In this episode of The Verdict is Marketing, we’ll discuss can I replace my marketing agency with AI. Did you know that AI can now write compelling website copy, design social media ads, and even generate personalized email campaigns? It’s a game-changer, and many law firms are wondering: can I replace my marketing agency with AI?
Podcast Resources:
Show Transcript:
Kim: Welcome to the Verdict Is Marketing, the podcast about all things law for marketing. I’m your host, Kim Sailer, founder of LawBARD. Today I’m joined by my co-founder, Todd Blackman, and we’re diving into the increasing role of AI in marketing. And the dilemma facing many law firms, should they rely on AI, maintain their agency relationships, or find a new approach?
Todd: Yeah, that’s right, Kim. It’s incredible how AI is revolutionizing the market just across all the industries. With the law firm or they’re no exception. It’s the stuff I’m seeing is pretty impressive, but as we dig deeper in today’s discussion, see how really law firms should be embracing this and not really running from it or being scared from it. Let’s get to it.
Understanding AI’s Current Capabilities and What it Can Do for Your Law Firm s Marketing
AI Capabilities in Content Creation:
Kim: First, we’re going to tackle understanding AI’s current capabilities and what it can do for your law firm s marketing. One of the biggest things that comes to my mind is content creation writing and repurposing your existing content. AI is making content creation so much faster, so much more efficient.
Kim: Law firms today, they can now generate high quality content in minutes rather than hours and do it themselves. Some of the key areas where I find AI is useful is like writing your blogs and your articles. They’re great AI tools like Jasper, Copy.ai that can not only draft your blog posts, your legal posts.
Kim: They can help you maintain an active blog. There are many social media posts and management tools like Gemini, Claude.ai. These can capture and craft engaging captions and even schedule your posts. E-newsletters. Many of you are doing E-newsletters or wish to do e-newsletters. MailChimp AI driven features can help you personalize your marketing campaigns and track your data. You can also use it to write your practice areas and your website copy. It creates really compelling content, and it can create helpful SEO friendly descriptions for your legal services, which saves you a lot of time. It’s just important to remember that AI training is essential in content creation process.
Todd: That’s true. We’ll definitely get in the training more in this episode. It’s super important, but again, content is, when most people think content, they think text, blogs, writing content and stuff like that, but content can also be visuals your imagery all that kind of stuff is super important too, that supports that written content.
AI Capabilities in Design & Visual Content:
Todd: It’s when, in regards to design AI Is just changing everything. I would personally as a graphic artist, I would spend hours searching through stock photography using the same generic stuff other people are using. I would see stuff I created used by other companies because they’re using the same stock artwork.
Todd: And with training and personalization of AI, you’re allowed to be more branded. And there’s fantastic tools out there like Canva, Adobe Firefly. They just simplify creating banners and all kinds of stuff. It’s just really a game changer.
Kim: Absolutely. And it used to be where you had to rely on someone else outside of your firm to do those, cause there was no way to even create those because of software complexities and things you had to have. And if in order to do those most definitely.
Data Analysis & Performance Tracking: with AI:
Kim: So we’ve briefly talked about some of the content and design tools. Let’s talk about how AI can help law firms understand their marketing performance. I think that’s very important.|
Todd: Oh, it’s huge. You can create content and visuals and marketing material and collateral all day long. But if you’re not tracking these things. You’re just fumbling around in the dark. There’s fantastic tools out there now that are just transforming the way that law firms analyze their marketing.
Todd: You have Google Analytics you have CRMs like HubSpot that track client interactions. This allows law firms to analyze what they’re spending and just be more efficient with their ad spend. There are also tools like SEMrush or SpyFu that can give firms great insight to who their competitors are, and it really helps you figure out where you want to put your ad spend.
Video & Audio Editing with AI:
Kim: Oh, that’s very smart and very helpful for firms for sure. There’s also a lot of really good video and auto editing tools out there. Video is becoming a dominant form of online content and AI is making it so much easier for. for law firms of any size to create professional videos.
Kim: One that we’ve used before is Descript. It’s a great AI powered video editing tool that can automatically transcribe and edit your recordings. You have a tool like Synthesia, again, another AI generated tool that has avatars and voiceovers that can help you create explainer videos. There’s Invideo which also helps create automated video creation just from your own text. It’s just amazing what they can do and how fast it’s changing.
Todd: Yeah, I agree. I’m just, I’m more impressed every day these tools are getting better and better. Again, you need to train it. You need to be aware of your branding. You have to be on top of all those things that make it yours. Don’t just go out of the canned content. Use AI to create stuff that’s trained towards your brand and same with the video.
Customer Service with AI:
Kim: Yeah. And what about customer service? What do you think about those and the AI tools used for those?
Todd: Oh, it’s amazing. Just chatbots alone, tools that automate your research are great to optimize your content, but chatbots like Drift and LawDroid they can handle inquiries 24 seven, pretty close to what a human can do and they’re getting better.
Kim: I think with chatbots your chances of losing a potential prospect is reduced and then you also have better data.
Todd: That’s true. Yes, absolutely.
Benefits of AI for Law Firms
Kim: Let’s talk now about the benefits of AI for the law firms.
Todd: Cool. Yeah there’s tons of them. They, we can start with the cost effectiveness. It can automate, like we were talking about earlier with the chat bots and your content. Those are things that, content that needs to happen, you need to create. But there’s also just these tedious, repetitive tasks that day-in-day-out law firms have to deal with.
Todd: It can also improve your targeting with personalized messages within your email campaigns and your collateral. It also improves insights and lets users think out of the box. You find new marketing areas that you didn’t know existed. It’s super smart and the deeper you dig, the more you get out of it.
The Limitations of AI in Legal Marketing
Kim: Oh, absolutely. So, you’ve highlighted the positives. There’s some negatives also with AI. AI first and foremost, isn’t perfect. There are limitations. One of the prominent ones that comes to mind, and many of you attorneys probably have already heard the story, it ties around ethics and compliance risks to New York lawyers who submitted a legal brief that had included six fictitious citations that was created by AI. Obviously, there were some repercussions from that. So, you have to be leery of the content and the things you’re generating and make sure they’re ethically compliant with your state’s bar rules. AI, while it can help develop a tailored plan, they’re not always the most strategic, AI cannot fully understand your local market and what makes your law practice special in your area. AI can often miss the human side of getting clients, like building trust and relationships. And, while AI can help with tasks it still needs human oversight and even like to create the marketing plans that really work for your specific law firm in the community you’re in. I’m always very leery about and have to watch is when you use the different tools, is it following your brand and your voice and your differentiations? That’s why human oversight is very critical. Sometimes AI feels a little generic and probably a little impersonal. Sometimes it misses some emotional understanding. It’s a computer, it lacks human qualities, and you’ve probably seen it when you’ve used some of the tools and sometimes consistency concerns and again, I think, again, most audiences know what AI is. And so sometimes too, I’m wondering if it impacts client engagement in the personalization challenges, because are people going to trust the content you’re putting out if it thinks it’s all AI generated?
Todd: Yeah, that’s for sure.
The “Fire Your Agency” Or Use AI Debate
Kim: Yeah. Okay. So, we’ve talked about a lot of different things. What AI is, some of the pros and cons of using AI. Let’s tackle the real question is, what do you do about your agency? Do you keep them? Do you let them go? Or do you do something else?
Todd: That’s a great question because it really also depends on your relationship with your agency. If you really feel like you’re getting a return on investment AI definitely improves marketing efficiency. I know some law firms are out there thinking, hey, do I really need an agency anymore?
Todd: And that comes down to your relationship that agency, did, do they really know you? Do they really know you? And a lot of times not so much. They have a lot of other clients. They’re doing the same thing for you that they’re doing for other clients but, a few of the arguments for letting them go is you can save a lot of money. They are expensive. And these AI tools are far cheaper. If you manage them properly you can have more control of what you’re putting out there and your content and everything like that. You have a little more flexibility to experiment. You can test different strategies more quickly. You can move faster. You can be more fluid when it comes to your marketing. But those are really just the top level reasons why you may want to bring it in house.
Kim: Gotcha. All right. So now let’s highlight some of the reasons why you want to keep your agency. For me, it comes down to the attorney excuse. You’re too busy to practice law. You don’t have the understanding of the technology. It could be that you’re fearful of AI or making mistakes. It’s you’re not good at marketing. So those are those types of things. And again, sometimes, it’s just hard to replace a human sometimes. You want to spend your time practicing law and doing other things, and you don’t want AI to be doing all your stuff and so sometimes having that agency there. And don’t undervalue your agency’s experience and strategic guidance. This is what they’re doing and this is what they do all the time. And when you need this ongoing support and maintenance, sometimes you know, you might need an agency. Maybe you have a major reputation management problem come up. Are you going to trust AI? Are you going to trust somebody who actually has done this for a living?
Kim: Having an agency, they’re probably using the same tools, AI tools that you’re already using or looking or considering. And most likely they’re already aware of any issues or concerns with using these tools. So there and the other nice, great thing about having your agency is you have probably already educated and trained them, not only on your brand and your business, but you probably also educated them on your state bar advertising rules and ethics where an AI tool doesn’t know all of those components.
Todd: That is true. I have seen that recently. Some of those mistakes.
Finding the Right Balance Between AI and Legal Marketing Agency
Kim: You don’t want to have what happened to the New York lawyer, it’s just, you got to be very mindful of those things. So, I think, probably, again, one of the best things to consider is finding that right balance. I think for most law firms, the best approach is going to be, if you’re already utilizing somebody, a hybrid model is probably your best bet. Using AI to streamline tasks while relying on an agency for strategy and some of the bigger things that you just don’t have a handle on. If you keep saying, I don’t have time, I don’t want to do marketing, then you probably want some agency support.
Todd: That is true. Yeah, I agree with that 100%.
Kim: Yeah.
Todd: Another thing to consider is that these firms, the law firms should consider upskilling or training their team members to use AI because there’s a lot there and they can, it doesn’t take a lot. There’s plenty of YouTube videos and tutorials out there. And it really can’t hurt to get your staff up to speed and be more aware of this whole new AI world.
Kim: Yeah, it’s certainly not going away. Okay. So AI is transforming law firm marketing as we’ve already learned today, but it’s not an all or nothing approach. I think firms must find the right balance between AI, their in-house efforts and agency support for sure.
Todd: That’s true. Whether you’re fully embracing AI or using it as a supplement, understanding its capabilities and limitations will help your firm thrive in today’s digital landscape. It’s complex. And again, if you choose to use it train, that’s super important. You can require it to use your information and your data that way it’s not going off the rails and hallucinating and again, proof everything and look at everything before you put anything out there.
Kim: Oh, absolutely. If you’d like a full transcript of today’s episode please visit us at lawbard.com/verdict and check the show notes for additional resources and tools that we’ve mentioned in today’s podcast. Thanks to co-founder Todd Blackman for joining us today.
Todd; It’s been fun.
Kim: Yeah, and thank you all for listening. Feel free to drop me a line at Kim at LawBard.com or visit us at anytime at LawBard.com. Until next time, the Verdict Is Marketing is adjourned.
