For many of us, the normal way to write a law firm blog is to review the facts (eg the relevant law) and to read a couple of articles to see what interesting angles other people have come up with, before drafting something and then reading it through two or three times to improve the flow and the wording. The whole process can easily take an hour or more, depending on how well one knows the topic.

Using AI such as ChatGPT or Copilot, one can get straight to the review process in minutes. You simply ask the AI to write an article, with a clear set of instructions (‘prompts’): the title, objectives, the target audience, the word count, the format, call to actions and style/tone, and any other parameters. Moments later, you can read what the AI has produced.

You can then refine the blog with further prompts such as “make the blog more/less chatty”, or “include something about X”, or “make the blog more useful for someone who is running a small business in London”, and so on. The output still needs checking and refining, but the ease of creating content can be transformational for a busy marketing team.

ChatGPT sources information from the whole internet. If you are concerned about privacy, you can use a product such as Copilot or online, ‘privacy-first’ alternatives such as CamoCopy.

Copilot is designed to improve productivity within Microsoft 365, while online alternatives such as ChatGPT or privacy-first alternatives have more access and ability to use the internet, often producing different results.

Gaining marketing insights

Once you have allowed AI to look at your data, such as all of your accounting information, AI can answer questions about that data, such as:

• How many new conveyancing clients did we open files for last month?
• How many completions did we do?
• How fast did we complete on average?
• Which fee-earner did the most completions?
• Which new matters came from website enquiries?

But AI can only provide the answers that the data can reveal. So if a completion note does not include the name of the fee-earner, either in the document itself or else in the set of tags that are added to the document, it cannot provide that detail in response to a query.

"If you don't know how to code, use ChatGPT to create Python scripts for automating processes, then use Google Colab to run the scripts. It is surprisingly easy to automate previously time-consuming tasks."
Sam Borrett, director, Legmark

Generating data automatically

How many phone calls does your team do each day? With permission, you can record every phone call and then use AI to transcribe each call and store the data in your data bank. AI can then search through the entire data set to answer your questions:

• How many complaints did we receive, from which callers, to which employees?
• How can we best address those complaints?
• How many compliments did we receive?
• What questions were frequently asked?
• What work have we turned away?

Creating marketing assets

Traditionally, creating marketing assets such as brochures has been a major undertaking. Canva and Adobe Express are well known, easy-to-use tools that now have impressive automation to produce content at scale. And with AI, you can now create a complete range of digital brochures for different situations.

For example, you can create a version of your main brochure for every department, featuring pictures of that team, quotes from them, and perhaps an introduction by the head of department.

You can personalise a brochure for a particular market segment, or even an individual client or prospect. So if your objective is to grow the size of your care home practice, you can tailor a brochure purely for that target market.

"More and more tools are being created. So don't sign up for lengthy subscriptions. What might be great today, may be eclipsed by better technology tomorrow."
Rich Dibbins, founder, Staxton Digital

Everyday productivity tools

Meetings are part of life in a law firm, including meetings for the marketing team.

Someone writes an agenda, then someone takes notes and circulates them.

These are things that AI can do, with simple instructions, such as: “Write an agenda for the monthly marketing meeting, based on the agenda from last month, but replace item 5 with [new wording]”.

If you record the meeting using Fireflies or Fathom, AI will transcribe it, summarise it, and suggest the action points. AI can even email this note to the people listed as attendees.

In other words, using AI is like having a whole team of assistants at your disposal. Provided that the instructions are clear and the AI has been given access to the data and folders that it needs, it can carry out those instructions.

Prompts, testing and training are key to developing something that works specifically for you, your tasks and in your business environment.

(Of course, all of this applies to fee-earners too. Attendance notes can be done by AI in moments, in the form of a complete transcription of every word that was recorded, plus the summary and action points that can be reviewed — and edited if necessary — in minutes.)

Processes for the marketing team

In an ideal world, someone starting a new job in a marketing team would be given induction training covering a long list of things. For example, how the firm runs itself, who is in which department, what the various policies are, who to ask about what, how various software works, where things live in the filing system, and so on.

But things keep changing and in most firms there simply isn’t the time to document all these things.

AI transforms this situation. A person can record a handover, or an explanation of something, in a matter of minutes. AI can then do the heavy work, transcribing it and summarising the key points.

In this way, instead of learning on the job over a period of 12-18 months, a new person can get to grips with a new job in a few weeks.

"Google's NotebookLM is a free tool that every law firm should look at today. It transforms tasks such as briefing or training colleagues."
Sam Borrett, director, Legmark

Sales tools

AI can transform the way that your firm corresponds with clients and prospects, as it can summarise the situation regarding that person in a moment — by looking at past emails and phone conversations.

So, when emailing a client who you have noted supports Chelsea, you might instruct the firm’s secure AI to “Draft an email to [that client] summarising progress on their matter and suggesting to go ahead at price X provided that the other side agree to Y.” You can then use ChatGPT, which uses the internet as its data source, to suggest a witty comment on Chelsea’s recent progress. And if you don’t like that suggestion, you can simply give it another prompt, such as asking for a kind comment about Chelsea’s recent progress.

Personalised online conversations like this can change a relationship and can also make work more enjoyable and interesting for everyone. In a future world, in which all lawyers (and some clients?) may have access to an immediate and correct legal answer to an issue, personal relationships will become more important than ever.

See also:

• Staying in contact with referrers, clients and prospects
• 17 tips on writing content and finding your audience
• 24 common mistakes on law firm websites
• Social media - overview